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

What If U.S. Elites Followed CPC Anti-Corruption Rules?

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1. The Thought Experiment: Imagining CPC Anti-Corruption Rules in U.S. Politics The Thought Experiment asks us to imagine transplanting the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) strict anti-corruption and disciplinary regulations into the U.S. political system. These include the Eight-Point Regulation, the “Several Guidelines on Honest and Clean Governance for Leading Cadres,” the “Disciplinary Regulations of … 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Why Zhang Weiying’s Anti-Industrial Policy View Is Outdated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

Why Party Secretaries in China Are Rarely Marginalized

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I. Why the “Marginalized Party Secretary” Assumption Misreads CCP Power Dynamics A common misunderstanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s internal governance begins with a literal reading of its formal rules. On paper, the CCP emphasizes collective leadership, and the Party Secretary is officially defined as little more than the convener of meetings, without a clearly … Read more

Why China Keeps Discipline Inspection Under Party Leadership

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Drawing on historical experience, patterns of human behavior, and modern governance practice, China’s discipline inspection system represents a conscious institutional design shaped by repeated lessons about the risks of unconstrained oversight. Across imperial dynasties and into the contemporary period, supervisory bodies that operated with excessive independence often developed into rival power centers, distorted normal administration, … 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

Being Industrialized Before Democracy: Lessons from Britain

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Britain’s industrialization occurred well before the advent of full democracy, a historical pattern with significant implications for today’s developing countries—especially China—and one that closely echoes Lee Kuan Yew’s economic-first approach to nation-building. Drawing on insights from Yi Wen (The Making of an Economic Superpower, 2016) and Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans, 2007; Kicking Away the Ladder, … Read more