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