Dictators can do many things.
They can hold territory. They can terrorize people, even kill them. They can force our bodies into lives of drudgery and poverty.
What they can’t do is whip people into creativity.
Xi Jinping is betting he can. By controlling what people see and hear, by whipping up patriotic fervor, he thinks he can make China a dominant economy. Many western analysts agree.
He’s wrong. They’re wrong.
This has nothing to do with western investment. It lies in the nature of the 21st century economy. Because money no longer comes out of the ground. It rains down from the clouds. Technology provides added value. That trend is accelerating.
A technology age demands trained, agile, motivated minds. One such mind is worth 1,000 lesser ones. That margin increases daily. Executing a single idea takes hundreds of people, agreeing to be harnessed together, pushing their creativity to its limits.
If you’re to build an economy around creative minds, you must give people what they need to be creative. They must be free. Their motivation must come from within, from the work they’re doing and from achieving personal goals, not corporate goals and not state goals. Creativity can’t be forced from above. If the last half-century of Moore’s Law teaches us anything, it teaches us that.
Western managers condemn “quiet quitting,” employees who only clock in, do only what’s necessary, and don’t go the extra mile. Xi has created 1 billion quiet quitters. If you can’t make money, if you are not allowed to think for yourself, if you’re worried or angry or just tired all the time, you’re not going to go the extra mile. You’re not going to pursue any crazy ideas that might lead to breakthroughs.
Yet that’s the key ingredient to economic growth today. People with crazy ideas, obsessed by their work, creating things that never existed before. Clouds let these inventions scale like TikTok videos. The drudgery of marketing, of office work, of manufacturing provide minimal value. They can all be replaced by software. Creativity can’t be.
Xi is already seeing it. Creative people are abandoning Hong Kong. Students and tourists who go to the West often don’t come back, or they’re changed by the experience. China is a great manufacturing country, but manufacturing can move, and it’s already moving. To Vietnam, to Indonesia, to Thailand, ro Korea and India. What began as cost cutting is accelerating to protect assets.
China is losing its competitive edge, and that won’t return with Xi and his economic assumptions in power. It’s the economy that fuels the military machine. It’s the economy that gives party cadres their luxuries. It’s the economy that needs creative, agile, motivated, free minds to grow.
China is dying inside. Xi doesn’t get it. All the guns and whips in the world can’t create great software.
