Economist, Dec 15, 2018 (I)

choi

(1) Synthetic drugs | Too Many Cooks. Westerners once flooded China with opium. Chinese labs are returning the favour.
(most of paragraph 1: "WHEN POLICE raided an apartment used by a chemicals exporter in the northern city of Xingtai just over a year ago, they found a team of English-speaking saleswomen hired to advertise illegal wares on foreign websites. Last month their boss was among nine people who pleaded guilty in a Chinese court to producing and mailing narcotics to America. The drugs included fentanyl, a potent opioid painkiller that has killed tens of thousands of people. The investigation began with a tip-off from American police, who were investigating one of the gang's customers"

(2) Free exchange | The Lives of the Parties; China's economy is more Soviet than you think.
https://www.economist.com/financ ... ives-of-the-parties

Quote:

"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, formed five years after the Russian revolution of 1917, came apart at age 69 [1922-1991]. At 69 [also], the People's Republic of China seems destined for world domination. Yet the Soviet economy seemed modern and dynamic once. China's gdp per person, at purchasing-power parity, remains below that in the Soviet Union on the eve of its collapse [CIA and all others said so, but after collapse of Soviet Union, all threw out the window data on Soviet Union].

"In the first half of the 20th century the population of the Soviet Union remained largely rural, and industrialisation was far less advanced than in western Europe. By moving its people to cities and placing them in factories filled with Western technologies, the Soviets made up economic ground without relying on markets and private capital.  The results were striking—for a time. Official Soviet data exaggerated the economy's performance, but work by CIA analysts and other economists points to robust growth in the 1950s, with real output per person rising by nearly 6% annually. In the 1960s it grew by a slower but still solid 3%. In the 1961 edition [Economics, an Introductory Analysis, 5th ed; 1st ed in 1948; last ed 2009] of his seminal economics textbook, Paul Samuelson [1915–2009; with MIT; a Keynesian], a Nobel-prizewinning American economist, predicted that the Soviet economy would be larger than America's by the 1990s. When Nikita Khrushchev told the West 'We will bury you,' the threat seemed credible.  But flaws became increasingly apparent in the 1970s. * * * By the 1980s productivity was declining [negative growth] (see chart).

"The benefits of capital accumulation (saving to fund factories, equipment and so on) fall over time unless new productive uses for capital can be found [: generally speaking for economics]. * * * But firms in market economies had more freedom and incentive to experiment with new technologies. Resources could flow more easily from stagnant firms to promising ones. Every aspect of the Soviet economy was directed by central planners, who could not replicate these dynamics.

"The best is nyet to come[:] The effects are malign. * * * More worrying, the contribution to growth from capital accumulation is higher now than it was in the 1980s or 1990s, and productivity makes less of a contribution. Indeed, productivity is actually declining, and at an increasing pace, according to recent work by Harry Wu [伍暁鷹 [which is kanji; male] and David Liang 梁涛 of Hitotsubashi University 一橋大学 [[rivate; at Tokyo] in Japan. Unpublished estimates by Mr Wu suggest that in 2016 total factor productivity, or the contribution to growth not accounted for by the addition of labour and capital, dropped back to levels last seen in the early 1990s. The problem is the same as that which plagued the Soviet Union: capital, directed by political interests, piling up in inefficient parts of the economy.  The work by Mr Wu and Mr Liang suggests that improving productivity in the information-technology sector has been China's saving grace [中国の経済成長における情報通信技術（ICT）の役割: 論文; 役割 = role].

"China is not on the verge of collapse. In the 1980s the Soviets were burdened by sinking oil prices {Soviets produced and sold oil] and soaring defence spending. * * * But the [Chinese] Communist Party's interests still trump those of the private sector. There is no easy way to relax that constraint—or, perhaps, to avert a slide into stagnation.

Note:
(a)
(i) the life of the party, or
the life and soul of the party (idiom): "someone who is energetic and funny and at the centre of activity during social occasions"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org ... d-soul-of-the-party
(ii) 白桦, 新民调：越来越多的俄罗斯人怀恋苏联. VOA Chinese, Dec 22, 2018
https://www.voachinese.com/a/Nos ... 181222/4712092.html
("列瓦达民调中心刚刚发表的一份报告说，越来越多的俄罗斯人对苏联解体感到遗憾，怀恋苏联的情绪达到了最近 [14] 年来的最高水平。  民调结果显示，几乎所有年龄段的俄罗斯人现在都怀恋苏联。55岁以上的人最怀恋苏联 * * * 那些在苏联解体后出生，根本没有见过苏联的18-24岁年龄段的人中，最近两年来，怀恋苏联的情绪也在迅速增长")
(b) The sectional heading "The best is nyet to come" is a wordplay on the English idiom "The best is yet to come."  The "nyet" is English spelling for Russian "no."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nyet
(c) "The effects are malign"

The truth is I can not tell the difference among malign, malicious, malignant and malevolent, nor can I find it in the Web.