Shanghai sets population at 25M

These kinds of heavy-handed interventions seem to almost always lead to processes of waste and corruption -- ie so who gets to live in Shanghai? That will be decided by bureaucrats and lawyers which opens up cronyism. By contrast, previously the market provided an efficient, free-to-use, and arguably fair system that allocated the opportunity to whoever was willing to pay for it.

People will say "but they need to tackle pollution, and congestion," and I'm in the Pigouvian camp that it is more fair and economically efficient to tax externalities themselves (the disease) rather than making heavy-handed and arbitrary rules.

Anyways, in China this is not the worst thing their government is doing.

Control over building is extremely common in "the west". It may not be explicitly about population, but limiting population is a common result. Try building a slum in London and see how long it lasts.

They're in a situation where they need to dramatically slow down debt accumulation, which will slow down economic growth a bit faster than otherwise anticipated. It's a whiplash action, going from the growth the last 20 years (in which people were aggressively encouraged to move into the cities) to needing to strictly control that growth and the correlated debt expansion.

Manufacturing stopped net expanding years ago, many of their largest state-corporate manufacturing enterprises are simultaneously loaded to the ceiling with debt and being heavily subsidized to maintain current levels of employment and output.

There is wide discussion about local governments being allowed to go bankrupt, because the debt burdens have gotten so extreme:

"China Central Bank Official Says Bankruptcy May Benefit the Country"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-25/pboc-offi...

China's goal, in theory, is to transition increasingly to a services economy, to provide the next leg of its growth, as manufacturing can't provide that. Service economies grow far slower than the type of manufacturing fill-in-the-slack / join the WTO boom they saw from ~1992-2015. They can no longer afford to keep accumulating debt as they have been since 2007. S&P is forecasting another ~75% increase in their total debt position in just the next five or so years, which would push them to... ~550%-600% debt to GDP ratio (possibly worse when counting all the shadow debt), or nearly twice that of the US. It's untenable to say the least.

Bottom line: China has to start applying the brakes, and that likely means dramatically slowing the migration into the cities. That migration is unsustainable if China has to slow its debt expansion (which it does).

It takes extraordinary perpetual economic expansion to provide enough jobs for all of those people and pay for the infrastructure demands. China's financial reserves haven't kept pace with either their debt or GDP growth, with about 3/4 of those reserves untouchable. Their ability to continue to finance the wild debts that have gone with the local government & infrastructure splurges, is heavily restricted now (if cities like Shanghai or Beijing want to add millions of more people, it'd require continuing to fund all of that while the overall context gets more shaky).

You're setting up a fake strawman that the parent comment never suggested at all.

In no regard did the parent say that politicians in the West are not or are never corrupt, nor did they imply it. They said China's government is corrupt to the core.

Is the snark necessary? Does it add anything to this discussion?