I spent July in China also, Adam. The steady hum of life there is always invigorating for me, and when I try to articulate what it feels like to people who are under the thrall of western media narratives about China, they are typically fascinated, but also intimidated.
I appreciate, and have come to truly rely on, the detail and daily drip I find in Chartbook. Content from you that is coupled with your intellect and experiences in China is creating new understanding and perspectives that I think might help reshape how we engage with the future.
Also, one way that I improved my Chinese language and pronunciation was by going deep on the Chinese music scene. You've got an excellent gateway through Kaiser, but there is so much music to explore, and so many songs to sing along to to dial in our conversational language skills.
Thank you, this is a great and thought provoking piece. Good adjustment of yardsticks.
One note
We simply have no experience of any such system.
We actually do - it's Chinese ancient and early medieval history. Back then China was relatively isolated geographically from the rest of the world, but formed effectively a globalized mini world with its periphery.
It's the Zhongguo model, "central beuaty, where china was depicted as square, central under the sky, constituting the entire universe, with the rest of what we consider the the world on the four sides of it, as add ons, to be admitted into the universe once they are cultured and sophisticated enough.
Very old concept, present from the beginning of Chinese history - there is no reason to believe 20th century has done away with it. Neatly fits with the last slide in your article :)
What a pleasure it was to spend time with you in Shaxi! "Captain Mushroom" — 蘑菇队长 in Chinese — has stuck as a nickname for Yang Meng. Let's do the seminar thing.
That chart of historic coal production does say it all: there is absolutely no hope of even mitigating the now inevitable collapse of climate stability. And climate forcing is just one aspect of the ecological overshoot that is rapidly manifesting itself. The overriding reality is that we are facing not problems with solutions but a predicament with an outcome.
That's a possible interpretation of the coal chart, certainly. And Trumpers often say that any climate measures in the US are futile, because the problem is China. It is China, to a large extent, but that doesn't mean that Western measures to mitigate climate change are useless: China is clearly leading the way on renewable energy, EVs, etc., as well as continued coal consumption (contradictions of Party capitalism). The chart should not make the US and EU give up, but rather redouble their efforts on climate, (a) because it would make some difference at the margin, and (b) to keep the pressure on China to keep focusing on transition. As to the rest of the global South, it's true that they will need fossil fuels for a long time to come, but they will also be getting renewable technology from China (not, given Trump, from the US), and we should not reinforce the semi-specious argument of "neo colonialism" by doing nothing ourselves.
Thanks Adam for this. It reassures me that the amount of time I spend looking at information about China is worthwhile. The West's, usually shallow, views that seem always to paint China as "other" or a threat are indeed a product of a backward looking nostalgia for a time when only "The West" mattered (at least to its intelligensia). The economist Michael Hudson compares the rise of China and the decline of the West and sees it as a product of financialisation that has left a rentier class in control of the West's institutions, a fate which China, which disposessed its rentier class in 1949, has escaped. This has allowed the energies of China and its people to be directed at real production and the subsequent betterment of its people to a previously unimaginable degree. Yes, this has given rise to other problems but China is fortunate in having a system which can adopt rational solutions in these difficult times.
Thanks to you, I am a subscriber to the wonderful Pekinology, and I watched the video of your talk at CCG with absolute fascination. I have no expertise at all that bears on this topic, I am just an interested global citizen. I have not been able to stop thinking about that graph of coal consumption. It just completely rock(ed)(s) my world. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us!
Very helpful... if we can keep up. Smile. Yes, the future in very large measure is not happening in the USA.
(Some US constraints however currently imposed on China are partially effective in the race for AI according to RAND.)
Please forgive me trying on some thoughts...
1. S. Korea urbanised in similar fashion earlier under dictator Park, so we might know something about how the urbanised population is going to cope down the line. One might also more generally give a thought, for example, to the medical results and other implications of the global spread of the 'Western' diet along with other problems promising to be even more limiting for a viable future industrial civilisation?
2. So far, addition of new primary energy resources, (wood is still very much still there), coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and now solar, have not seen a displacement of an earlier energy source. And, fossil energy remains stubbornly ~80% of total energy demand. This appears to be ongoing even as population growth rate reduces. There is no sign as yet of global reduction in per capita primary energy demand, ('efficiency') nor in the global per capita demand for each type of fossil energy.
