Living in the UK, there is a kind of low-level background hum of mild dysfunction. Broadly, things are Basically Fine, but there’s a tangible sense of anxiety that as each year passes they are becoming slightly less so: economic growth is stagnant, housing costs outpace wage growth in a way that is not especially promising for the next generation’s home-ownership prospects, and one notices small, tangible ways in which the high-trust society we grew up in begins to erode: the trains are later, the TikToks are played more loudly on public transport, there are homeless people living in tents near Picadilly Circus.
One can be forgiven for thinking that this is a universal phenomenon, and not a specifically British one - after all, a similar sense of decline seems to be present in other Western nations too. Perhaps this is simply the Kali Yuga, and we will have to be content watching things fall apart while we distract ourselves with short-form AI-generated content neuralinked directly into our prefrontal cortices. Or maybe this is just reactionary scaremongering, and things are really better than ever, and you need to close this piece of dangerous right-wing propaganda right now and go listen to Rory Stewart babble sweet boomer nothings on The Rest Is Politics Podcast until your anxieties fade away into a warm and endless void.
But there is a third path available: you can go to China. You can boot up your computer right now and navigate to Google Flights and buy a Hainan Airlines return flight to Chongqing. You can revel in the cyberpunk glory of the world’s largest city (proper), eat diabolically spicy hotpot and down $1 Tsingtao and smoke cheap and beautifully decorated cigs with Chinese uncles. You can memorize the words Hēi, mèizǐ, nǐ de wéi xìn shì shénme? (Hey girl, what's your WeChat?) Most of all, you can step out of Plato’s cave and into the cold, clear, lightly smoggy December sunshine and observe: a better world is possible.
What I mean by this is that China replaces the UK’s background anxiety of dysfunction with a warmer and altogether more pleasant hum of competence. Things generally tend to work well.
Firstly, China is pretty cheap. Arriving in China, you can order a DiDi taxi to your hotel and it’ll cost about ⅓ to ¼ of what it would in the UK. You will stay in a hotel which will be priced at a similar discount. If you want to go and eat out then, like most of Asia, your food will be cheap. If you want to book a train anywhere in China or a flight anywhere in Asia, you can book it a week or so in advance and it’ll be cheap. More importantly, this cheapness is not just true for tourists but also for locals: people in China are able to afford the essentials of life on a normal income in the same way that one used to be able to in the West.
Now you might say, big deal. Plenty of Southeast Asia is cheap too. Yes, but typically when travelling in cheap developing countries there are real tradeoffs to this cheapness: it means being in somewhere that is a poor local place with tourist infrastructure stitched on top of it. Chinese cities are not like that: they are real places with actual functioning infrastructure. I’m just making the tourist example because it’s familiar to you as westerners: the important thing is that Chinese society is inclusive and affordable to ordinary working people.
Secondly, China is safe. There is basically no crime in China, you can walk around at night anywhere, you can leave your laptop at your seat in Starbucks while you go to the bathroom. Now here again I know some readers will say: actually I find that living in London is perfectly safe, I’ve never been robbed / worried about my safety / etc. To which I say: you’re missing the point. The important thing about being in a safe society is not the actual probabilities of getting mugged. It’s the second order effect it has on the vibe of being in cities. Chinese cities like CQ have a cheerful and upbeat feel which is very different to the slightly on-edge stressed out vibe of London. You see many more children in public because it’s safe for them to walk home from school for example. It is not at all about the big noticeable things like getting robbed, but rather about the accumulation of lots of small details - absence of graffiti, absence of litter, absence of homeless people, absence of street preachers, absence of train TikToks - which together accumulate and give things a healthy and pleasant vibe.
Thirdly, China is harmonious.
In a city such as London or NYC, the experience is notably and obviously cosmopolitan: it is a melting pot of many different cultures, languages, peoples. One can eat any cuisine in the world prepared freshly and to a high standard by someone of that particular culture as well as innumerable fusion dishes formed from this natural cultural exchange. I mention cuisine because it is an obvious example of an area where cosmopolitanism works quite well but one can observe other benefits; for instance London is somewhere that is highly tolerant of outsiders and anyone from any background can in theory move there and build a good life for themselves.
But while cosmopolitanism has certain benefits it’s interesting to observe in Chinese cities a completely different model. Chinese cities are completely, consistently, and exclusively Chinese: yet unlike Western countries it is not the case that certain classes of jobs are delegated to foreign migrants. So you will be exposed to working class Chinese people that drive cabs and run street food stalls; you will walk through tiny Chongqing alleyways and side streets and see tiny houses stacked atop one another while massive skyscrapers loom above them. China really is dedicated to socialist ideals and CCP propaganda is very interested in celebrating working class people such as farmers and workmen that do difficult jobs in a way that I warmed to.
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Now you may roll your eyes and say that I am romanticizing China, to which I would say: what else is travel for? The question is what specifically does one romanticize. Only in the 2020s could a Westerner visit China and be entertained simply by living in a society that amounts to a YIMBY fantasy come true. Of course, China isn't just interesting because of its boring competence; it's also a fascinating culture with thousands of years of history, etc. But there is a particular way in which it is interesting at this particular time.
If you make these arguments about China's relative merits to some Westerners then often the immediate response is to point out that China also has various tradeoffs that one doesn't observe in the UK. For instance: sure, China might function well, but there's no free press and you can't criticize the government. Or: sure, it's probably easy to build a lot of housing and develop functioning industry if the government has the power to unilaterally override objections against building things.
