Redacted

Anti-war & anti-poverty. Pro green, capitalism and technology.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@DarioCpx How did we get an oil supply glut where most national SPR are getting drained and SOH are still close? What did he do that you respect him? All Robin's post is clownish for someone that held a high position at a major financial institution.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@unusual_whales And when Trump and I see eye to eye, the American taxpayers end up footing the bill.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@TanyaaDave American caste system under Indian's eye.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@netaji1948 Is this the new Indian disinformation campaign about poop consumption and caste system? Both synonymous with one particular country.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@IHoomanNotRobot @CsabaSzekely7 @Civixplorer Both Islam and Jewish religion are Abrahamic. Believe in the same God, but differently. Halal & Kosher food preparation and language... They have more similarity than differences. You going to tell me they are vastly different bc they hate each other.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@SuperSisi He is just sorry that he got caught.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@CsabaSzekely7 @Civixplorer Original Jewish people that never left that area probably genetically similar to it's neighbors. Israeli is now mostly from Europe and America.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@BaathistSyria @Civixplorer What if you didn't remove the original occupant?

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@Basedgoymemes @zhao_dashuai Monitor lizard? 😂

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@Cokezero369 @Reuters @specialreports If you were Indian or Nigerian, I would be laughing with you. Since you are not, I am just sad for you.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@CommonHouseflyy @RT_com I seen video where kids save classmate in wheelchair and old ladies save pets during earthquake. That sound like what you would do in that same situation.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@zhao_dashuai If you show the food pyramid to some Indians, they will assume it is the caste system too.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

Chinese EVs gaining traction in Serbia

The EU has consistently accused China of having excess EVS production capacity.
But when people have multiple choices and still choose Chinese EVs, that is not “dumping,” that is value winning.

Consumers do not buy ideology,they buy price, performance, design, reliability, range, technology, and after-sales service.

During the gasoline era, nobody was rushing to buy Chinese cars, China did not cry about “unfair competition.”
China learned, invested, upgraded, and waited for the next battlefield.

Then Europe hesitated, Japan clung to the old engine, Legacy automakers protected yesterday’s profits.
China took the EV transition seriously and pushed it to scale: batteries, supply chains, charging ecosystems, software, manufacturing efficiency, model variety, and price discipline.

China did not steal a market Europe wanted, it mastered the market Europe was too arrogant to take seriously.
Now Chinese EVs are competitive abroad, and suddenly the same people who spent decades preaching “free markets” have discovered a new word: “Overcapacity.”

Please.
It was not overcapacity when Western cars flooded China, it was globalization.
It was not overcapacity when Europe sold luxury brands into every emerging market, it was consumer choice.
But when China builds better, cheaper, faster, and at scale, it becomes a “threat.”

So the real problem is not Chinese dumping, but it is that China stopped playing the role assigned to it.

It stopped being the workshop at the bottom of the chain, it started building the future.

And the old car empires cannot forgive that.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@ICantEvenICant @ShangguanJiewen The best time to buy property in the US is yesterday specially if you are a renter. Very difficult to time a housing collapse. In 1970, a house cost $15K. In 1990, it is worth $200K. Now that same house is worth $800K+. This is base off of my sis' house and what her neighbor pay.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@RnaudBertrand The EU is beyond saving. Countries join the union to extract benefit and not to make MEGA. Every EU leader have their own agenda, past history and sometime financial benefit.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@zhao_dashuai Read the news. When there are too many of the same occurance to female travelers, then the smart thing to do is NOT go there.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@ICantEvenICant @ShangguanJiewen Partially true. In the US, they offer homeless shelter. Most cities they can't build enough houses for normal people to buy. They are producing all type of subsidies for developer, legalizing basement rental, etc.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@KalidasuGirid @ruima Improve your health system first, then Bloomberg might write an article about it. Inserting India into any Chinese article won't help.

[Redacted @RslGame2022]

@RnaudBertrand @haloboyscp That last sentence. Why am I not surprise? lol

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a really fascinating paper that everyone interested in China's industrial policy should read.

It destroys so many myths (see below), and is written by deeply credible people who conducted over three years of fieldwork in China and interviewed 60+ Chinese officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers. When it comes to China studies, it literally doesn't get more rigorous than this.

First myth it destroys: contrary to popular belief, Beijing's industrial policy didn't build the companies that became China's EV champions. They rose largely **despite** it, through its cracks.

For sure, Beijing did favor EVs as an industry and pushed hard for it but their big bet was SOEs (State Owned Enterprises): research grants, pilot programs, licenses, cheap credit - virtually all of it flowed to state firms.

The result? China's actual EV champions - BYD, Geely, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, etc. - are overwhelmingly private firms that succeeded despite Beijing favoring their SOE competitors.

How so? Because, when favoring SOEs, the central government didn't just pick winning companies, it picked winning cities, each SOE being anchored in a specific city: Shanghai (SAIC), Changchun (FAW), Wuhan-Shiyan (Dongfeng), etc.

Which means that every city not on the list, that wanted a piece of the auto boom, had only one option left: team up with private entrepreneurs who were equally excluded from central government favor.

That's what truly fueled China's EV miracle: an alliance of the excluded, between local private entrepreneurs and local mayors.