3. The results of climate change are only just starting to be apparent. Yes, future climate is importantly down to emissions, but biosphere reactions are similarly key, relying on ongoing sequestration of carbon dissolved in the ocean and carbon 'fixed' in both terrestrial and ocean biological systems. Similarly, changes in ocean convection and global hydrology are critical for impacts on a viable future civilisation, whatever its industrial systems in a likely disturbed environment.
4. Arguably, changes in land use, human or climate induced in the tropics and sub-tropics will as likely determine future impact on industrial civilisation inevitably inseparable from the biosphere, perhaps more so than China's future industrial transition?
Your exploration of China’s "dual circulation" strategy resonates deeply with a project I’ve been pursuing since July 2: a weekly deep-dive into one Chinese city (707 in total!) to understand how local dynamics shape national policy. Six cities in, a striking pattern emerges: Chinese cities operate like strategic venture capitalists, each with a social contract to pursue prosperity by seeding entire industries, not just companies.
Take Hefei (Week 1), which pivoted from obscurity to global leadership in quantum computing (Origin Quantum), voice AI (iFlytek), EVs (NIO) and LCD panels (BOE). The city’s playbook is audacious:
Pre-emptive bets: Hefei backed quantum tech in 2017, pre-sanctions.
Market creation: BOE’s fab plant won mandates from local appliance giants (Midea, Gree) before production even began.
Rescue-as-strategy: NIO’s bailout required relocating HQs to Hefei, catalyzing an EV ecosystem (12→1,200 suppliers in 3 years).
Now, Jiangmen (Week 6) reveals how cities adapt to globalization’s shifts. When garment factories fled to Vietnam, the mayor declared: “We’ll own Africa’s motorbike market.” Today, 1 in 3 motorbikes on African roads are from this city of 450,000, a feat of ecosystem engineering, not luck.
This aligns with your dual circulation analysis: cities act as microcosms of China’s “self-reliance via openness” paradox. Local governments don’t just react; they orchestrate whether through supply chain sovereignty (Hefei’s veto to keep BOE profits in Anhui) or global niche dominance (Jiangmen’s Africa pivot).
I’d love to hear your take: Are Chinese cities the ultimate “developmental state” laboratories? Their ability to force multiply comparative advantages, while retaining global leverage feels like a missing layer in the dual circulation discourse.
The post-2020 development model is reminiscent of the Japanese model that preceded it. Raw materials in and value-added goods out, plus a few flying geese. I don't think this was China's outlook 15 or 20 years ago. Then I think the the model of graduating from low wage to high wage sectors and relocating the low wage industrial sectors to low wage economies was a more prevalent view. I am struck how the massive changes in technology in recent years, perhaps epitomised in China's massive investment in industrial robots, changed things towards onshoring of almost anything that adds value.
The author explicitly states his hope that this lengthy essay will offer readers valuable insights, interest, and provocation, and he certainly delivers on that promise.
However, after reading the piece in full, one cannot help but feel that the author, along with his collaborators or interlocutors Zichen Wang and Kaiser Kuo, seems—whether intentionally or not—to have sidestepped one or more profoundly important questions. This evasion lends their discourse a sense of unreality, and perhaps even a lack of honesty.
Such questions include, but are not limited to: Given China’s astonishing and admirable pace of development, are they themselves willing to accept the government’s harsh restrictions on personal freedoms, including freedom of expression? Or do they believe that Chinese citizens ought to become stepping stones for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation? Do they consider personal liberty, like the Western model of economic development, to be outdated and undesirable—an obsolete notion best left behind? In other words, amid China’s unprecedented economic rise in human history, does personal freedom still matter? And if so, in what way?
This is something I've addressed in many, many essays — probably most directly in this one, which I hope you'll read as you seem so often to make this same comment about my conversation with Adam and the essay it inspired me to write. https://www.sinicapodcast.com/p/priority-pluralism-rethinking-universal
Great post! I often only 1/2 joking about what our Chinese Gibbon will write about the decline & fall of the American republic. How diverse is China? How many languages & dialects? What difference does it make? I ask because 15 years or so ago, two Chinese exchange students stayed with us for a week. They were friends native fluency in English, & shared a common language but spoke "home" languages which were mutually incomprehensible. In one restaurant they asked to visit, the staff spoke the "home" language of one of them, and everyone came to greet him! I'm still in contact, btw, with the other: he lives in Hong Kong, is an executive with Louis Vuitonn, & plays western classical music & composes his own in the same idiom.
