China’s Industrial Ascent

China moves up the value chain, to advanced manufacturing and increasingly frontier technology. Why the U.S. still claims to favor free markets.

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Why Zhang Weiying’s Anti-Industrial Policy View Is Outdated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

The West’s China Illusion: Missionary Modernity Meets Reality

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Why the West Cannot Decide What China Is The West’s long-standing effort to reshape China reflects a basic misreading of China’s developmental trajectory and reform logic. For decades, Western policymakers, academics, and elites have viewed China not as a civilizational peer pursuing its own path, but as an incomplete or delayed version of the West—one … Read more

The Power of Fabricated Beliefs in Human History

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Throughout history, human societies have relied on myths, narratives, and symbolic stories to build shared beliefs, inspire ambitions, and explain historical events. These stories often simplify complex realities, overstate the contributions of individuals or nations, and overlook structural, social, or economic factors. What matters in these myths is not always their factual accuracy, but the … 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

Why the U.S. Never Gave China a Marshall Plan

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The lack of a Marshall-style reconstruction program for China after World War II was neither accidental nor simply the result of Kuomintang (KMT) corruption or administrative failure. Rather, it reflected deliberate strategic choices shaped by U.S. priorities, racialized perceptions, fears of Chinese nationalism, and the short-term logic that guided early Cold War policymaking. From Washington’s … Read more