Yes, China is a patently dysfunctional society. This is what I can say as person whose life and career depends on it, and who actually lived there.
I'd say the "good" performance of Chinese state looks like that only in comparison to catastrophically bad showing from Western nations.
20 year ago, I would've said that what China did after the monumental screw up at the start, would've been an expected level of response from an upstanding Western nation. Now, the West can not do the same what it could've done 20 years ago easily. That's the only message for that particular point.
Is Chinese society a healthy, functioning society? No, but at least critical parts are still coasting on inertia from the time China had half sane political leadership.
Is the West a healthy, functioning society? Some things there work, but the most important, critical parts are failing in broad daylight, and people don't damn care.
I heard even most hardcore communists starting to question Xi's mandate to rule now, and how much such a weak leader is costing them.
What I heard myself was pretty much a question "What if it was a war?"
Were Xi to hide in a bunker when the military can't do anything without his explicit approval, they would've been screwed.
* demonstrate failure by business and political leadership in the US to be science-based, humanitarian * counter the emerging anti-Asian sentiment
Agree that my last statement could have been more productive.
Why we had to wait until a crisis like this for this to be rendered bare for the wider population?
As I've said countless times before, the West has been on the downward trajectory for a very long time, both as a society, and as state entities.
What I call an "ultrapopulism" has been an ever growing trend in the West since around mid-nineties.
The Western nations are not just weak as societies, and nations, they are diseased (sorry for having to use this word now.)
The reasons for me moving from comfy life in the West to China is not because I so much enjoyed it, but for me having a realisation that this accelerating downward trend will have very real consequences in my lifetime, and that even money alone no longer favours the West.