I travelled by train in China in the mid-90's: Beijing, Xi'an, Wuhan, ending up in Hong Kong, where I experienced the creepy new feeling of being the invisible 'other.' Incredibly dirty with coal dust coated windows, crowded, fantastic food, high-rise construction with bamboo scaffolding, palpable feelings of optimism and a better life ahead, crowds following me to practice their English. I had taken a year of Chinese language to prepare: Hah!
Looking at that graph of coal consumption since 1900: the US has been averaging about 5,000 Terrawatt hours for 120 years, with a population rising from 76 million to 350 million. China, in 1950, had a population of over 500 million, and is now at 1.4 billion. They have packed all their coal consumption in the last 60 years, just trying to catch up to the US. And why shouldn't they. They want what we have: a car (or 2, plus boat, ATV and zero-turn lawn mower) in every garage, a ginormous refrigerator with automatic ice-cube maker, and central heat and A/C. Plus a new iPhone every two years. And the ability to be someplace else in a few hours. God forbid we Westerners should reduce our cherished 'way of life.
The ladder starts to clatter, but Lenny Bruce is not afraid. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
The dual circulation idea resurrects the Middle Kingdom positioning, I suppose. I remember as a kid reading John Fairbanks (when he was alive, not a building), and listening to my Dad talk about being a U.S. Marine in Tianjin (as its called now) right after WW2. Buried worlds, come to life.
The discussion being had in the rise of the new global city piece resembles what urban studies colleagues and I have been engaging in recently. I think it is useful to consider what exists away from the global city, although I do believe that the global city form is still necessary, but it cannot be ubiquitous. Thus, new city forms emerge. One discussion colleagues and I had was around the 'internet famous' (wanghong) city, which we wrote briefly about here: https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2022/11/wanghong-urbanism/
Pillow talk? 🤨
I spent July in China also, Adam. The steady hum of life there is always invigorating for me, and when I try to articulate what it feels like to people who are under the thrall of western media narratives about China, they are typically fascinated, but also intimidated.
I appreciate, and have come to truly rely on, the detail and daily drip I find in Chartbook. Content from you that is coupled with your intellect and experiences in China is creating new understanding and perspectives that I think might help reshape how we engage with the future.
Also, one way that I improved my Chinese language and pronunciation was by going deep on the Chinese music scene. You've got an excellent gateway through Kaiser, but there is so much music to explore, and so many songs to sing along to to dial in our conversational language skills.
Thank you, this is a great and thought provoking piece. Good adjustment of yardsticks.
One note
We simply have no experience of any such system.
We actually do - it's Chinese ancient and early medieval history. Back then China was relatively isolated geographically from the rest of the world, but formed effectively a globalized mini world with its periphery.
It's the Zhongguo model, "central beuaty, where china was depicted as square, central under the sky, constituting the entire universe, with the rest of what we consider the the world on the four sides of it, as add ons, to be admitted into the universe once they are cultured and sophisticated enough.
Very old concept, present from the beginning of Chinese history - there is no reason to believe 20th century has done away with it. Neatly fits with the last slide in your article :)
What a pleasure it was to spend time with you in Shaxi! "Captain Mushroom" — 蘑菇队长 in Chinese — has stuck as a nickname for Yang Meng. Let's do the seminar thing.
That chart of historic coal production does say it all: there is absolutely no hope of even mitigating the now inevitable collapse of climate stability. And climate forcing is just one aspect of the ecological overshoot that is rapidly manifesting itself. The overriding reality is that we are facing not problems with solutions but a predicament with an outcome.
That's a possible interpretation of the coal chart, certainly. And Trumpers often say that any climate measures in the US are futile, because the problem is China. It is China, to a large extent, but that doesn't mean that Western measures to mitigate climate change are useless: China is clearly leading the way on renewable energy, EVs, etc., as well as continued coal consumption (contradictions of Party capitalism). The chart should not make the US and EU give up, but rather redouble their efforts on climate, (a) because it would make some difference at the margin, and (b) to keep the pressure on China to keep focusing on transition. As to the rest of the global South, it's true that they will need fossil fuels for a long time to come, but they will also be getting renewable technology from China (not, given Trump, from the US), and we should not reinforce the semi-specious argument of "neo colonialism" by doing nothing ourselves.
