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Comment by joelwilliamson | Hacker News Reader

China is also quite decentralized. The provinces have an enormous amount of power to resist central government demands to do things they don't want to do. Look at how much trouble they are having trying to crack down on highly polluting power and industrial plants. If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen.

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Both are true. The provinces can get away with murder as long as they don’t attract the attention of the central committee. But as long as Beijing is focused on something, they’ll get it. The attention is however always fleeting, preventing them from solving long term problems like that.

>>If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen.

What if the Party wants something what will happen? Not sure 100% about China, but in such systems you either go with the flow or...best case scenario you'll get audited, Chinese style.

The Party is decentralized as well - the distinction between state and party institutions is fuzzy in the Chinese system.

I bet to an outsider the US government probably looks pretty coherent too, one could say "What if the US Government wants something to happen?" and you'd understand what they meant.

But the US Senate has political parties, and heck, even our political parties have various factions.

And I'm sure the Party has its own factions as well, and they play the political game that humans play in order to arrive at some semblance of a story we can tell.

(Granted it also seems to me that the CCP is more unified, but I don't know if it's actually true or if it's because all of their arguments happen behind closed doors.)

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