Nice note from BlackRock: Outside China, the key question is whether companies use Chinese technology or compete against it. Cheaper Chinese industrial robots and machinery can boost productivity and ease labor shortages for their customers. For rival producers, the economics are less appealing. European machinery…
Read the note →Yuen Yuen Ang is one of the most thoughtful commentators on all things China, and everything she writes—including her books—is a must-read if you wish to understand the phenomenon that is China. She just made her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, free and openly downloadable.
As I’ve mentioned, I have an enduring fascination with China, and much of what I know about it is informed by the mental models and heuristics from Yuen Yuen Ang’s work. I highly recommend downloading the book and reading it.
Crazy!
Another example of why Twitter, for all its flaws, is still one of the best places to follow thoughtful discussions about important issues. They can be raucous, messy, and often contentious, but that’s also part of what makes the place interesting.
This thread, and the various threads branching off from it, with Dean Ball, Philippe Lemoine, Rohit Krishnan, Paul Novosad among others, debating the attitudes of U.S. elites towards AI is a good example. It’s the kind of intellectually rich discussion that’s hard to find elsewhere.
What is this? A rambling, status-post-shaped voice note. How sure am I? Reasonably sure about the broad argument. Much less sure about how the technology, economics and geopolitics will unfold from here. Disclosure: I dictated most of this into ChatGPT and used it heavily to clean up the voice notes, organise the post…
Read the note →
Whethet you agree with or not Glenn always has interesting perspectives on China. I always learn something from his tweets: “China has gotten ‘pretty good’ at developing its economy” is something that many people are clearly loathe to admit. That is why many seem to gravitate towards flawed, simplistic macro-based…
Read the note →It’s China’s world and the rest of us are living in it. One of the persistent stories of the last decade has been the relentless rise in Chinese exports and what that’s done to everyone else. Arvind Subramanian, the former chief economic adviser, has been making a version of this argument at the Peterson Institute. His…
Read the note →Interesting paper from Ken Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang:
Despite these parallels, China is not Japan. The structure of leverage differs: Japan’s crisis centred on private banks and corporations, whereas China’s vulnerabilities are more concentrated in local governments and state-linked entities. China also retains greater administrative capacity to postpone loss recognition and prevent outright financial sector collapse.
China also has other advantages that Japan lacked. Productivity growth remains stronger, and China sits near the global frontier in several fast-growing sectors, including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and more recently, artificial intelligence. These factors may help prevent a full-scale replication of Japan’s stagnation.
But the differences cut both ways. China is ageing faster than Japan did in the 1990s, and as a still-developing country, it lacks Japan’s extensive social safety net. Moreover, newer growth engines, no matter how dynamic, are still small relative to real estate and infrastructure. Rapidly shifting from one export-led boom to another is unlikely to substitute fully for a domestic demand shortfall in an economy of China’s size.
Interesting paper on the success of China’s solar industry: China’s solar success gives hope for industrial policy, but it cannot necessarily be replicated in all sectors. Part of the success is likely because solar is a relatively young, high-tech industry, with more opportunities for learning than a more mature…
Read the note →Chinese people aren’t worried about AI:
Driverless taxis roam more than a dozen Chinese cities, and service robots putter through hotels and restaurants. Chinese tech companies have rolled out medical chatbots to help users avoid long lines at hospitals. They’ve embedded A.I. assistants throughout popular apps, so users can ask A.I. in their mapping apps to help them decide where to eat, or in their shopping apps to help them choose between pairs of shoes.
That’s because Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.
In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)
💯 China is quite aggressive and territorially self-aggrandising in its immediate backyard, but restrained beyond. Even occasional border skirmishes with India are basically fought with sticks and stones. Outside of the military build up triggered by the US during MAGA 1.0, China is not interested in projecting power…
Read the note →No matter how much you read about China, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the fact that they’re dominant across so many different industries. It’s even crazier that Western companies are being forced to go hat in hand begging for their technology. What a stunning reversal of fortunes. It was China that was…
Read the note →I was reading this article by Kyle Chan on the great reversal in technological dominance. Until recently, the West was the undisputed leader across “all” technologies, but now the tables have turned. China is now the top dog across a whole range of industries from EVs, solar, AI, robotics to pharma that Western…
Read the note →
The reason could be that when you are powerful, people take note only when that power falters. The world was hardly impressed when Trump went on his tariff rampage; what struck people was when China successfully fought back. America demonstrated stunning military power in Venezuela but it was also expected; what people have noticed is Russia’s military failure in Ukraine.
People also notice who envies whom. And it is no secret that Trump envies China; and that to his chagrin the envy goes unrequited. The US president fantasises about the scope of China’s industrial power, so much that he now practices state capitalism Chinese-style. It is as if Trump has lost trust in his country’s political and economic system. As the saying goes, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and now it is Washington imitating Beijing.
Thoughtful piece by Robert Wright parsing out the inconsistencies in the opinions of various factions that opposite selling advanced NVIDIA chips to China: The grave dangers AI safety hawks worry about can’t be adequately addressed without extensiveo international cooperation—cooperation tight enough to qualify as…
Read the note →The scale at which China is operating and the foresight they have is amazing: Beijing also is building a national innovation system — linking academia, industry and defense — designed to bolster China’s military and technological strength. In recent years, dozens of China’s top 60 universities have established an…
Read the note →From this post that’s overflowing with potential rabbit holes. Also pay attention to the beautiful framing of things-brilliant writing:
Han Byung-Chul says that ritual is repetition without purpose, a way of founding community through shared uselessness. Performance seeks applause; ritual seeks duration. In the performance culture of the West, even grief must be productive, posted, monetised. In the ritual culture of the East, continuity is its own defence: the temple rebuilt, the porcelain recast, the festival repeated until memory becomes weather. Between them stands the modern remainder—too connected to vanish, too surplus to command.
1. The illusion of knowledge
2. AI capex boom
3. China and weaponized interdependence