Kyle Chan @kyleichan Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Kyle Chan

@kyleichan

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Princeton postdoctoral researcher. Focused on industrial policy, clean tech, infrastructure, development, China, India. Newsletter:

https://t.co/O5KuFNaBIN

Joined November 2010

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@kyleichan

Kyle Chan

6 months

I write a newsletter about industrial policy, clean technology, infrastructure, and development—particularly in China and India. My articles aim to be information-dense with lots of charts and data but also easy to read.

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High Capacity | Kyle Chan | Substack

Industrial policy, clean technology, EVs, infrastructure, and development, particularly in China and India. Over 2,000 subscribers. Click to read High Capacity, by Kyle Chan, a Substack publication...

www.high-capacity.com

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@kyleichan

Kyle Chan

15 days

What a story. Ford CEO Jim Farley travels to China with his CFO in 2023 for the first time since the pandemic. They test drive an electric SUV from their Chinese joint venture partner Changan and suddenly realize Chinese automakers are now ahead of them.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Amazed this ChatGPT detection trick worked

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Imagine if India created a regional cluster connecting its tech megacities: Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai. High-speed rail and freight corridors connecting all three cities. India’s answer to China’s Greater Bay Area connecting Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong.

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Kyle Chan

6 months

First time I’ve seen someone (1 million+ followers) copy me like this without credit. Posted several hours after mine. I guess this just happens?

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@kyleichan

Kyle Chan

6 months

Apple’s shift of iPhone manufacturing to India is happening faster than many had expected. 2021: 1% made in India 2023: 7% 2024: 14% 2025 goal: 25%

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Most underrated industrial policy success story: Morocco's auto industry - More car exports to Europe than China - Zero to $14 billion in auto exports in 15 years - Invested heavily in infrastructure: rail, highways, ports - Brought in foreign firms from France, China, Japan,

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@AP

The Associated Press

5 months

Morocco’s automotive industry shifts gears to prep for electric vehicle era

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Kyle Chan

1 month

This story says so much about China’s battery dominance. A US firm invents a better method for making electrolytes. No US or European firm wants to license it. A Chinese firm does, spends 7 years making it work while losing money, and is now a top global electrolyte supplier.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

Incredible: 50 cranes at work on Samsung's $17 billion Texas chip plant. One building alone is 11 football fields long and needs 5,000 construction workers. The plant will do cutting-edge chips and advanced packaging for HBM. Started early 2022. Expected to open in 2024 or 2025.

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Kyle Chan

1 month

Controversial question: The US has very high GDP per capita, even among G7 countries. Some of this is higher productivity. But how much is due to inefficiencies, transaction costs, and socially wasteful activity? US spending on healthcare, finance, higher education, legal

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Kyle Chan

6 months

Remember the “Giga Press” that Tesla developed with a Chinese-owned company? Xiaomi is using similar “gigacasting” machines to make its new SU7 EVs. These machines are rumored to be made by Haitian Die Casting in Ningbo

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@kyleichan

Kyle Chan

6 months

When Tesla entered China, it helped Chinese firm LK Group develop the world’s largest casting machines to make Tesla parts. Later, LK sold similar casting machines to 6 Chinese firms, likely automakers. This is what I mean by using foreign firms to turbocharge your own industry.

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Kyle Chan

6 months

Apple’s shift of iPhone manufacturing to India is happening faster than many had expected. 2021: 1% made in India 2023: 7% 2024: 14% 2025 goal: 25%

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Kyle Chan

6 months

When Tesla entered China, it helped Chinese firm LK Group develop the world’s largest casting machines to make Tesla parts. Later, LK sold similar casting machines to 6 Chinese firms, likely automakers. This is what I mean by using foreign firms to turbocharge your own industry.

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Kyle Chan

4 months

India needs a national bullet train system. In my latest High Capacity piece, I discuss how we should think big about rail infrastructure, climate, and economic development with some data and lessons from China's high-speed rail system. Read here:

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Kyle Chan

3 months

While we were busy debating whether industrial policy works, our entire shipbuilding industry went to Asia.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

Impressive. Chips Act funding got basically every major chipmaker to build in the US. “That means the US will become the only country in the world with facilities run by all of the top manufacturers.”

