Which is why you should support China, as a recent Harvard Kennedy School survey found that over 93% of the Chinese people are satisfied with their central government.
https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7.6.2020.pdf See page 3
Facts don’t care about your feelings
No. It’s not “the economy”. It’s real material changes in their lives. This is strictly stated, and something Harvard has been keen to say does not occur in the American population – for example the rust belt are not voting based on rational assessments of their material conditions.
There is a massive difference between voting for the line and voting for actual material change in your life. The Chinese people’s support is driven by absolutely consistent improvement in their lives, nationwide, year on year, for multiple decades in a row with almost no slowing. It is exceptionally consistent and has been since the 50s.
Everything about this is based on how there’s never been a real financial downturns there nation wide in decades.
There’s a difference between a financial downturn and a change in the actual material effect on a population. If people have houses, food, entertainment and work the same hours their lives have not actually deteriorated, they’ve just stayed the same. A financial downturn may affect investment and thus the continued development and improvement of conditions for people but unless the government severely mismanages it there is no reason it should result in a backwards step in the material lived conditions of the people – any private business that is necessary to maintain the conditions of the people can simply be pulled into national ownership and operated at no profit until such a time as things change or have been adapted to suit the changing situation.
Labour is what matters to the continued survival of communities, not financial growth. If you ensure labour is protected in a crisis you do not have a collapse of anyone’s living conditions. Massive setbacks in living conditions of a population is a distinctly capitalist phenomenon and is driven by governments allowing the “free markets” to collapse industries in various local areas and have the communities that depended upon those industries rot as a result, followed by doing absolutely nothing to help those rotting communities.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you’ve said. I’m talking about metrics like unemployment, housing stability and ownership, ect.
China is deeply integrated into the global market place, should there be a major sudden demand drop for things like say, electronics, people in China would be put into a bad spot and that could very meaningfully hurt the approval of their party.
As I said before, they will protect the labour in the short term and adapt industry into other things to maintain people’s ability to have those three things – food, housing and entertainment.
Should their manufacturing-based electronics industry ever be threatened as you fear there is absolutely nothing stopping them retooling local economies into more service related things or changing from electronics manufacturing to something else.
If push really comes to shove and you can’t fix local conditions through such adaptation or retooling of the local economy they aren’t averse to simply having entire towns relocated somewhere else. Remember all those “ghost cities” that the west propagandised about for years? What happened to all the talk about those? They aren’t ghost cities anymore. Massive populations were relocated into them out of other areas in order to improve people’s conditions. The problems you’re raising are things capitalist countries are terrible at handling but they simply won’t sit there and allow communities to collapse the way you’re envisioning if key businesses suddenly struggle. They will prop up the conditions of the people while they find alternative solutions to ensure conditions don’t go down, failing that they will simply take drastic measures to move entire communities.
Drastic measures don’t always work, they have very significant side effects on the way people act and feel about the state of things.
To suggest that there isn’t something that could happen within the country that results in a decline in material conditions is incredibly foolish, just look at what happened in the USSR. Economic stagnation that didn’t even result in a meaningful decline in the standard of living played a role in what caused them to make the many strategic errors that eventually resulted in their downfall.
