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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   29830 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Very interesting. I'd have expected China to be way more centralised because it's, well, China. Maybe the much larger population plays a role?

According to Wikipedia, this decentralization was instituted by Deng Xiaoping back in the 1980s. Quoting various books published since 2008:

The governance of China is characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization. Policy instruments or processes are often tested locally before being applied more widely, resulting in a policy that involves experimentation and feedback. Generally, central government leadership refrains from drafting specific policies, instead using the informal networks and site visits to affirm or suggest changes to the direction of local policy experiments or pilot programs. The typical approach is that central government leadership begins drafting formal policies, law, or regulations after policy has been developed at local levels.

After [Deng's] economic reform, China has been characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization.  The central government sets the strategic direction while local officials carry it out,  including developing the details of policy.

Laboratories of <del>democracy</del> <ins>socialism with Chinese characteristics</ins>

The recent "laboratories of socialism with Chinese characteristics" is correct. As far as I understand, regional governors have great latitude to experiment with policy, with successful cases transplanted into other provinces (as with the original "laboratories of democracy").

But the heightened autonomy also makes sense, looking back further in history. The division of China into its provinces goes back a long way; though the modern system (with adjustments) dates back to the Mongols, many of these territorial units trace their origin to antiquity; going into the 20th century, provincial feeling within China would have been much stronger and more deep-rooted than e.g. the same between US states. IIRC early observers of republican China thought that China would most likely be heavily federalised in large part due to this; even with Maoist destruction of China's cultural heritage, some of this still stays.

And historically while imperial China was theoretically totalitarian, in practice -- especially late into the imperial era, where the bureaucracy was increasingly lean and population increasingly large -- regional leaders had quite a lot of freedom as long as they were sufficiently obsequent to the Dragon Throne. (When central power was weak, of course, even that didn't apply -- see how the Beiyang fleet was snubbed by the other three Chinese fleets during the first Sino-Japanese war, or how during the Boxer rebellion governors of the southern provinces refused to heed the declaration of war on the Europeans and Japanese and withheld knowledge of the edict from their populations.)

Edit: a word

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