The pains of being a patron of a Chinese state monopoly had never been more keenly felt: back when I was living in Beijing in the early 2010s, the speed of my phone’s internet connection was positively glacial. I called my service provider China Unicom to complain.

“You’re welcome to call this number as often as you like to grumble about the slow connection. When management hears from enough disgruntled customers, perhaps they will deal with the problem,” a lady who staffed the company’s complaint lines told me matter-of-factly.

It’s not like I could take my business elsewhere. I had bought my mobile in Hong Kong; China Unicom had the exclusive rights to claim people with such phones as clients. So, if I didn’t use China Unicom, I wouldn’t be able to use my device in mainland at all.

But at least with China Unicom I could get myself online. In Beijing, where in some residential buildings people only had the choice of one internet service provider (a state-owned one, of course), a friend who worked from home sometimes had to - along with everyone who lived in her building - put up with periodic internet outages that could last for as long as half a day.

I can therefore immediately see the merits of exiled mainland economist Cheng Xiaonong’s (程曉農) recent criticism of Warren Buffet. At this year’s Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meeting, Buffet predicted heady days ahead for China’s economy, citing as proof of its strength the increasing number of Chinese companies earning a place in the “Top 20” list of the world’s most valuable companies. Buffet added he expects more and more Chinese firms to attain the same stature in the coming three decades.

Cheng cautions against using company financials as the sole basis for making forecasts for China, however. He takes notes of an aberration: among the 20 companies with the largest market capitalization in the world, four are Chinese: China Mobile, ICBC, Alibaba and Tencent. Of these four, two are state-owned - all the remaining 18 companies in the list are private companies.

There’s no way China Mobile and ICBC should be discussed in the same breadth as western behemoths like Apple and Google, according to Cheng. For their massiveness is due to Beijing’s coddling and not to the business acumen of their leaders.

“In a country as vastly populated as China, if everyone has to use your services and you become large as a result, you haven’t proved your operation is successful. All you have proved is you have enjoyed the backing of a regime that controls the world’s largest population.”

As for Chinese private enterprises, they are unlike their western counterparts in many ways as well.

“Earlier this year, the founder of Alibaba had his listing plan thrown out of the window by Beijing. He is also widely rumored to be prohibited from leaving China. If you buy Alibaba on Buffett’s recommendation, you’ll almost certainly lose money this time next year,” Cheng said.

Cheng thinks Buffett’s ignorance of the economic history of communist countries has a hand in leading him to draw the wrong conclusions about China.

“After World War Two, the Soviet economy enjoyed a period of spectacular growth, in large part due to the technology it got from the US and Germany. At that time, western economists who didn’t understand the nature of totalitarian governments were convinced the USSR would exceed the US in economic might one day. They weren’t aware that the gains a command economy manages to make - the result of an unnatural allocation of resources - aren’t sustainable in the long run.”

Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not uncommon for western universities to use pro-Soviet western economic textbooks, the most (in)famous one being Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson’s best-selling “Economics” (over 4 million copies sold and translated into 41 languages). In his book’s first edition (published in 1961), Samuelson proclaimed “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” He also predicted that the USSR’s GDP would overtake the US’s in 23- 36 years. In the 1980 edition of his book, Samuelson still thought this scenario would materialize, only that this time, he thought the USSR would hit the milestone in 2002 - 2012.

Last month, Civil Human Rights Front convener Figo Chan (陳皓桓) was sitting in the dock waiting to be sentenced for unlawful assembly when he saw a little girl approaching the defendant’s box holding a paper boat “Are we all doomed, embarking on a sinking boat?” (“咁大鑊喇，大家一齊搭沉船”) Chan blurted out. Laughter arose in the public gallery. I wasn’t there, but how urgent was my desire to tell Chan and all the others detained for their belief in the cause of freedom: it’s actually possible that it’s the CCP sycophants in Hong Kong who are on a sinking boat, because the sway CCP holds over the Chinese people and the world may not be as strong as it makes out. The reality is a weakening mainland economy will increasingly undermine the regime’s ability to make people and countries become beholden to it. I’m already placing a bet on this. This is one reason why you can still see me writing honestly.

(Michelle Ng (吳若琦) is an independent bilingual writer based in Hong Kong.

Her blog is https://michellengwritings.com, and she can be reached at [email protected])

Michelle Ng’s article can be found in our Columnist section.

We invite you to join the conversation by submitting columns to our opinion section: [email protected]

Apple Daily reserves the right to refuse, abridge, alter or edit guest opinion columns for accuracy, length, clarity, and style, and the right to withdraw and withhold columns based on the discretion of our editorial page editors.

The opinions of the writers do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial board.

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play