8 dispatches
One of the great lessons of the last few years of geopolitics and economics is that it’s not enough to simply have moral/legal authority and money, real power and prosperity requires actual physical inventory and manufacturing capacity. In a world where Russia is willing to buck sanctions and condemnation to invade a sovereign nation and where trade barriers / epidemics can...
Earlier this year, a Chinese company called DeepSeek took the AI world by surprise by releasing an incredibly cheap, performant reasoning model called DeepSeek R1. The result was an outpour of commentary on how Meta’s open sourcing of Llama led to its creation, whether or not the reported lower training cost for DeepSeeek’s model meant the end of NVIDIA’s business, and whether...
Among the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism are: 1. Arbitrary paranoia from on high — where students singing patriotic songs on bike rides are suddenly viewed to be a threat 2. Contradiction between reality and what the state wants you to believe — where state media simultaneously can champion “Labubu blind boxes” as signs of cultural & economic success but also frivolous...
It’s been a long time coming but China Evergrande (which I blogged about nearly 2 years ago!), once China’s largest property developer and who’s debt crisis is widely viewed as the “Lehman Brothers” moment in China’s property crisis, has finally been de-listed, about 18 months after it was ordered to be liquidated.
Fascinating chart from Bloomberg showing level of economic freedom and prosperity under different Chinese rulers and how Xi Jinping is the first Chinese Communist Party ruler in history to have presided over sharp declines in both freedom and prosperity. Given China’s rising influence in economic and geopolitical affairs, how it’s leaders (and in particular, Xi) and it’s...
Maybe you have shopped on Shein or Temu. Maybe you only know someone (younger?) who has. Maybe you only know Temu because of their repeat Superbowl ads. But these Chinese eCommerce companies are now the main driver behind air and ship cargo rates with Temu and Shein combined accounting for 9,000 tons per day of shipments! This is scale. ---
The collapse of China’s massive property bubble is under way and it is wreaking havoc as significant amounts of the debt raised by Chinese property builders is from offshore investors. Because of (well-founded) concerns on how Chinese Mainland courts would treat foreign concerns, most of these agreements have historically been conducted under Hong Kong law.
This article in the Economist paints a dismal picture of the state of life for the youth in China: youth unemployment so high the government has stopped reporting on it (as if that was going to change anything…), housing and childcare costs so high that young people have given up on having traditional families, a government and state-run media that actively scolds them for...