That makes me think about the China of my childhood.
I grew up in the social environment of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The education of ordinary people and the level of civic development were nothing like what they are today.
My childhood impressions of society were often deeply negative: ignorance, greed, petty cunning, narrow-minded habits, and all kinds of rural beliefs that now seem extremely backward.
But looking back, much of the Communist Party messaging I heard as a child was actually quite interesting.
For example:
‘If you want to get rich, build roads first.’
There was also family planning, tree planting, and the idea of rejuvenating the nation through science and education.
When I turned on the television as a child, I often found agricultural programmes teaching farmers, day after day, how to farm scientifically and use new techniques.
At the time, none of this seemed remarkable.
Only after arriving in the Philippines did I suddenly realize:
For decades, the Communist Party was continuously teaching an entire society how to modernize.
It was not merely building roads.
It was raising the foundational capacity of the whole society.
And this was not the work of one administration serving five years. Several generations of leaders kept reinforcing the same direction.
There is an important distinction here:
The fact that something is propaganda does not necessarily mean its content is false.
Modern states inevitably shape certain social norms.
‘If you want to get rich, build roads first’ was addressed both to ordinary people and to local officials:
What does development mean?
Not political slogans, but roads, electricity, schools, industry, and higher incomes.
When a message like that persists for decades, it creates a powerful organizational culture.
A county chief, whatever his other flaws, knows that his record is expected to include investment, roads, industry, GDP, and employment.
That has effectively become the organization’s default objective function.
Over time I came to think that the Chinese Communist Party resembles a company.
At the beginning there was a group of founders.
They did not initially know how to manage a country of such scale.
They experimented, made mistakes, and gradually developed their own management system.
The Mao era was, of course, an extreme case.
An ideology like communism can easily be used by figures such as Mao Zedong or Fidel Castro as an instrument of extreme politics.
China’s good fortune was that, after Mao’s death, it did not remain captive to that extreme ideology.
Beginning with Deng Xiaoping, China became highly pragmatic.
It does not matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
Use whatever works.
So although China still calls itself a socialist country, in practice it has patched the system countless times.
It retained certain socialist elements while also using markets, capital, foreign investment, and private enterprise.
To me, this looks very much like a startup continuously iterating its management model as it grows.
The company analogy is highly explanatory.
The Mao era resembles a founder-dominated organization.
The founder’s personal authority could override even the organization itself.
The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution both revealed an extreme form of founder risk:
The paramount leader could bypass normal organizational mechanisms and even mobilize the public to destroy the bureaucracy he himself had built.
After reform and opening, one of the most important changes was institutionalization.
Many of the political arrangements developed under Deng can be understood as the Party’s answer to one question:
How do we prevent another Mao Zedong?
Cadre retirement, collective leadership, technocratic administration, policy pilots, local experimentation, and the principle that ‘practice is the sole criterion of truth’ all bear traces of that organizational learning.
That makes me think of another question.
Perhaps even if Lee Kuan Yew had occupied Mao’s position, China would not necessarily have become a ‘Singapore writ large.’
Without Mao’s disastrous experimentation, the Party itself might never have truly paid the price.
It might never have developed an immune system against the far left and the primacy of ideology.
It was precisely because the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution devastated the Party itself that its members finally understood:
We must never take this road again.
I think that judgment has considerable explanatory power.
The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were disasters not only for Chinese society; they inflicted deep trauma on the Party itself.
Many of the officials who later returned to power had personally been victims of those political movements.
The reformers did not learn from a textbook that Maoist governance was flawed.
They were the experimental data.
That does not mean the disasters were therefore worthwhile.
But from the perspective of organizational learning, catastrophe can produce institutional immunity.
What was unusual about China was this:
The organization lived through the catastrophe without collapsing along with it.
It was therefore able to preserve the organization while changing how it operated.