Industrial Policy

China’s state sets goals, takes risks, and builds scale, while firms compete and innovate—an integrated system the market-driven U.S. struggles to match.

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

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Why Zhang Weiying’s Anti-Industrial Policy View Is Outdated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

Why Low- and Mid-End Manufacturing Reshoring Fails in U.S.

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Drawing on Yi Wen’s The Making of an Economic Superpower and Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans, this essay argues that large-scale U.S. reshoring of low-end and much mid-end manufacturing is neither historically plausible nor structurally efficient. Both authors, through independent but convergent historical analyses, show that industrialization follows a largely one-way … 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

Rare Earth Elements and the Myth of a U.S. Achilles’ Heel

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Rare earth elements are neither truly scarce in nature nor an inherent, singular point of existential weakness for the United States. Their strategic importance instead arises from their role as a high-leverage chokepoint within modern industrial supply chains. The most complex, capital-intensive, and environmentally demanding stages—midstream refining and downstream magnet production—are overwhelmingly concentrated in China. … Read more