Diktat and wads of cash

Ian Williams has an interesting CAPX piece on China’s faltering economy


Xi Jinping’s coercion is destroying his own economy

Football provides a useful way to understand the dead end into which Xi Jinping is leading the Chinese economy. This month, a 7-0 loss by China’s men’s team to Japan in an Asian Cup qualifier marked the colossal failure of a decade-long multi-billion dollar project to turn China into a footballing superpower. When Xi launched his masterplan in 2015, China was 81st in the world; now they are 87th. Dozens of top officials and players have been suspended or jailed for corruption, and much like Xi’s dream of creating a tech-driven ‘innovation economy’, the plan to capture the heights of world football was a top-down project driven by diktat and wads of cash, with rigid plans and targets so beloved of Communist Party bureaucrats.


The piece is short but well worth reading because of what it says about a familiar problem here in the UK and the developed world generally. Politically-driven top-down coercion doesn't work - we know about that too.


Xi’s longer term goal is to build a world-beating ‘innovation’ economy driven by domestic tech, but the most effective way of achieving this – giving more sway to the market and to private companies – runs counter to everything he stands for. He has hobbled China’s most innovative technology companies, which have faced tightening restrictions. Last year, China led the world in the number of millionaires leaving the country, according to the Henley Wealth Management Report.