Thanks Adam for this. It reassures me that the amount of time I spend looking at information about China is worthwhile. The West's, usually shallow, views that seem always to paint China as "other" or a threat are indeed a product of a backward looking nostalgia for a time when only "The West" mattered (at least to its intelligensia). The economist Michael Hudson compares the rise of China and the decline of the West and sees it as a product of financialisation that has left a rentier class in control of the West's institutions, a fate which China, which disposessed its rentier class in 1949, has escaped. This has allowed the energies of China and its people to be directed at real production and the subsequent betterment of its people to a previously unimaginable degree. Yes, this has given rise to other problems but China is fortunate in having a system which can adopt rational solutions in these difficult times.
Thanks to you, I am a subscriber to the wonderful Pekinology, and I watched the video of your talk at CCG with absolute fascination. I have no expertise at all that bears on this topic, I am just an interested global citizen. I have not been able to stop thinking about that graph of coal consumption. It just completely rock(ed)(s) my world. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us!
Very helpful... if we can keep up. Smile. Yes, the future in very large measure is not happening in the USA.
(Some US constraints however currently imposed on China are partially effective in the race for AI according to RAND.)
Please forgive me trying on some thoughts...
1. S. Korea urbanised in similar fashion earlier under dictator Park, so we might know something about how the urbanised population is going to cope down the line. One might also more generally give a thought, for example, to the medical results and other implications of the global spread of the 'Western' diet along with other problems promising to be even more limiting for a viable future industrial civilisation?
2. So far, addition of new primary energy resources, (wood is still very much still there), coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and now solar, have not seen a displacement of an earlier energy source. And, fossil energy remains stubbornly ~80% of total energy demand. This appears to be ongoing even as population growth rate reduces. There is no sign as yet of global reduction in per capita primary energy demand, ('efficiency') nor in the global per capita demand for each type of fossil energy.
3. The results of climate change are only just starting to be apparent. Yes, future climate is importantly down to emissions, but biosphere reactions are similarly key, relying on ongoing sequestration of carbon dissolved in the ocean and carbon 'fixed' in both terrestrial and ocean biological systems. Similarly, changes in ocean convection and global hydrology are critical for impacts on a viable future civilisation, whatever its industrial systems in a likely disturbed environment.
4. Arguably, changes in land use, human or climate induced in the tropics and sub-tropics will as likely determine future impact on industrial civilisation inevitably inseparable from the biosphere, perhaps more so than China's future industrial transition?
Your exploration of China’s "dual circulation" strategy resonates deeply with a project I’ve been pursuing since July 2: a weekly deep-dive into one Chinese city (707 in total!) to understand how local dynamics shape national policy. Six cities in, a striking pattern emerges: Chinese cities operate like strategic venture capitalists, each with a social contract to pursue prosperity by seeding entire industries, not just companies.
Take Hefei (Week 1), which pivoted from obscurity to global leadership in quantum computing (Origin Quantum), voice AI (iFlytek), EVs (NIO) and LCD panels (BOE). The city’s playbook is audacious:
Pre-emptive bets: Hefei backed quantum tech in 2017, pre-sanctions.
Market creation: BOE’s fab plant won mandates from local appliance giants (Midea, Gree) before production even began.
Rescue-as-strategy: NIO’s bailout required relocating HQs to Hefei, catalyzing an EV ecosystem (12→1,200 suppliers in 3 years).
Now, Jiangmen (Week 6) reveals how cities adapt to globalization’s shifts. When garment factories fled to Vietnam, the mayor declared: “We’ll own Africa’s motorbike market.” Today, 1 in 3 motorbikes on African roads are from this city of 450,000, a feat of ecosystem engineering, not luck.
This aligns with your dual circulation analysis: cities act as microcosms of China’s “self-reliance via openness” paradox. Local governments don’t just react; they orchestrate whether through supply chain sovereignty (Hefei’s veto to keep BOE profits in Anhui) or global niche dominance (Jiangmen’s Africa pivot).
