Ezra's Bookshelf

Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts

by Jeremy L. Wallace · 280 pages · ~5 hrs

Politics & GovernmentSociety & Culture

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Jeremy Wallace examines how quantified metrics came to dominate Chinese governance and how the blind spots this system created led Xi Jinping to reassert personal authority. Wallace, a political scientist at Cornell, traces how the Chinese Communist Party used numerical targets--GDP growth, social stability, pollution levels--to manage a vast bureaucracy, creating incentive systems that drove remarkable achievements but also produced systematic distortions. Local officials met targets through whatever means necessary, generating the statistics Beijing demanded while allowing problems to accumulate unseen. Wallace draws on Chinese-language sources to show how metrics that measured regime priorities like growth and stability failed to capture emerging challenges, from debt accumulation to demographic decline to the COVID-19 outbreak that spread before surveillance systems detected it. He argues that Xi's concentration of power represents an attempt to address systemic dysfunction through personal control, abandoning the collective leadership and institutionalized succession that characterized the reform era. The book combines quantitative analysis with qualitative case studies, explaining both how the system worked when it worked and why it stopped working. Wallace writes accessibly about Chinese politics for readers without specialized background while engaging scholarly debates about authoritarian governance.

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