As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
Although it is worth recognizing that although the Imperial Chinese did have an examination-based civil service, it wasn't examinations on anything actually relevant to their jobs as in modern merit-based civil services. Instead, people wanting to enter the Imperial Chinese Civil Service were tested on their ability to recall trivia from classic Chinese literature. Great if the job was Jeopardy! contestant, less so for anything practical.
Parkinson's Law contains a nice (tongue in cheek) summary of the influence of the Chinese system on the British Civil Service:
> The Chinese system was studied by Europeans between
1815 and i830 and adopted by the English East India
Company in 1832. The effectiveness of this method was
investigated by a committee in 1854, with Macaulay as
chairman. The result was that the system of competitive
examination was introduced into the British Civil Service
in 1855. An essential feature of the Chinese examinations
had been their literary character. The test was in a knowledge of the classics, in an ability to write elegantly (both
prose and verse) and in the stamina necessary to complete
the course. All these features were faithfully incorporated in
the Trevelyan-Northcote Report, and thereafter in the
system it did so much to create. It was assumed that classical
learning and literary ability would fit any candidate for
any administrative post. It was assumed (no doubt rightly)
that a scientific education would fit a candidate for nothing
- except, possibly, science. It was known, finally, that
it is virtually impossible to find an order of merit among
people who have been examined in different subjects.
Since it is impracticable to decide whether one man is better in geology than another man in physics, it is at least
convenient to be able to rule them both out as useless.
When all candidates alike have to write Greek or Latin
verse, it is relatively easy to decide which verse is the best.
Men thus selected on their classical performance were then
sent forth to govern India. Those with lower marks were
retained to govern England. Those with still lower marks
were rejected altogether or sent to the colonies. While it
would be totally wrong to describe this system as a failure,
no one could claim for it the success that had attended the
systems hitherto in use. There was no guarantee, to begin
with, that the man with the highest marks might not tum
out to be off his head; as was sometimes found to be the
case. Then again the writing of Greek verse might prove to
be the sole accomplishment that some candidates had or
would ever have. On occasion, a successful applicant may
even have been impersonated at the examination by some-
one else, subsequently proving unable to write Greek verse
when the occasion arose. Selection by competitive examination was never therefore more than a moderate success.
I didn't know this and have always wondered why in the UK we didn't have something like the Chinese system for civil service.
Ironically the civil service is full of intelligent people and it's a competitive grad programme, but it's also wholly undesirable as a career path for many.
I know plenty of smart driven people who want to make a difference who won't go anywhere near the civil service for fear or bureaucracy or salary sacrifice or both. I also know plenty of people who left the civil service jaded by the whole experience.
I don't know what the solution is but I'm always a bit saddened that people end up moving money around or optimising clicks because there's no alternative if you don't want to get left behind
In ancient China, power and social status were gained through official positions, and merchants were considered the lowest of respectable occupations. This led to the exams attracting many of the "best and brightest" to government service. In modern western countries, being wealthy is the best way to get respect and adulation. The "best and brightest" spend their education learning how to extract value from the rest.
China isn't really that different these days. Everyone is thinking about being wealthy, but especially the Chinese. Hopefully the official class evolves to something like what Singapore has, or its going to be a constant brain drain on the government as smart kids continue to prefer the private sector.
I feel like there is a part more difficult to be captured in technical definition. ECS designs usually pay more attention to seperate data and logic because systems are constantly updating data (world state) regardless there is an event or not. In the case of k8s the specs create a target world state and kubelet/controller constantly update the current world state (status) so a control system can be created.
This misconception is common among US official/think tanks especially related to DOD because the way Chinese government operated is so counter-intuitive from US perspective (probably many other governments). It's actually same as how China makes economics policy: First assess the "inevitable" future, than make a plan to better adapt to that future (e.g. Battery, EV, Solar...actually a lot more examples before those). This means China is constantly making policies considered "ineffective" because in many cases they don't have a clear goal (build the capbility for the sake of the build). On contrast US sets a clear goal first and build the capbility accordingly, which means you build the capbility for a purpose.
For some reason people can't translate the same process when talking about military capbility. The current assessment from China probably is some version of "China will be regard as superpower. to be regarded as a credible superpower, credible superpower level army is required". While most US officials think China builds this military power for a concrete goal (why spend money if you don't plan to use it?).
This misconception at least has been communicated by some US intellectuals many times though I think it's not very effective under current geopolitical climate.
I think China is building military capability because they think they need it. We don’t know why. If you think about the game theoretic aspects of this, then it makes sense for the US to preemptively mass forces nearby even if they believe China’s ambitions are peaceful. You can’t just assume that because your opponent is telling you that. And vice-versa if you’re China and you see the US massing forces.
The fact that Chinese fishing ships invade other territorial waters to steal fish and damage habitat and the fact that the premier wants to bring Taiwan back suggests a will to be the aggressor.
China didn’t increase defense budget accordingly and for now still sticking to the same gdp percentage (around 1.5%) so the spiral hasn’t started yet (surprisingly).
Also China is always aggressive to DPP which isn’t something new and US government well understood the reason and used to assure China they will deter DPP’s independence agenda (if you’re familiar with that history. also https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-china-true-sour...). Unfortunately there isn’t much political room now in US for that kind of assurance.
The belief of "I should" is one of the core part for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD, not confused with OCD). The behaviour is largely driven by the anxiety of "fail to e.g. be citizen" and sometimes is considered a little extreme from others' view.
If you borrow in your own currency there's no real constraints. The trade-off is fiscal deficit = printing money and may cause inflation. Then higher interest rates will put pressure on economic growth.
WTO, IMF have yearly reports and IIRC one of U.S. Central bank branch have published report about this. TL;DR version is there's a trade flow reshuffle but China's trade percentage barely changed. As most traditional economic theories suggested and predicted, China sells more to ASEAN, South America and they sell more to U.S.
There's a liquidity issue for some heavily in debt local governments. It's also much complex because central government is taking this as a chance to pushing unwelcome structural changes. There's a quick fix have been done before - central government can simply swap local with central government debt and they still have a lot of fiscal room to do so. But many economists are against the approach this time because there's a issue long aware that central government doesn't actually able to control local government's budget but their debt considered backed by central government's unlimited credit.
What make things worse is the political incentive is local government has to grow economy and they can achieve that by borrowing money for investment. Even if the investment return is almost 0 there's a short term GDP boost (just think it as giving money to local workers, similar to Civilian Conservation Corps).
So now what they are pushing is force local government sell unused state assets they owned, cutting civil servant (hurting local consumption and local GDP), limiting their borrowing capacity and all other government reforms. Most importantly they want to break the expectations that local government debts are back by central government which distorted the market a lot in past decades.