I’d love to hear your take: Are Chinese cities the ultimate “developmental state” laboratories? Their ability to force multiply comparative advantages, while retaining global leverage feels like a missing layer in the dual circulation discourse.
i am not on whatsapp but you can send me an email on strategy@chinain5.org or just send me a dm here. I am on telegram though
The post-2020 development model is reminiscent of the Japanese model that preceded it. Raw materials in and value-added goods out, plus a few flying geese. I don't think this was China's outlook 15 or 20 years ago. Then I think the the model of graduating from low wage to high wage sectors and relocating the low wage industrial sectors to low wage economies was a more prevalent view. I am struck how the massive changes in technology in recent years, perhaps epitomised in China's massive investment in industrial robots, changed things towards onshoring of almost anything that adds value.
The author explicitly states his hope that this lengthy essay will offer readers valuable insights, interest, and provocation, and he certainly delivers on that promise.
However, after reading the piece in full, one cannot help but feel that the author, along with his collaborators or interlocutors Zichen Wang and Kaiser Kuo, seems—whether intentionally or not—to have sidestepped one or more profoundly important questions. This evasion lends their discourse a sense of unreality, and perhaps even a lack of honesty.
Such questions include, but are not limited to: Given China’s astonishing and admirable pace of development, are they themselves willing to accept the government’s harsh restrictions on personal freedoms, including freedom of expression? Or do they believe that Chinese citizens ought to become stepping stones for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation? Do they consider personal liberty, like the Western model of economic development, to be outdated and undesirable—an obsolete notion best left behind? In other words, amid China’s unprecedented economic rise in human history, does personal freedom still matter? And if so, in what way?
This is something I've addressed in many, many essays — probably most directly in this one, which I hope you'll read as you seem so often to make this same comment about my conversation with Adam and the essay it inspired me to write. https://www.sinicapodcast.com/p/priority-pluralism-rethinking-universal
Great post! I often only 1/2 joking about what our Chinese Gibbon will write about the decline & fall of the American republic. How diverse is China? How many languages & dialects? What difference does it make? I ask because 15 years or so ago, two Chinese exchange students stayed with us for a week. They were friends native fluency in English, & shared a common language but spoke "home" languages which were mutually incomprehensible. In one restaurant they asked to visit, the staff spoke the "home" language of one of them, and everyone came to greet him! I'm still in contact, btw, with the other: he lives in Hong Kong, is an executive with Louis Vuitonn, & plays western classical music & composes his own in the same idiom.
I travelled by train in China in the mid-90's: Beijing, Xi'an, Wuhan, ending up in Hong Kong, where I experienced the creepy new feeling of being the invisible 'other.' Incredibly dirty with coal dust coated windows, crowded, fantastic food, high-rise construction with bamboo scaffolding, palpable feelings of optimism and a better life ahead, crowds following me to practice their English. I had taken a year of Chinese language to prepare: Hah!
Looking at that graph of coal consumption since 1900: the US has been averaging about 5,000 Terrawatt hours for 120 years, with a population rising from 76 million to 350 million. China, in 1950, had a population of over 500 million, and is now at 1.4 billion. They have packed all their coal consumption in the last 60 years, just trying to catch up to the US. And why shouldn't they. They want what we have: a car (or 2, plus boat, ATV and zero-turn lawn mower) in every garage, a ginormous refrigerator with automatic ice-cube maker, and central heat and A/C. Plus a new iPhone every two years. And the ability to be someplace else in a few hours. God forbid we Westerners should reduce our cherished 'way of life.
The ladder starts to clatter, but Lenny Bruce is not afraid. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
The dual circulation idea resurrects the Middle Kingdom positioning, I suppose. I remember as a kid reading John Fairbanks (when he was alive, not a building), and listening to my Dad talk about being a U.S. Marine in Tianjin (as its called now) right after WW2. Buried worlds, come to life.
All in all, you're right.
Brings to mind Andre Gunder Frank’s “Reorient” from twenty some years ago. Seems to be playing out in our lifetimes faster than expected.
The discussion being had in the rise of the new global city piece resembles what urban studies colleagues and I have been engaging in recently. I think it is useful to consider what exists away from the global city, although I do believe that the global city form is still necessary, but it cannot be ubiquitous. Thus, new city forms emerge. One discussion colleagues and I had was around the 'internet famous' (wanghong) city, which we wrote briefly about here: https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2022/11/wanghong-urbanism/