Chinese puzzle

China’s rise defies the monolithic authoritarian view; its actions reflect politics, economics, history, regional priorities, warning against flawed policy.

Why Industrialization Precedes Democracy in China

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I. The Global Hierarchy Framework: Understanding Structural Position 1. Intellectual Lineages Behind Hierarchical Models of the Global Order Across diverse ideological traditions, major twentieth-century thinkers converged on a strikingly similar diagnosis of the international system: the world economy is structurally stratified. Although they differed in terminology and theoretical foundations, their frameworks share a common architectural … Read more

Why China Must Develop Its Steel Industry Despite Surplus

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The phrase “global steel surplus” sounds straightforward. But steel is not a normal commodity like shoes or smartphones. It is foundational infrastructure, strategic capacity, and industrial DNA. To understand why China continues to develop its steel industry, we need to separate several layers of the issue: I. “Surplus” Is Relative — Global Demand Is Structurally … Read more

When Market Fundamentalism Wakes Up Too Late: Zhang Weiying

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I. The Zhang Weiying–Lin Yifu Debate: A Dispute Frozen in Time 1. A Clash of Perspectives, Not Competence: The Zhang Weiying vs. Lin Yifu Debate The long-standing debate between Zhang Weiying and Lin Yifu, especially their high-profile 2014 academic confrontation at the Yang Xiaokai memorial symposium, is often misconstrued as a battle of intellectual prowess. … Read more

Inside China’s Industrial Policy: Trade-Offs Made Clear

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China’s approach is deliberate, multi-layered, and strategically coordinated over decades, combining long-term planning, financial direction, state involvement, and regional execution. Crucially, it operates with an explicit awareness that unchecked financialization is corrosive, even as structural constraints prevent its full elimination. What distinguishes China is not purity, but active governance of distortion. Planning Against the Pull … Read more

China’s Structural Advantage Over Six Emerging Economies

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In Globalization and National Competition: A Comparative Study of the Seven Emerging Economies (2021), Wen Tiejun argues that China is the only major emerging economy to have secured land, industrial, financial, and state sovereignty prior to deep integration into globalization. By contrast, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, and South Africa entered the global system with … Read more

Germany, Japan, and China Avoided U.S. Industrial Decline

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Across sharply different political systems and historical paths, Germany, Japan, and China share a foundational commitment the United States abandoned:manufacturing is a strategic national system that requires deliberate institutional support, not a residual sector left to market punishment. In each case, capital allocation, labor relations, education and training, and state policy are organized around sustaining … Read more

Why Zhang Weiying’s Anti-Industrial Policy View Is Outdated

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I. Zhang Weiying’s Worldview: Elegance, Coherence, and Its Narrow Frame Zhang Weiying’s critique of industrial policy is not a superficial stance but the product of a highly coherent intellectual synthesis. Drawing on Austrian economics, he emphasizes the radical uncertainty and dispersed knowledge that make centralized planning inherently flawed. Schumpeter’s notion of entrepreneurs as engines of … Read more

Why Party Secretaries in China Are Rarely Marginalized

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I. Why the “Marginalized Party Secretary” Assumption Misreads CCP Power Dynamics A common misunderstanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s internal governance begins with a literal reading of its formal rules. On paper, the CCP emphasizes collective leadership, and the Party Secretary is officially defined as little more than the convener of meetings, without a clearly … Read more

Why China Keeps Discipline Inspection Under Party Leadership

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Drawing on historical experience, patterns of human behavior, and modern governance practice, China’s discipline inspection system represents a conscious institutional design shaped by repeated lessons about the risks of unconstrained oversight. Across imperial dynasties and into the contemporary period, supervisory bodies that operated with excessive independence often developed into rival power centers, distorted normal administration, … Read more

The Role of Public Goods in Driving China’s Industrial Rise

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China’s rapid economic growth was driven not by the triumph of “free markets” but by the deliberate creation of public goods—markets, infrastructure, institutions, coordination mechanisms, and carefully sequenced reforms—by a capable state. As Yi Wen demonstrates in The Making of an Economic Superpower: Unlocking China’s Secret of Rapid Industrialization (2016), China’s government actively engineered these … Read more