“You want entrepreneurs discovering what nobody anticipated, but you want cadres ensuring nothing politically unexpected happens. So it's innovation, please. Surprise, no thank you. … That's not an impossible combination, but it's sure as hell an expensive one.”

…written into tech companies' charters and operations with platform workers instructed to, quote, listen to the party and follow the party, unquote. Not much ambiguity about the desired user experience. My read. The Chinese Communist Party sees an economy generating connections it doesn't fully control, and its answer is to insert itself deeper into the machinery. Understand the contradiction. You want entrepreneurs discovering what nobody anticipated, but you want cadres ensuring nothing politically unexpected happens. So it's innovation, please. Surprise, no thank you. That's not an impossible combination, but it's sure as hell an expensive one. Somebody has to decide when commercial experimentation becomes ideological deviation. Everybody else learns to anticipate that decision. The party calls this cohesion. I call it state interference in business that is doomed to fail. The danger isn't that China suddenly stops innovating. It's that control becomes the…