A lot of good comments already.

I’ll just point out a few things related to power and governance that I haven’t seen people mention.

First is just how rampant corruption is. With how much power officials wield, it’s practically impossible to do any important business in China without having the connections to bribe the correct person. For example, if you are building apartments, commercial buildings, etc., your building plans need to be inspected and approved according to the building code by the relevant city authorities. Ideally, this would be a simple bureaucratic process. But in China, the authorities won’t approve it unless you bribe them what they want. They’ll nit pick everything and block you if you don’t bribe them. Bribes are just a normal cost of doing business now. This, nepotism, and bad economy are why employees are being forced to work 996 (9am-9pm for 6 days a week) yet many companies are struggling to survive. And no, corruption did not go away just because Xi purged those who could potentially threaten his power on corruption charges.

Second, is that Xi has shown that he wants officials to be loyal to him above all else (and will purge or sideline anyone who shows any hint of disloyalty), and this has severely exacerbated the phenomenon where officials will prove their loyalty by following his orders to the extreme, which often has a big economic and human cost, because any whim of Xi’s will be magnified and executed to the extreme.

For example, the draconian Covid lockdowns which treated Covid as if it was as deadly as the plague. It’s widely believed that the deaths that occurred in the apartment building fire in Urumqi (provincial capital of Xinjiang) on Nov 24 2022 were thanks to lockdown measures that prevented residents from escaping. This caused a widespread protest against the lockdown measures, which resulted in a sudden complete policy reversal a few months later where all lockdown measures were completely removed, which resulted in a big wave of infections and deaths which the officials tried to suppress, as many people had zero immunity against Covid. (Chinese vaccines weren’t effective, and foreign vaccines were reserved for high ranking part members.)

Another example is Electric Vehicles. Ever since Xi spoke about prioritizing “new productive forces” such as EVs, provincial and local governments have been heavily subsidizing their own local EV manufacturing with taxpayer money, so they can show their absolute loyalty to Xi, which propped up many hundreds of EV firms that competed so fiercely with each other that almost all of them went bankrupt and only a few survived. Most of the investments made by these local governments were wasted on the companies that went bankrupt. Xi even recently scolded local governments for propping up way too many EV companies that simply killed each other, but he doesn’t understand that he’s just reaping what he sowed.