So it’s more like a federation, and they are all pretending to obey Emperor Xi.
Beijing has historically been able to enforce power and discipline when it has to, but it’s also like, legitimately expensive in time and money to do it. And the Xi administration is trying to not be like the Jiang administration where they spend a lot of time building consensus before moving on something because both Xi and the Standing Politburo have deadlines they want to meet. So both have made the decision to bypass consensus building and just do rolling collateral against the petty municipal chiefs that do their thing on the basis they’ll fix it later once they pass the threshold from a second-rate manufacturing economy to a first-rate service economy like the US and Europe. They’ll be the first country to ever manage itself into the top tier of economic development, and with it its stability.
This of course doesn’t mean everything will flow in one direction since in regards to programs like Social Credit the government is more than willing to keep it in the hands of the local provinces and cities to opt in and out, as even private individuals it turns out can opt in and out. Because Beijing’s belief is that the regulatory tool that Social Credit (SoCS) ultimately is is in better hands when local provincial and city governments have it. This however means the entire thing ranges from one type of comedy to another. But it’s like, soon new Orwellian thing; China already has five pre-existing surveillance programs which I am sure like the US equivalents are not in communication with one another and probably engage in branch rivalry like the CIA and FBI and the NSA and sho on.