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Kyle Chan

4 months

China’s scientific progress is real. Citation counts can be gamed. There is some fraud. And Chinese researchers have been incentivized with cash to target top journals. But the Nature Index, which looks at contributors to 145 top international journals, is solid. 1/ 🧵

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Kyle Chan

27 days

If you want to understand the depth of China's industrial policy and economic statecraft, look at gallium. China produces 98% of the world's gallium, which is not mined directly but is a byproduct of aluminum production. China makes 59% of the world's aluminum. DARPA originally

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Kyle Chan

4 months

"Tariff engineering" is when a company tweaks a product to get a lower tariff rate. The Subaru BRAT of the 1980s got around the 25% "chicken tax" on US truck imports by adding jump seats in the back to qualify as passenger cars. Some more examples: 1/

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Kyle Chan

3 months

The richer the country, the more people have a negative view of China. I quickly threw this together using the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey. Rich countries have grown more negative towards China over time while middle income countries tend to be more positive.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

When BYD’s founder Wang Chuanfu decided to start making cars, he began by buying around 50 foreign cars and taking them apart to reverse engineer them. Re-upping this great profile of BYD’s founder by @kevinsxu

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Kyle Chan

3 months

Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta have a combined market cap of $15 trillion. Yet they rely heavily on a single company—TSMC—with over 60% of the semiconductor foundry market and around 90% for high-end chips? This seems like a ridiculous market failure.

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Kyle Chan

1 year

The dominance of Chinese universities is legit super impressive. Not just Peking University and Tsinghua but also USTC, Nanjing, Zhejiang, Sun Yat-sen, Fudan, and Shanghai Jiaotong — all rank higher than Oxford.

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@pstAsiatech

Paul Triolo

1 year

Chinese universities ranked ahead of Oxbridge, Caltech in quality research output by Nature Index Rankings based on published scientific papers show Chinese institutions overtaking the US and other Western counterparts Sun Yat-sen University overtakes Oxford with 22 per cent

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Kyle Chan

8 months

One thing I didn’t fully appreciate until doing research on China’s industrial policy is how virtually everything related to advanced manufacturing comes from either Germany or Japan.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

You could complain about China’s “overcapacity” or “unfair competition.” Or you could feel smug that China’s central and local governments shouldered a huge share of the cost of the world’s transition to clean energy.

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Kyle Chan

15 days

According to the article, Ford’s CEO later had Chinese EVs shipped to Michigan so Ford executives could examine them. One of the EVs was Xiaomi’s new SU7.

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What Scared Ford’s CEO in China

Jim Farley is changing strategy to combat what he calls an “existential threat” from China’s electric carmakers.

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Kyle Chan

15 days

Ford has a secretive team based in California working on a low-cost EV platform. It’s apparently headed by a former Tesla engineer and full of former Tesla, Rivian, and Apple car engineers. Ford is interested in sourcing some low-cost parts from China.

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Ford's secretive, low-cost EV team is growing with talent from Rivian, Tesla and Apple | TechCrunch

A TechCrunch review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has built this team up to around 300 employees over the last year.

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Kyle Chan

1 year

My paper on railway infrastructure development in China and India based on two years of fieldwork.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

This is what relentless innovation looks like. This chart shows the rise and fall of each process node as a share of TSMC’s revenue over time. From a new working paper on the global effects of semiconductor industrial policy:

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@straightedge

Nathan Lane

3 months

Just released—our new @nberpubs project on semiconductor industrial policy with @PennyG_Yale , @juhreka13 , @GiuliaLoFort , & Jeff Thurk We examine the scope of semiconductor policies & their global impacts. We find *positive* global spillovers from chips industrial policies 1/N

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Shipbuilding might not seem as exciting as AI and EVs, but this one industry has been at the heart of industrial development for hundreds of years. In the 1600s, the Dutch (population 2 million) had “roughly half of the world’s total stock of seagoing ships.” China today is but

