So I promised a thread on this from @SamoBurja.

What's missing from the tech articles and Western reporting is a mental framework for how governance works (or don't) in the Chinese government. It means mass surveillance like remains an ambitious goal.

Let's begin: https://twitter.com/SamoBurja/status/1317538257509470208

So Chinese governance since liberalisation (post 1990s) can be framed as "fragmented authoritarianism"(Lieberthal 2004).

It is not a monolith.

There's competing fractions horizontally between different provinces, different bureaus, standing committees etc.

There's bargaining between different levels - from national to province to prefecture etc. Below is an example of what needs to happen to pass laws on renewable energy.

It's a lot. But China's a lot at 1.4bn people.

Samo refers to fractals in empires, this is a prime example.

There's a lot of implications from this. But at a minimium, there's no unified control and there's a lot of silos in Chinese governance.

Any software platform that gets implemented will have to successfully navigate across all of these to work.

If you've had any experience implementing enterprise software that aims to provide 'a single source of truth', you'll get what I'm trying to say here.

It is a sisyphus task and generally doesn't work. Or just in patches.

In my time in China so far with Covid, every different province has their own health QR code and record keeping (some records are still on paper given the shallowness of digitisation for a low of workflows.)

These QR health codes don't talk to eachother, nor the regions much.

Mass surveillance software architecture needs to be underpinned by some fundamentals like mass digitalisation of records and a unified data lake for starters.

That’s not really where China’s at right now. (like read my SaaS article)

I know the story of limited implementation and capabilities because of structure silos is definitely not as sexy as 'mass surveillance authoritarian state'.

What can I say, the Chinese gov is run by humans, and software can't bridge all humans limitations.