6 Comments
Oct 2, 2021Liked by Angelica Oung

The more China eschews a decentralized, market-based approach in favor of command-control, the more frequently these imbroglios will occur. Bureaucrats simply can't match the wisdom of the crowd, at least over the longer term. The technocrats running things in China have gotten a lot of things right over the last 40 years, but when they do screw up, it's apt to be spectacular in scale, given the lack of meaningful checks on the center's power.

Expand full comment

I don't have any special insight into China's current energy grid crisis, but it seems to be a pattern which has repeated itself for thousands of years in China. Not with electricity/coal of course, but with infrastructure in general, especially water infrastructure (canals, flood control, irrigation, boat navigation, all that good stuff). On the one hand, to execute a project like the Grand Canal requires some central planning/power. On the other hand, the governments which can pull off something like that also have a tendency to take too much control of the economy, including stuff which is better managed at a local level. Which means that either the people at the local level passive-aggressively do things their way and deceive the people higher up in the official hierarchy, or the people in the centralized hierarchy impose their will and don't understand how that meshes with local conditions.

The Han Dynasty did something like what Louis XIV did with Versailles to unify China and prevent the upper classes from maintaining their pre-Han regional power bases. The Tang Dynasty gave the upper classes more leeway to control their own region, but that meant that some people with a regional power base figured they didn't need the imperial government and stopped paying taxes, and the imperial government figured it was cheaper to just pretend that those regions were still part of the empire rather than send troops and possibly lose a war. However, water project failures played a role in the decline of both dynasties (I'm not sure about the Han Dynasty, but during the Tang Dynasty extensive deforestation made flooding worse.)

Expand full comment

What PRC provinces are non-mainland provinces?

Expand full comment