Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
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Today, I'm talking with Victor Shih, who is a director of the twenty first Century China Center at UC San Diego. China is obviously the most important economic and geopolitical issue over time, and doubly so if you believe what I believe about AI. I was especially keen to talk to you because you have deep expertise not only in Chinese elite politics, but also its economic system, its fiscal banking policies. We'll get into all of that before we get into the AI topics. Is China actually a more decentralized system than America? If you look at government spending by provincial governments versus
I think for a while, China was quite decentralized. So this is kinda in from the mid nineteen seventies all the way until the mid nineteen nineties. China was very decentralized where local governments generated a lot of revenue, but they also spent a lot of money. And it incentivized them to do, you know, kind of basically good things such as trying to attract as much FDI as possible, trying to attract as much local investment as possible, give tax breaks and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, China had a very good period of mainly sort of private sector driven growth because of this f
Let's start at the very top. If you look at the members first, I wanna understand the personnel. If you look at the members of the Politburo, and you look at their past, a lot of them will be provincial leaders and then some local thing before that. But in many cases, they'll have stints, as you said Mhmm. As they were the head of this, chemical engineering SOE or they have a they studied and Xu Jin Ping himself was a, like, a has a PhD in chemical engineering. Right? Something. Some
kind of well, but I I yeah. I
think Yeah. So that's actually what I'm asking about. If you just look through their the list, a lot of them are, like, PhD economist, PhD industrial engineer, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, some of them, if you look, it's like, oh, I'm they have PhD in Marxist, theory
or something. Marxist thought too.
Which that seems fake. But are they actual technocrats? If you look at their degrees, they seem quite impressive. Or is this just, like, fake made up credentialism? If if there's, like, a PhD economist in the Politburo, am I should I be, like, impressed and be, like, oh, they probably really understand economics, or should I just think Some of so
the former, premier of China, Li Keqiang, his his undergraduate degree, I think, was economics, and he studied under one of the best economists in China. Yeah. So I think he understood economics. So in I would say in the Politburo today, there is this wing of the Politburo who are military industrialists, who were trained as engineers, and they indeed were trained in the best programs in China. So Ma Xinrui, the party secretary of Xinjiang for example, in the Politburo, graduated from Tsinghua University. Zhang Guoqing also who worked in military industry for years, he grad I don't know if it'
Yeah. I still feel confused about how to model the competence of Mhmm. The party because on the one hand, they are super educated on in STEM and are Yeah. Selected at least partly on merit, etcetera. On the other hand Mhmm. We just see them may like, a lot of zero code was just genuinely stupid, scrubbing down airport runways and so forth. And it just lasted for too long. And why why was nobody steering the ship then? So Well,
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