Atrioc

I can carry on my influence somehow.

But in China, once you use your influence on one of these sites, you've lost it on everything.

And your ability to rebuild your following isn't really existent.

It's like you just pay the price.

You're not going to jail, but you've lost all of your influence.

I think, okay, here's an example I can think of that kind of supports what you're saying.

It's actually the social credit system that gets talked about a lot.

So we've joked and talked about this on this trip a little bit, but basically the way that started is broad requests from the, I guess you call it the federal government,

the central government, came in and the social credit system as it was floated around in the US was an example of more local government trying to take these broad stroke goals or rules from the central government and employing a policy in one specific place.

Was it a specific city, right?

And then trying this sort of social credit-esque system out where officials would note good deeds or bad deeds and try to build something out of that.

But it didn't actually work, and it never expanded out of that one place.

And that expanded into this news story of the social credit system as we know it in the US.

But that, from, I mean, admittedly, stuff I've just read and watched, this is an example of how the central government in China works, is they'll roll out some new goals or...

things that they want to change in broad terms, and then let local government officials approach tackling that problem as they wish.

It was stressed to us that these local places that try something become testing grounds for laws that can be applied at scale across the whole country.

I think one of the downsides to that, too, is you often hear these stories of how much debt China has actually taken on, and it's also a result of this system, from my understanding, is local government officials take on debt in order to build large infrastructure projects that the public still benefits from, right?

But the debt is accumulating in China in a different way

where local officials are choosing to spend this money and the debt accumulates at a local level, which is like tracked differently.

So the amount of debt that China has is actually much, much larger than the central government shares because a lot of the debt is held by like specific areas of the country or like by these local positions or parties.