Video of the day -- the grim march into disaster

The tragic fiasco of Shanghai's "response" to covid illustrates how authoritarianism inevitably leads to absurdity and failure.  Xi Jinping's rule has reversed China's earlier steps toward more freedom, restoring the disastrous Mao model of the godlike leader wielding total power and surrounded by yes-men and toadies.  Note also the strategy of playing off rural and urban populations against each other, something we've seen in the US as well, at serious cost to national unity.

The unrest in Shanghai could be a foretaste of more serious trouble for the regime.  Remember, revolutions are rarely caused by poverty or tyranny per se.  For most of history almost all the world's people lived under varying degrees of tyranny, and in far worse poverty than can be seen in even the poorest countries today, yet there were not constant revolutions.  Rebellion tends to happen when rising expectations are disappointed.  For a generation, the Chinese people have seen a real rise in their standard of living (even if not as much as official figures claim), while tasting some degree of greater freedom.  Now they're being forced back under the total control of a mindless bureaucracy robotically carrying out insane orders, while the economy lurches from one crisis to another.  It's a potentially explosive situation.

(The last section, speculating that all this chaos is a "stress test" before starting a war, strikes me as very unlikely.  China would be hopelessly out-classed in such a war, and the democracies' unity in punishing Russian aggression is a warning even Xi can't ignore.  Usually, policies that look like bungling really are just bungling.  Don't let that part of the video distract you from the real points in the rest of it.)