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There's even a case to be made that those policies actually depressed the manufacturing share of GDP: by boosting output and capacity above where they would have been otherwise, subsidies probably contributed to the sustained decline in prices for China's manufactured goods over the past few years, weighing on their share of nominal output.
Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality
Why don't Chinese dragons look like Mexican dragons or equivalent thunderbirds or whatever? Well, because it probably wasn't influencing them. If they were all seeing the same skeleton, they'd probably all produce the same kind of mythical animals.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
On this measure, state capacity at the local level looks much stronger in China than in India, which helps explain some of the long-running economic differences between them.
China does much better in basic service delivery-and its local governments have also played a very obvious and important in driving growth, thanks to the competition and experimentation among local officials driven to develop their jurisdictions.
In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
One interesting point is that, in China, you ask the companies to innovate first, and then you regulate after, right? So, that has led to things like P2P platforms. It’s led to lots of kind of financial innovations, some of which has actually been very helpful and good, some of which had been disastrous, but the intention to regulate after the fact is to really not slow down or hinder the innovation. This is a very different approach from Europe. You regulate first, and then companies have to work around that.
Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.
And what’s more, you use your leverage once, and that leverage has a half-life. It becomes a lot less effective the second time around because other countries, other companies are going to try to substitute away. If China uses the rare earth leverage, which I think it is now a little bit, there will be alternatives and substitutes.
Maybe on the good side, it’s actually a golden age for Chinese women because the Chinese girls never had as much education investment apportioned to them as they’ve had after being the only child in the family. And you raised a daughter like a son. And if we look at all the skill gaps and the education gaps and the returns to education, actually girls fared better.
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again.
But this great system that united, it's called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.
r1, a Chinese model, is very capable and free to use, but is missing a few features from the other companies and it is not clear that they will keep up in the long term.
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.
One is ByteDance, arguably is the largest smuggler of GPUs for China. China's not supposed to have GPUs. ByteDance has over 500,000 GPUs. Why? Because they're all rented from companies around the world.
But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly.
if you believe we're in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we've been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term.
So there is an angle of, the US' actions, from the angle of the expert controls, have been so inflammatory at slowing down China's progress on the leading edge that they've turned around and have accelerated their progress elsewhere because they know that this is so important.
There's not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.
AI competition needs to be tempered with a recognition that China isn’t going away as a player in AI, and that coexistence must also be a part of America’s strategy.
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
if you want a very good all-around model with excellent reasoning. As an open model, you can either use it hosted on the original Chinese DeepSeek site or from a number of local providers.
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.
The Broken Ice (China) 3.2 A few decades ago, I would have been more impressed by this film, which is roughly in the style of Jia Zhangke. Now it seems a bit derivative.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
If a Chinese spacecraft can dock with a friendly satellite to refuel, repair, or transport it, the same robotic arm can also disable a US satellite’s solar panels and antennas. Alternatively, China can use these spacecraft to tow satellites into locations where they can, at best, only sub-optimally perform intended duties such as early warning, surveillance, or geolocation.
Based on public commercial data that tells a lot about the military potential of these dual-use robotic spacecraft, we have shown that China can manufacture and deploy 200 such spacecraft as early as 2026, enough to cripple critical US satellites in geosynchronous, highly elliptical, and other orbits, and thus severely degrading space support to wartime operations.
Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.
As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.
Though companies are relocating production to India and Vietnam, China is going to remain the world’s largest manufacturer for many more years to come.
A lot of people think that to make deterrence work, you have to be able to beat the Chinese and therefore, you need a much bigger military. And I don't think over time that's possible. I think it's probably not even possible now to beat the Chinese in a war over Taiwan or in a war in the South China Sea.
The Chinese are my kind of people. They're realists, right? They speak my language. It's the United States that is not very realist. American leaders have a very powerful liberal bent and tend not to see the world in realist terms.
Yes, China has been very clear that they’ll incorporate Taiwan peacefully or militarily, but that they will incorporate it from their standpoint is 100% likely.
My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.
Their words now
What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.
David Graff's Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 is actually a political-institutional history of China from 200 AD-1000 AD, and is probably the best political narrative history we have for the time period.
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