@sim @Moon @maija
China's economic problems stems from its cultural problems, where appearances are far more important than reality, and cheating is normalized, and statistics are a thing to cook for careerism, or at least to not lose everything by admitting there are problems. It's hard for westerners to comprehend, but cheating is completely normalized in China.

This culture is the heritage of when China was more communist. The "people moving from the countryside to the city to get factory jobs" was not by choice, they were forced and collectivized and families very intentionally split apart so that the nation/government would be their family instead of their traditional parents and siblings and children.

The communists industrialized China by attempting to make steel in huge bonfires, outdoors, which resulted in massive deforestation for fuel and produced useless slag. They planted rice too densely, for photo-ops of their revolutionary hyper-productivity, and the crops failed. They did collective farming by taking people from the city who didn't know how to farm and making them farm. Treating people as interchangeable parts with no skillsets is very common in communism. They had a huge campaign to kill all the sparrows because they eat crops. They killed them, then the locusts came, which the sparrows normally keep under control. Tens of millions died in The Great Leap Forward.

The death rate only slowed when localities started allowing private industry, and they only allowed it because they could do it secretly and at least not starve to death like the others. This became endemic and a relaxation of central planning followed. Of course there were no private property rights, and it this pseudo-capitalism was allowed because it got economic results. The economic system has since then been more like Nazi germany, where central planning is given up on, at least in the details, but private property is a privilege which can be seized at any time for any reason, and not a right.

Central planning and communism also allowed the One Child Policy, which was, is, and still will be incredibly destructive.

Now they're into the environmentalism/green trend, for carbon credits and prestige, so orders from on high (the Chinese Communist Party) are to make things green. Since it's impossible to fulfill these lofty goals they've been assigned, they cheat, and literally paint the trees green and cover the barren hills with fake plastic leaves, and plant stones to make it look like agriculture is occurring from a distance or in satellite photos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AynNsPs9i80