2025-05-29
1 小时 29 分钟Today, I'm talking with Victor Shi,
who is the director of the 21st 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 the national government in China,
it's like 85% local per provincial, 15% national.
In the US, it's actually, if you look at state and local,
it's 50%, national, federal government is 50%.
What do you think of an authoritarian system?
You often think of it as like very top down, the center controls everything.
But if you look at these numbers, it just seems like it's quite decentralized.
Or is that the wrong way to look at the numbers?
I think for a while China was quite decentralized.
So this is kind of in from the mid 1970s all the way until the mid 1990s.
China was very decentralized where local governments generated a lot of revenue,
but they also spent a lot of money.