The Chinese government's firm hand on their country's economic reins can be beneficial in some circumstances,

like when you need to goose the value of your currency

or instruct businesses to do more of some things, less of others.

Other governments have levers they can pull and buttons they can push

to accomplish roughly the same thing,

but those mechanisms are typically at least somewhat removed from the actual variables they want to tweak to accomplish that change.

More hands-off and indirect manipulation.

The Chinese government, on the other hand, can say jump, and most business leaders will clamor to be the first to ask how high.

And that's mostly because the government has the ability to

run them out of business, imprison their CEOs and other leadership, take away all their money,

the businesses, but also those running the businesses, their personal wealth, and generally

make life difficult or impossible for anyone who doesn't tow the line. As a consequence of this dynamic,

the Chinese government is generally able to set the tone of their economy

using an upgraded version of top-down concepts

that were used more clumsily by earlier authoritarian governments,

like those of the Soviet Union.

China's top-down setup interacts more

cleanly with the rest of the world, and their direct involvement basically just gives

them more levers to pull and buttons to push. Those mechanisms plugged directly into

the relevant variables, rather than those mechanisms being separated from those who wish to tweak

them by several protective layers of other people and organizations and regulations.

These tools haven't always been used heavy-handedly, but the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has been especially enthusiastic in utilizing them to rewire the Chinese economy to better suit his idea of how things should function.

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