While Western governments reacted to the global pandemic by sending cash payments to households— in the United States, three rounds totaling $3,200– Beijing gave little financial support to people. It offered only meager increases to unemployment insurance, which only a fraction of the millions of unemployed workers were able to claim.

Beijing decided instead that the best way it could help workers was to get them back to work. In practice, it meant assisting companies to restart production rather than sending cash to households. It did that with its pursuit of the zero-Covid strategy, which involved taking drastic action to seal the country off from foreign travelers and imposing protracted lockdowns wherever it detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Engineering only works if it is using good data. But data probity is another of China’s casualties in the aftermath of Covid. The government has had a wobbly commitment to accurate reporting at the best of times. After the pandemic, the government has more regularly succumbed to the temptation not to share bad news.

Engineers are bad at several things. They’re not very good, for example, at producing appealing cultural products.

During the height of the pandemic, Xi declared that China needs to become more “loveable.” The country’s image had suffered as people around the world blamed China for the spread of the virus.

Food was not the only item to run short during the pandemic in the United States. Many different items were hard to find: furniture, semi-conductors, personal protective equipment. The Chinese government and Chinese companies tend, on average, to maintain greater stockpiles of different goods so they have better resilience. The American corporate dictum is that “inventory is evil.” Although having spare capacity hurts various profit measures of Chinese firms, especially its state-owned enterprises, they are better able to leap into action in any crisis. A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have if there is another pandemic— or a war.

Gupta also demonstrated another tendency that helps keep success from leading to overconfidence: being tough-minded about situational factors that contributed, such as a bull market lifting virtually all boats. When reflecting on the great results of his first few years, Gupta shared, “We had fixed a lot of the fundamentals, but I got lucky, because China opened up in 2010. For the first time, the Chinese Central Bank allowed Chinese companies to go to the financial markets of Hong Kong and Singapore” for funds and trading activity.