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Kyle Chan

6 months

My latest piece on how China uses global industry leaders like Apple and Tesla to get technology and upgrade its industrial ecosystem. How China uses foreign firms to turbocharge its industry

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How China uses foreign firms to turbocharge its industry

China uses global industry leaders like Apple and Tesla to get technology and upgrade its industrial ecosystem.

www.high-capacity.com

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Kyle Chan

1 month

If you spend a lot of money on health insurance claims processing or divorce lawyers or fund of funds managers, this doesn’t add a lot to social welfare but it does go into GDP.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

BYD Thailand plant: 10,000 jobs BYD Mexico plant: expected 10,000 jobs BYD Turkey plant: expected 5,000 direct jobs BYD Hungary plant: thousands of workers BYD Brazil plants: expected 5,000 jobs BYD’s EV factories are highly automated. Yet they seem to create thousands of jobs.

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Having Chinese automakers set up plants in the US could be a smart solution that would allow US consumers to have cheaper, innovative Chinese EVs while keeping jobs in the US. This is what happened with Japanese automakers. But there’s one thorny problem: auto parts. 1/ 🧵

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Only the paranoid survive: “Japanese companies controlled 50% of global chip sales in 1988 and boasted six of the world's top 10 chipmakers... But by 2019, Japan was only producing 10% of the world's semiconductors.”

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Kyle Chan

5 months

There's a mistaken belief that South Korea's industrial policy succeeded because it took an export-oriented approach rather than import substitution. An FT piece cites Hyundai as an example. But South Korea basically banned the import of foreign cars until 1987. 1/ 🧵

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@FT

Financial Times

5 months

How to tell good industrial policy from bad | opinion

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Xiaomi’s EV story is incredible. 2021: Founder Lei Jun got a call saying Xiaomi was on a US blacklist. He feared the whole company was at risk and decided to go into EVs. 2022: Construction begins on Beijing factory 2023: SU7 introduced 2024: 25,000 SU7s delivered by June.

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Kyle Chan

1 month

Taiwan makes over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and over 90% of the highest-end chips. The US makes only 12%. Yet the US dominates value-add in the semiconductor industry (38%) compared with Taiwan (11%) largely due to chip design. This is old news to many of you. But it’s

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Kyle Chan

1 month

The most common argument against industrial policy is that the government is bad at picking winners and the market is better at allocating capital and resources. Every time I hear this I think of the fact that the market values all cryptocurrency at over $2 trillion.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

BYD’s Americas head said that BYD plans to build a factory in Mexico but stresses that this is for the Mexican market and not for export to the US. She said the US market is too complicated, including the politics, whereas in China if you don’t go electric, “you have no future.”

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Kyle Chan

5 months

Tata is making big moves with iPhone production in India. It took over Wistron’s plant near Bangalore and now looks poised to take over Pegatron’s iPhone plant near Chennai. This reminds me of what happened with China’s Luxshare, the exclusive manufacturer of Apple’s Vision Pro.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

GM was once a world leader in rare earth magnets. GM sold off this division to a Chinese consortium to gain a larger share of China’s auto market. This gave China crucial technology for its future EV industry. From @ErnestScheyder ’s book The War Below

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Kyle Chan

4 months

I'm planning to write a book on China's industrial policy. The goal is to explain to a general audience what tools and strategies China has used to dominate certain industries like EVs, solar, and high-speed rail. Topics will include: state-owned enterprises, state banks, local

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Kyle Chan

1 month

Is this what the future of manufacturing will look like look like? At this semiconductor plant in Taiwan, the main factory floor is all automated. In a separate room, a team of 70-90 people monitor operations through 50,000 sensors generating up to 30 petabytes of data per day.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

In 2015, Panasonic was the largest EV battery maker in the world with nearly 40% of production. The Big Three were Panasonic, LG Chem, Samsung SDI. Now CATL produces more EV batteries than all three combined.

