Opaque as in we really don’t know how they arrive at a certain decision, and that’s largely due to a lack of (visibly) coherent set of ideology. For example, I feel much more confident in predicting how US and Europe will react to certain events because there is a very defined neoliberal ideology that drives the decision-making process.

China claims to be Marxist (and I believe that) but there are many decisions that simply don’t conform to our understanding of Marxism, and this is why among Marxist circles here there’s a joke about anything that we don’t understand what the government is doing can be attributed to 特色 (lit. special characteristics, i.e socialism with Chinese characteristics). It is socialism if the government says it is lol. And a lot of neoliberal brainworms injected into those decisions for sure.

In a way, this allows China to respond quite dynamically to the changing global events, but at the same time we (as leftists) also see many mistakes that would lead to problems down the road. I have already mentioned the property market boom, which was accompanied by many public infrastructure building (good) and a lot of new housing with no prospective buyers (the financing mechanism between local government and the property developers created such a condition where local officials can “cheat” GDP growth by building lots and lots of empty houses and sucking in capital investment that would have been better spent elsewhere to develop the economy).

A lot of the decisions made in the early 2000s were predicated on a scenario where the West doesn’t actively seek to decouple from China, and somehow this could go on forever (how many times people have told me that “we have so much to learn from America” and “we can prosper together with America” lol). It wasn’t until Trump’s trade war in 2018 that we start to see the panic about a possible decoupling event with the US. Many on the left had been calling for a shift towards “internal circulation” since decades ago. Now you can make the argument that growth would probably have been slower, and the poverty alleviation effort would have been more gradual, but it would also have made the Chinese economy much more resilient and less vulnerable to Western sanctions, as it is still strongly dependent on export rather than internal consumption.

Where China still has its major advantage is that the central bank is still run by the state (literally right next to the ministry of treasury) instead of independently run by private bankers as in most other countries. We are seeing them semi-reluctantly using this advantage to deal with the emerging crisis but there is still too much neoliberal brainworms that is restraining them from fully utilizing it as an effective weapon/tool to solve the economic problems in the country.

Still, governing 1.4 billion people is no joke and developing such a populous country from a poor agrarian economy to a modern industrialized state is no easy feat, and stability is always prioritized over chaos (you’d understand this given how the government reacted during the Tiananmen Square incident). And the end of the day, the people can’t really influence what the government is doing and all you can do is to 相信国家 (trust the country i.e. the government) to act in your best interests lol.

But ultimately China needs a set of clearly defined ideology that truly distinguishes itself from Western capitalism like what the USSR did. (There is a reason that despite all its flaws, I still deeply admire the USSR because they genuinely attempted to create a true alternative to capitalism).