He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. As a global journal of ideas, Noema receives feedback from readers all over the world that broadens our way of seeing and kindles the further iteration of our thinking. One recent case is a response by Carl Gay, an executive of the Cloudspago consultancy in Australia, to the Noema essay “When The Present Eats The Future: The Achilles Heel of Consumer Democracies.” In that essay, I contrast post-Mao China’s capacity for reaching a consensus on long-term goals and determinedly implementing them over many years without a break in continuity with the increasing inability of consumer democracies to do so.
The example I used in the context of climate change was how China set the goal decades ago of dominating green technology, especially electric vehicles and batteries, and has steadily achieved that objective, while most open societies of the West have sputtered behind. Its “whole dragon” approach brings the resources of the entire system to bear on the challenge at hand. I pointed out that the strength of China’s system is closely related to its chief flaw: enforcing order and repressing freedom to keep the consensus from fraying.
In his note to Noema, Gay makes explicit what I only implied: “To the extent China’s determined continuity clogs corrective feedback loops, a policy ordained by the Party can go off in the wrong direction for a very long time, causing damage not easily repaired.” The example he uses is the disastrous one-child policy that held from 1980-2015. It resulted in today’s demographic implosion, where there are not enough young people to sustain the welfare of an aging society. Indeed, blinkered assumptions from the present, projected forward, robbed the future of a balanced population.
Another less calamitous case in point was the 2022 COVID lockdown, which went on well past the patience of a restless public. In that case, the nascent feedback loops of contagious online rants, instances of journalistic exposure and even episodic outbursts of public demonstration resulted in a responsive and more immediate change in policy. The big question for China’s one-party juggernaut is whether it can accommodate corrective feedback mechanisms in politics that are equivalent to the market signals it accommodates to check state-backed economic policy from going too far down the wrong path.
Two developments are emerging that impact this feedback deficit. Paradoxically, the first is that expanded surveillance from the top serves at the same time to register people’s dissatisfaction to the Party guardians listening at scale. The other is that China’s densely wired society has become a ready platform for surveillance of official behavior from below, or sousveillance.
Citizen reports, especially about corruption, rapidly gain virality when posted online. This dual potential is not lost on the authorities. In a candid conversation in Beijing in 2015, China’s then cyber czar, Lu Wei, openly acknowledged that, in the absence of electoral accountability, an active netizenry can be a critical channel for sending rectifying signals from the grassroots to the Party hierarchy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
