“travel blog by someone I don’t know” seems a bit too dismissive, but I take your point that much of the article is based on one person’s observations. (Or two if you count my endorsement of it based on my observations, and I perhaps should have mentioned that I stayed in China for 6 weeks on my trip, and was able to see more than the typical tourist stuff.) It does talk about “A 2017 Ipsos survey of almost 20,000 people reported that 87% of respondents from China believe that the country is heading in the right direction. Compare that to 43% of respondents in the U.S. and an average of 40% among all of the countries surveyed.” and “hard results speak for themselves in terms of shipping traffic, passenger-miles on high-speed rail, and tons of steel produced and concrete poured.” The latter statistics are not directly cited but are easy enough to look up.
I do have a bunch of uncertainty about how much of the “good governance” in China is just appearances and how much is real, and perhaps should have conveyed that more in the OP. Some of it is also based on my recent experiences with local politics and government in the US, which kind of shocked me as to how pathological and dysfunctional they are, and it’s possible that I overcorrected based on that.
More data and facts are obviously welcome, but it seems hard to measure governance in any way that doesn’t depend on human judgment, so again I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss the article based on that, unless someone actually did do a more objective study and the result contradicts the article’s conclusions. I’m also actively trying to seek out contrary perspectives—see this comment I posted on EA Forum.
I am live in China, doubt about ’87% of respondents from China believe that the country is heading in the right direction’, found this article on line, the full title is ‘Chinese people have lots of faith in China, but not so much in their fellow Chinese’. What I know is lots of people do self-censorship automatically before they say anything here, include me. So I doubt about the data validity.
“travel blog by someone I don’t know” seems a bit too dismissive, but I take your point that much of the article is based on one person’s observations. (Or two if you count my endorsement of it based on my observations, and I perhaps should have mentioned that I stayed in China for 6 weeks on my trip, and was able to see more than the typical tourist stuff.) It does talk about “A 2017 Ipsos survey of almost 20,000 people reported that 87% of respondents from China believe that the country is heading in the right direction. Compare that to 43% of respondents in the U.S. and an average of 40% among all of the countries surveyed.” and “hard results speak for themselves in terms of shipping traffic, passenger-miles on high-speed rail, and tons of steel produced and concrete poured.” The latter statistics are not directly cited but are easy enough to look up.
I do have a bunch of uncertainty about how much of the “good governance” in China is just appearances and how much is real, and perhaps should have conveyed that more in the OP. Some of it is also based on my recent experiences with local politics and government in the US, which kind of shocked me as to how pathological and dysfunctional they are, and it’s possible that I overcorrected based on that.
More data and facts are obviously welcome, but it seems hard to measure governance in any way that doesn’t depend on human judgment, so again I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss the article based on that, unless someone actually did do a more objective study and the result contradicts the article’s conclusions. I’m also actively trying to seek out contrary perspectives—see this comment I posted on EA Forum.
I am live in China, doubt about ’87% of respondents from China believe that the country is heading in the right direction’, found this article on line, the full title is ‘Chinese people have lots of faith in China, but not so much in their fellow Chinese’. What I know is lots of people do self-censorship automatically before they say anything here, include me. So I doubt about the data validity.