This is the biggest misconception this paper destroys: the reality is that the "Chinese state capitalism" that many in the West think powered the EV boom actually tried to block many of these companies from existing. In effect, it was closer to an obstacle course that local actors (mayors and provinces) learned to game.

Geely - now the third largest automaker in China - is a fantastic example of this.

First of all, it started off illegal since, to build passenger cars, you had to have a central government license and they couldn't get one. Zhejiang Province told them to go ahead regardless because the province had hundreds of auto parts suppliers but no carmaker of its own.

It's only a couple of years later, recognizing the fait-accompli that Geely was producing cars and was competitive, that the central government admitted them to the National Sedan Catalog - effectively legalizing them retroactively because there were facts on the ground.

Then there was the Volvo acquisition in 2010, which is fair to say - looking back - proved to be the most strategically valuable acquisition in Chinese automotive history. Despite it being presented at the time (and still described this way today) as "China buying Volvo", all 3 major state-backed banks in China (Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of China) refused to finance the deal. The only state-bank money Geely managed to get was a $200 million loan from a provincial branch of China Construction Bank - a tiny fraction of what the deal required.

Geely actually did the deal with Goldman Sachs money via Hong Kong plus loans and equity from four local governments (Chengdu, Zhangjiakou, Daqing, Shanghai's Jiading district), each of which bought in by securing a Volvo plant or headquarters for itself.

In effect, the doors that Beijing controlled were largely closed to Geely, but it made it because the doors subnational actors controlled were opened.

Which all means this paper destroys another very common myth: the big merit of the central government in all this was to be relatively chill about it, to NOT be dictatorial.

I just imagine if that had happened in France and you had - say - the mayor of Lyon or Marseilles open, fund and promote an unlicensed carmaker against Renault: the préfet would shut it down within weeks, and the mayor would be lucky to escape prosecution.

That's the irony: on industrial policy, the supposedly "totalitarian" Chinese state proved more tolerant of local defiance than most Western liberal democracies would be. Beijing's greatest contribution to the EV miracle wasn't the plan - it was looking the other way while the plan was being violated.

To be sure, the paper doesn't hide the costs of this system: ferocious local competition also produced what's known today in China as "involution" (内卷-Neijuan, basically a hypercompetitive price war), as well as some spectacular failures. For instance one county lost 6.6 billion yuan on a carmaker that never really made cars.

But that's precisely the point: this is a high-risk, high-reward model of decentralized experimentation, the very opposite of the careful central planning Westerners imagine.

I've repeated this countless times but it bears repeating again: the single greatest misconception people have about China is - probably because we wrongly associate communism with centralized control - that it is a monolith run from Beijing. Some even say it's run by "one man."

The reality is the exact opposite: China is, in practice, one of the most decentralized countries on earth. Roughly 85% of government spending in China happens at the subnational level - against about 30% in the average OECD country (and even less in France, which is actually one of the most centrally controlled countries on earth). A Chinese mayor commands fiscal resources, land, investment funds and policy latitude that virtually no Western mayor could dream of.

Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to mention what the paper has to say on the positive legacy of Mao and its role in the rise of EVs (given I myself wrote an article titled "Mao's economic record wasn't bad, actually": https://t.co/1NZgHqBHwg).

When it comes to China myths, none is more entrenched than the idea that Mao left behind nothing but ruins.

This paper confirms a key argument of my article: Mao's deliberate dispersal of industry across China (during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution decentralizations) left dozens of cities with their own small auto works. Inefficient, yes - but these scattered factories survived into the 1990s and became the seed stock of everything that followed: the industrial base, the engineers, and the production licenses that EV startups would use to enter the market.

The paper even says it outright: the fragmentation that industrial policy "sought to eradicate" is "precisely" what "ironically enabled" the EV sector's rapid rise.

This is exactly the mechanism I described in my Mao article: structures built in the Mao era - communes becoming township governments, commune enterprises becoming TVEs, Third Front factories seeding interior industrialization - became load-bearing foundations of the reform miracle.

Fittingly, the spark for China's first municipal carmaker adventure was literally a TVE (Township and Village Enterprise), the institutional descendants of Mao's commune enterprises: Tongbao, a kit-car maker in Wuhu whose success stunned local officials into building what became Chery (one of China's biggest carmakers today). You can't tell the story of China's EV miracle without crediting the legacy of Mao.

What's the biggest lesson in all this for Western policymakers?

The obvious one is that the part of industrial policy that most people assume China does and that they sometimes want to copy - i.e. the state picking winners - is actually the part that failed.

The part that did succeed is the China nobody in the West believes exists: a radically decentralized system with a high degree of tolerance for disobedience and experimentation.

We imagine China as a country where nothing happens without Beijing's approval when the reality is closer to the opposite: China's EV miracle happened precisely because localities asked for forgiveness rather than permission.

All in all, and this is the lesson I often come back to, this is yet another illustration of the importance of understanding China for what it is as opposed to the caricature we've built of it. This matters whichever "camp" you're in. If you see China as a rival, you can't compete with someone you don't understand. If you see them as a source of lessons, you can't emulate what you've misunderstood. Whatever you want from China - to compete with it or learn from it - the entry fee is the same: genuinely understanding it.