Rugoz wrote:How is that unique to China? Every authoritarian regime I can think of has a political party attached to it. So you can join the regime I suppose, but I imagine you will primarily execute orders, because policy is made at the very top. The national congress of the CCP for example doesn't decide anything.
This is false and would never work in such a huge country. Different cities have different regional systems in place. Even the metro and ticketing systems of two neighbouring cities are not unified. GUIDELINES are made at the very top, and funding is provided-funding derived from taxation and export incomes (note that the autnomous regions are not taxed-not a single yuan makes its way from tibet or xinjiang to Beijing).
From there it's like school, the provincial, district, city, village officials, (superintendents, principals, teachers, party students) work together to fulfill the guidelines best they can. If they fail badly they lose their jobs and get replaced, usually by one of the other 1,000+ contenders vying for the position from the bottom up thanks to local elections (85 million active ccp members-all can partake, employees of large manufacturers are encouraged to join). If they do a mediocre job, they get reprimanded and get less funding next time until they shape up big time or fail outright. If they succeed, they are given top marks and preferential treatment making their trajectory easier and giving them long term job security and a way to move up. Failure is based on hard numbers/quantitative performance.
Trying to fudge the numbers just leads to them being criminalized and fucked, jail or worse- everyone at their level that wants their job or just below them would squeal to Beijing-and they are encouraged to do so. At the most local level if individual families misreport their financial situation in order to get more free gibs they get cut off and shamed until their antics are self adjusted. See the story of the mayor that tried and succeeded in revitalizing china's ugliest, most unlivable city. He did it by naming, shaming, squealing and then dealing. Failures were used to light a fire under every official's ass in the region and to relocate 140,000 ratty tenants who were shitting up the place.
It's how the poverty alleviation program and the infrastructure programs have been so successful.
Where China dwells towards fascism is at the highest politburo level. Here the key party members run a bunch of state corporations that have a finger in every pie domestically and abroad and which oversee every single foreign entity allowed to participate in the domestic market. Essentially National Syndicalism or soft fascism. There is a symbiosis between the communal worker/academia governed market socialist economy and the big corporate state champions. Xi is literally the CEO of an entity called the PRC. Everything below the PRC are subsidiaries, most of them that wouldn't be classified as state champions but that do exert important economic influence(eg huawei, alibaba BYD) entirely autonomous and only observed to be staying within guidelines. The mom and pop small businesses are just like anywhere else, completely private.
And this is fucking cool. China has cracked the economic code on a civilization level. The ultimate test of this decentralized, hierarchical and yet communal syndicalist bureaucracy was on display just a couple months back when the politburo neutered a man who had control of every transaction of every citizen in the country. Alibaba's fintech antics were right up there with those of large US lobby groups, Jack Ma was lobbying hundreds of city level officials and below, trying to change the financial system from within to further monopolize his position. He was detained, reformed and released. His attempt at unsolicited top down economic reform was crushed. Now he is a good little boy. And there is nowhere to run. His Empire is completely entangled with the PRC, and it is a subsidiary. He learned it the easy way, others have received bullets. Thus proving the resilience of the PRC corporation, it can't be hijacked.