Asian Angle | China’s moralising of public policy risks eroding gains in human welfare
- The government’s moralising and patronising reaction to youth unemployment could be disastrous for China’s young people
- Lazy paternalism impedes policy change and allows authorities to avoid difficult reforms needed to improve the economy
Policymaking in the mainland has, in recent years, become characterised less by pragmatism, experimentation and improvisation, and more by ideology, morality and security (in which policies are increasingly seen through the lens of national security, often at the expense of economic growth).
This shift has significant ramifications: it risks eroding the gains in human welfare that 40 years of reform and opening – an era in which Chinese policymaking was highly pragmatic and adaptive – delivered.
Moralising public policy carries more risks in the long-term than whatever short-term benefits and political advantage such an approach brings.
China’s zero-Covid policy for much of the pandemic is perhaps the most salient example of how moralising a policy issue can be self-defeating. For more than two years, Chinese authorities defended and implemented the draconian, even inhumane, policy, while criticising and denigrating other countries that had switched to “living-with-Covid” – calling them reckless, callous, and Darwinian. Zero-Covid zealotry trumped science and evidence; the policy was ideologised and moralised, and citizens were told to persevere (a moral virtue) because “perseverance is victory”.
Persisting with zero-Covid was ultimately disastrous for China, especially its under-vaccinated elderly population. When the central government abruptly dropped its zero-Covid policy, the unspoken policy was Covid-for-everyone. Most credible estimates put the Covid death toll at 1 million to 1.5 million people (a very high mortality rate of about one in 1,000 people in just over three months).
The rhetoric the Chinese state is now adopting in response to the stubbornly high youth unemployment rate – which stands at around 20 per cent – reflects the same moralising, victim-blaming, and valorisation of “struggle” and “perseverance” that accompanied zero-Covid. And just as zero-Covid was ultimately tragic for China’s elderly, the Chinese government’s moralising and patronising reaction to youth unemployment could be disastrous for China’s youth.
