China: Evil Geniuses or Retards?

An outside observer can't tell if governments around the world are evil geniuses pushing a larger agenda, or if they're retarded. I find it hard to believe they're all retarded, so think there must be a larger agenda at play, but that might just be completely wrong.

China is disrupting its own economy, and at the same time disrupting western countries who shipped manufacturing there over recent decades so executives could get paid more. China is also curb stomping its own population, who seem to be meek and submissive to the point where they prefer suicide to conflict. China is killing or causing the starvation of household pets to "fight covid". There are videos of people jumping out of apartment windows to "escape" the oppression of their shitty government. After that oppression are people going to support their government?

China has a really bad track record with its central planning. One of the best examples of that is killing all the sparrows to increase crop yields in the 1950s. They ended up lowering yields because bugs ate all the crops. I think governments are good at appearing to be authoritative, but they're actually very bad at accomplishing anything useful.

China's covid strategy might just be totally stupid rather than part of a larger plan.