i think you don't understand how china works. for the entirety of its history, it has been a gigantic country with a ton of people making it impossible for a central government to micromanage everything and forcing them to delegate to local managers, who often end up being corrupt and lying to the government to save face. it was like that before and it's still like this now. it's why they had one last famine in the 50s-60s.
Canada