I'm not sure China is underestimating anything. They had an asset, in the form of millions of underqualified workers, and they've used it, to manufacture cheap stuff. But with increasing automation, that asset was never going to last; every passing year it's becoming easier for other countries to replace Chinese manufacturing with local developments, and I think they know it.In order to stay relevant, China needs a better educated workforce, but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms. I doubt they'll be able to make it work in the long run, so they likely will need to change strategies, but right now it makes sense.
mlthoughts2018|5 years ago
> “ but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms.”
This is like a building whose own load directly undermines its own stability, or a roller coaster whose own construction dynamics tears itself apart little by little with each run.
Trying to institute mass social control while changing a population to be highly educated knowledge workers is like boiling the ocean.
In some small local patch of time, it looks scary (ooooh social credit system, face recognition everywhere, disappeared artists and journalists, cyber warfare.. spooky)
Zoom out on the scale of 50 years and it’s farcically stupid.
Wanting an enduring human population asset and wanting authoritarian control are fundamentally incompatible desires. At best they can be sustained through force on short time scales, then ending up very very bloody for the leadership involved.
sterlind|5 years ago
I think the best thing they can do is induce political apathy. Discourage people from trying to get into even the Party apparatus, except as functionaries doing repetitive, menial jobs, and then keep people prosperous so they don't question.
I've certainly known a lot of engineers - Western engineers, even - who didn't care about politics because they simply didn't need to.