China moves up the value chain, to advanced manufacturing and increasingly frontier technology. Why the U.S. still claims to favor free markets.
Since the Asian Financial Crisis, China and Western economies have followed sharply diverging paths in the relationship between finance and the real economy. As Peter Nolan argues in Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), China has consistently deployed finance to support infrastructure, production, employment, and productivity, … Read more
The United States currently leads in frontier AI research and innovation, yet it faces persistent challenges in system-level deployment and large-scale integration. These constraints stem not from technological limitations but from structural factors, including decades of manufacturing hollowing, fragmented governance, and weak coordination across public and private actors. As a result, the U.S. often lacks … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade (2007) and Kicking Away the Ladder (2002), Ha-Joon Chang challenges the conventional narrative that wealth is built through strict adherence to free-market principles. He argues that historically, rich countries became prosperous not by following liberal economic rules but by actively intervening in their economies—through tariffs, protectionism, subsidies, … Read more
Debates over whether China’s development path is historically aberrant often overlook a well-documented pattern of late industrialization. As Ha-Joon Chang argues in Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), China’s strategies—state intervention, selective protectionism, subsidies, and the copying or weak protection of foreign technologies—closely mirror those once employed … Read more
In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that China produced approximately 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, far exceeding India’s 2.6 million and the United States’ 568,000. This vast output of technical talent translates directly into industrial capability: by 2024, China had become the world’s largest market for industrial robotics, accounting for 54 percent of global … Read more
In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that China produced approximately 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, compared with 2.6 million in India and about 568,000 in the United States. This scale of STEM output is not incidental; it underpins China’s strength in engineering-intensive sectors and helps explain outcomes such as its dominance in industrial robotics, … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang argues that the economic histories of today’s advanced nations follow a recurring and often obscured pattern. Countries such as Germany and Japan began with industries widely stigmatized for low quality, then relied on protectionist policies, state support, and … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang dismantles a set of long-standing Western claims that attributed the economic failures of countries such as Korea, Japan, and China to so-called “Confucian values.” These explanations portrayed Confucianism as inherently hostile to innovation, entrepreneurship, and modern economic organization, … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang offers both direct and indirect critiques of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, challenging not only Weber’s specific claims but also the broader tendency to treat cultural morality as the definitive explanation for capitalism’s … Read more
The hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing has reduced the availability of large-scale, real-world application scenarios, constraining the translation of technological advances into broad operational deployment. In contrast, China has pursued a “new type of whole-nation system” that concentrates resources on strategic bottlenecks—such as semiconductors, industrial software, and aero-engines—while advancing domestic substitution through tightly coordinated ecosystems. … Read more