The old story of the Chinese general Chen Shen comes to mind: Apparently he was running late due to rainstorms and the penalty for appearing this late to the Qin emperor was execution. Since that’s the same penalty for open rebellion, he decided he might as well try that too. And that was the beginning of the end of the Qin dynasty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_Wu_Guang_uprising

If the penalty for lying and being caught is the same league as screwing up, people are going to cover up problems.

The English idiom for this is "I'd rather be hanged for a sheep than a lamb."

That is to say, if the punishment for any kind of crime is death, no matter how serious or how trivial, you might as well go ahead and commit the much more serious one and try and cover that up instead.

Either way you're fucked, so why not go all in?

> And that was the beginning of the end of the Qin dynasty.

Not what I was expecting, but still a really interesting story.

That's a fascinating story thanks for sharing.

Everybody will always have a motive to prevent others from discovering their failures. A democratically elected politician has just as much reason to want their failures covered up as a CCP member does. The reason governments like the CCP have such a hard time dealing with that issue is that their entire system is set up so that you have one party, with no opposition, all working in concert to conceal the truth from the people. The “voters” have no mechanism to scrutinize their government, and no alternative to “vote” for if they don’t like what they’re doing. A natural consequence of this is that the opacity the CCP relies on to protect itself from scrutiny, also prevents central committee members from being able to effectively scrutinize the system themselves. A good story is always made available for public consumption, but what’s known internally is equally controlled by individual political actors trying to protect their own interests.

This is also why dictatorship always have corruption. They cannot have transparency which means there will be corruption.

Of course democracies are just as vulnerable to all the bad stuff as they are run by humans, but transparency is at least possible. Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.

> Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.

Man it took forever for someone to make this point. There's a lot of bad Chinese Gov behavior that US Gov players absolutely aspire to.

Any organisation, or group, or person who’s granted any power will tend towards trying to accumulate more power. So while your comment is a bit hyperbolic, it’s true of the US government in the same way it’s true of every other government. For any grossly authoritarian policy you see the US government implement, you’ll typically find equivalent policies in Canada and the EU and the UK and Australia...

It’s not a new thing. The (paraphrased) quote “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is at least a couple hundred of years old. In practice however it’s not a very simple proposition at all. People typically agree with endlessly granting government additional powers when it’s for a policy they agree with.

The difference between the US (or France, or Germany, or the UK...) and China however, is that we actually have some mechanisms for holding our government to account (however flawed they might be). Whereas Chinese citizens have none at all.