I don't mean to burst your bubble, but... this picture of a "house of cards"-economy, with "swindles all the way down", riddled Swiss-cheese-style with corruption, while indeed a Western populist idyll visage of China these days (a sort of Western-denialists wet dream of impending Chinese doom), is inaccurate, and I think, dangerous for folks in the West to believe, if they truly hope to compete with "their biggest strategic adversary."
Surely there is corruption, failure and incompetence, but if it was on the scale that comments like this yearn for, China would look more like Cambodia, or Myanmar, or even Thailand, than China.
The simple truth is China would not have been able to achieve the scale of productivity and growth that it has (and if you doubt the scale, you must travel there in earnest, you will leave mind-expanded, if not fully blown), if it were truly like you merely wish it were. Sorry, but truth ain't always easy to hear.
Surely there is corruption, failure and incompetence, but if it was on the scale that comments like this yearn for, China would look more like Cambodia, or Myanmar, or even Thailand, than China.
The simple truth is China would not have been able to achieve the scale of productivity and growth that it has (and if you doubt the scale, you must travel there in earnest, you will leave mind-expanded, if not fully blown), if it were truly like you merely wish it were. Sorry, but truth ain't always easy to hear.