Chinese puzzle

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

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Why Zhang Weiying’s Anti-Industrial Policy View Is Outdated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

Why Development Fails Without Markets and Sequencing

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Developing countries often fail to industrialize not because they lack potential, institutions, or capacity, but because both the global economic system and domestic policy choices hinder their ability to follow the historical path that enabled nations like Britain, the U.S., Japan, and China to achieve industrialization. As Ha-Joon Chang argues, rich countries impose neo-liberal rules—premature … Read more

Britain Then, China Now: One Industrial Logic at Work

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Yi Wen’s The Making of an Economic Superpower and Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans converge on a single, historically grounded claim: modern industrialization follows a universal and sequential logic. Britain pioneered this process during the Industrial Revolution, while China, after 1978, rediscovered and dramatically compressed it. Despite profound differences in political … Read more

China and Globalization: A Model No One Else Built

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Although most of the world operates primarily under market-based economic systems, China stands out for having leveraged globalization more effectively than any other country. With the world’s largest industrial output, rapid technological progress, and expanding global influence, China has followed a distinctive development path. This path reflects a combination of historical legacies, deliberate policy choices, … Read more