YOU CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS...:

[F]or all the successes of the Chinese Communist Party--real and imaginary--Xi Jinping cannot erase the weaknesses of China's system of governance. A year into the coronavirus pandemic that originated as a result of the CCP's mistakes, it is important for the West to study the problems of China's authoritarian system of governance in order to safeguard against dangers it poses in our globalized age. 

Following Xi Jinping's ascent to power, China's course of liberalization came to an end, and the country has been steadily becoming a full-fledged totalitarian regime--albeit "with Chinese characteristics." Modern China is the personification of a techno-dictatorship, as its management of the flow of information is arguably the most sophisticated and effective in the world, rivaled only by George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. Beijing continuously improves its machine of "public opinion guidance" by applying new technologies such as artificial intelligence. A.I.-powered propaganda is executed by the "thought management apparatus," which helps the CCP censor social media, suppress dissenting opinions, and encourage ideologically correct content. As Xi Jinping himself said, China should "explore the application of A.I. for news collection, production, [and] dissemination... to comprehensively increase [our] ability to lead [public] opinion". 

China's unique ability to manipulate public opinion and online discourse was demonstrated during the coronavirus crisis, as secret directives and official memos of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) obtained by ProPublica and the New York Timesshow. For example, following the news of the death of Li Wenliang, a doctor who warned about the new viral outbreak and was subsequently silenced by the authorities, CAC ordered "social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages," and "activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion."  Officials in one county boasted that their efforts "effectively eliminat[ed] city residents' panic," while one district reported that its 1,500 "cybersoldiers" were surveilling closed chat groups on WeChat.

In this essay, I argue that the knowledge problem of dictatorships is the reason why authoritarian regimes like China engage in propaganda and spread disinformation within their countries. First, I outline the "knowledge problem" faced by all societies as defined by Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek, as well as the differences in the approaches of democracies and dictatorships to overcoming it. Second, I take a look at the history of dictatorships' failures resulting from incomplete knowledge. Finally, I analyze state-sponsored propaganda as an answer to the knowledge problem. 

Paradoxically, complete control of information space does not necessarily translate into effective governance. In dictatorships--and totalitarian regimes in general--there is a significant discrepancy between the regime's understanding of reality and the actual state of affairs because the transmission of information from local authorities to the center is highly inefficient. State-sponsored disinformation cannot wholly overcome the knowledge problem--lack of awareness of the circumstances shaping social processes--because the transmission and analysis of information in centralized societies are problematic, even if public opinion and human actions are shaped and controlled by the government. This is the inherent problem of centralized regimes that, for all the boasting of the Chinese propaganda, Xi Jinping cannot ignore. Unless China returns to the path of liberalization, the country's future may look very different from the CCP's optimistic vision.

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