The rationale for the Western approach in many matters of government seems to be: the government's power is inherently dangerous, so it's important to implement lots of safeguards and checks and balances to prevent it from riding roughshod over civil society. So we need to make sure that we change governments quickly, subject it to robust criticism from a free press, have arms-lengths bodies like the OBR that can hold government accountable, have independent judges that can challenge executive decisions...etc.
You can see why this would make sense certain historical contexts. If you're the American revolutionaries and are writing a constitution for a free democratic republic after experiencing what you perceive to be tyranically rule from a monarch, then naturally you might be inclined to want to limit executive power.
The problem is that in the United Kingdom today, there are many ways in which our problems do not in any sense result from a deficit of executive power. In fact they result from our government being weak, slow, and ineffective. Yet it's seemingly taboo to suggest "hey, maybe we should reform our institutions in order to make them less ineffective" in the inverse sense to how liberal thinkers in the 18th century suggested reforms to make their institutions more democratic.
Take housing for example. In the UK, our local government assumes a very high degree of responsibility for getting housing built: since 1947, when the Town and Country Planning Act made it illegal to develop private land without getting a local government permit, local authorities have basically assumed primary responsibility for meeting the UK's housebuilding targets.
Yet while local governments take on this responsibility, they also are concerned with diffusing it as broadly as possible to an extent that makes it appear as though they do not, in fact, trust themselves to do their job. Hence the process of getting housing built in the UK is torturously slow and involves endless rounds of consultations with existing residents who are naturally inclined to block further development, environmental impact assessments, risk assessments, Section 106 processes in which local councils award themselves money from the development...etc. The 1947 TCPA was a failure: the UK has under-built housing for almost 6 decades as a result, as Works in Progress has shown. But no one can be held accountable for this failure: in fact, only a small fraction of highly online Brits are aware that it is the TCPA 1947 (along with subsequent planning legislation) that is to blame for this. They are just aware of a background hum of dysfunction, of a general malaise of over-regulation.
In China, you might assume that housing simply gets built by communist fiat, and that there is some overworked local official who makes arbitrary development decisions that construction firms execute on. Or you might assume that its some kind of grey-market free-for-all where rapacious property developers build away and bribe local officials to grease the wheels.
How it actually works is that the local government owns all of the local land and developers can obtain 70-year leases on the land to develop it. These rights are awarded by CCP officials who are recruited through a meritocratic process and who are benchmarked and held accountable for meeting their housing targets.
On the surface this sounds pretty outrageous to Western ears: it's not democratic in any sense, there are no elected local government officials. The government effectively owns all property rights. Additionally, there are real empirical concerns about how this has led to over-building and excess indebtedness of local governments.
But in practice, this works far better than the British system. A ton of problems in the British system are downstream from the fact that local councillors are simply not that smart - being a local councillor is a dead-end job in local politics with prospects of becoming a backbench MP at best, no real political prospects start as councillors. In China by contrast you have to work your way up: senior CCP officials start by running towns and provinces, as Xi Jinping did in Hangzhou.
It sounds unappealing to liberal ears that Chinese government owns all property rights. But in practice, this is less different from the UK than it sounds. Since our 1947 government had the bright idea of taking on responsibility for building all housing, you don't really have property rights anyway; you might own some land, but you aren't able to actually use it to develop housing unless the government says so.
Ultimately markets are good because they allow us to receive feedback from reality. If we have a mostly free market in housing then this should mean that it's impossible to have a housing shortage, since rising house prices result in increased incentives for developers to build more in response. The market responds to that signal and resources get re-allocated.
But in the UK we don't have a free market due to the aforementioned fact that housing responsibilities lie with the government, who does not bear any negative cost for failing to respond to this signal in the way that individual consumers of housing do (from high bills) or developers do (from going out of business)
In China, the system is a bit communist, but at least it knows it's communist! If a local government official in Guizhou fails to get enough housing built then his career prospects in the CCP will suffer, giving him an incentive to fix it, and if he fails to do it consistently it'll show up in the numbers he's benchmarked against and he'll be fired and replaced. This isn't a free market, but it has the advantage that we want our markets to give us - there is feedback from reality and the ability to adjust in response.
So which of these systems, in balance, is more democratic? Is it the British system, which insists on consulting everyone with the free time and desire to show up to endless council meetings on whether a new house should be built or not and ultimately consistently fails to build enough housing for decades? Or is it the Chinese system, which assumes that building housing is something that it's possible to accomplish in the same way that we accomplish building things in the private sector: through giving talented people access to resources and clear accountability for achieving a certain result?
Perhaps you argue that the British system is in fact better and that it just needs better execution. Fair enough, but the problem is that at present we are not having this debate. The only political debate that appears to be permitted is whether or not we should swap out the current adminstrators of local councils with those from another political party, just as at the national level we discuss whether or not it's better to be governed by this party or that one. But what we actually need is to start having a frank discussion about where we can remove parts of our system that are currently oriented towards democracy, consultation, and inclusion and replace them with systems oriented towards meritocracy, accountability, and feedback.
So why does China basically work, when the UK doesn't? Obviously the answer is far too complex to boil down to any singular factor. But it seems to me that at many levels (here I'm talking about housing but you could also look at rail, energy, industrial policy etc) the Chinese system is fundamentally designed to work, it is designed to be effective, while our systems are concerned first and foremost through either limiting government power and effectiveness. In China they treat the principle of political accountability as something that is not essentially different to the way that we assign it in functioning private sector organizations: in order to get things done you need a single directly responsible individual. In the UK we aim to spread accountability as widely as possible in the name of being consultative and inclusive and in so we very effectively hide the reason why things don't work.