All power corrupts

There was an interesting article (the thing called 'The Long Read', with one page of the thee page article being devoted to a large, non-information bearing graphic) in yesterday's Guardian, about the role of the (Communist) Party in the affairs of large businesses in China, with more or less all large businesses incorporating party cells and including party officials on important boards and committees. With the result that the Party can interfere in the affairs of business in a way that is not possible here in the west.

So if, for example, the Party in its wisdom should decide that plastic bottles were a bad thing, it would be able to give the companies selling plastic bottled drinks a very firm steer, without necessarily needing to go in for voluntary codes of practise, legislation or any of the more or less clumsy and often ineffective mechanisms available to us. Or if it should decide that region A needed more economic activity, it could push company B into building a large factory there, even though there were better locations available elsewhere.

The catch being that too much power is concentrated in the Party, a party which is run on rather secretive lines and not very open to public scrutiny. So while it may trim back the evils of the like of Walmart and Facebook, such trimming comes at the price of other evils from within the Party itself, evils of greed, corruption, nepotism and abuse of power generally. With the Party being all too aware of such evils within the large state corporations, but seemingly not so aware of the beam in its own eye. See the western wisdom incapsulated in the snap above: perhaps an interested reader could turn up something similar from Confucius?

Another catch being that the party officials embedded in companies may well exceed their brief, poking their noses into things beyond their competence.

Which meant, for example, that during the Great Patriotic War, Stalin had to have a care about how much power he gave the party officials - the political commissars - embedded in the military. They might well have been good at working up a bit of enthusiasm for the battle to come, but they might well have been rather bad at actual command.

While in the US, the constitution is very strong on the division of power between the president, the legislature and the courts. With one catch there being that this power can get so divided that nothing gets done. Another being that this division of power only covers the public domain and does not reach Walmart or Facebook, let alone into the murky depths of all the tax havens operated under the flag of Her Britannic Majesty.

Perhaps I ought to read the book of the article, referenced below.

Reference 1: Xi Jinping; The Backlash - Richard McGregor - 2019.

Reference 2: https://www.penguin.com.au/books/xi-jinping-the-backlash-9781760893040. The horse's mouth.