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.

I’ve come to realize that there are many way that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favours manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support. The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks to consumers during the pandemic.

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.

Tritton moved with great speed. Within his first two years, he’d launched eight private-label brands and had seventy stores remodeled. He reported to analysts that they were “performing above plan.” After the first few months of the COVID pandemic when stores were closed, store traffic rebounded well, and as a COVID-fueled boom in the purchase of home goods ensued, the chain enjoyed a strong boost in sales. But, then, in the latter half of Tritton’s second year, sales declined. Although he characterized the slide as “a disruptive moment along our multiyear transformational journey,” the moment turned out to be protracted. Many factors contributed to increasingly dire results for the chain, but among them was that, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Tritton ushered in changes faster than the retailer could build systems to support them.