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@cleantechnica

CleanTechnica

3 months

10 Largest EV Battery Producers in the World

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Kyle Chan

4 months

This is obviously a stretch, but the differing trajectories of some major industrial conglomerates sort of says a lot: GE, Boeing: financial engineering, cost-cutting, outsourcing Samsung, Huawei, Tata: aggressive push into any and every adjacent industry sector

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Vande Bharat Express is a step in the right direction. But I'm talking about full bullet train speeds like Mumbai-Ahmedabad HSR. For comparison, Bangalore to Chennai train distance is similar to Wuhan to Changsha, which takes less than 1.5 hours (top speed over 300 km/h).

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Nippon Steel has played a formative role in China’s steel industry, going back to 1978 when it agreed to build a new steel plant at a site near Shanghai called Baoshan. Baoshan combined with other steel factories over time to form Baowu, now the world’s largest steel producer.

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Kyle Chan

1 month

In quality of life measures, you don’t see the US doing far better than its peers (in many cases, actually worse). And having lived in the UK and Germany, I don’t notice much of a difference in quality of life for people there compared with in the US.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

Industrial policy across sectors can have a multiplier effect. China’s solar industry benefited from its R&D on semiconductors. China’s high-speed rail built on its aerospace research. Chinese EVs draw directly on China’s smartphone supply chain, as @robinsonmeyer points out. 1/

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Solar panels made in Southeast Asia are 50% more expensive than ones made in China. Such a large price gap is surprising given that a lot of the solar manufacturing capacity in Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia is from Chinese firms like Trina, Jinko, JA Solar, and LONGi.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

"Made in China 2025" was a massive foreign relations disaster for China. It's cited in virtually every US report, law, policy doc, etc. as the paradigmatic example of "unfair" state support for Chinese firms. Here it is in the USTR section 301 report behind Biden's new tariffs.

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Kyle Chan

19 days

Chinese engineers got a nickel extraction process called HPAL to work that Western miners gave up on. They persisted in making improvements through years of underproduction, water pollution, and worker accidents. Now China dominates global nickel production.

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Strange the argument is still being made that China’s industrial policy cannot yield true innovation. Too many counterexamples to choose from. One is demand from foreign firms to license Chinese EV battery tech from CATL and BYD. That’s cutting-edge innovation pure and simple.

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@ForeignAffairs

Foreign Affairs

@ForeignAffairs

4 months

“China is without a doubt the world’s leading manufacturing nation. But it cannot create a true climate of economic innovation so long as its rigid politics and governance and exclusionary approach to institution-building remains in place.”

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Kyle Chan

4 months

Amazing chart of who has held the world record for most efficient solar cell by type over time. In the 1970s, it’s American firms like Boeing, RCA, Kodak. Then you see Japanese names like Sharp, Sanyo, Panasonic. Finally you see Chinese names like Longi, Jinko, Nanjing U. 1/

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Kyle Chan

3 months

A few of my favorite charts from the recent IEA Global EV Outlook 2024 report. This chart shows that EV flows tend to stay within region. For example, EVs sold in China are mostly made in China using mostly Chinese battery cells. Also true for Europe and North America. 1/ 🧵

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Kyle Chan

2 months

“Washington is annoyed that an authoritarian single-party system like China can innovate and produce global industry leaders. Beijing is annoyed that a messy democracy like the US keeps churning out world-changing technology from the internet to AI.”

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@kyleichan

Kyle Chan

2 months

China's most direct economic competitor is South Korea. Smartphones, batteries, EVs, TVs, home appliances, shipbuilding, steel, chemicals, and increasingly semiconductors...

@drvolts

David Roberts

2 months

Samsung just debuted a solid-state battery with a 600-mile range & a 20-year lifespan. It charges in ... 9 minutes. 😳

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Kyle Chan

3 months

There are a handful of countries—Turkey, Morocco, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, maybe India—that stand at the intersection of Chinese supply chains and Western markets. If they can play their cards right, this is the sweet spot of economic development.

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Kyle Chan

1 month

The other issue is of course inequality and how the median American might not be so much better off but the top 10% of Americans have far more than the top 10% in other rich countries. A lot has already been said on this. I’m just pointing out another possible factor.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

Remember all those stories about how China can only copy--not innovate--because of its authoritarian system? Wishful thinking can be a dangerous problem, even for the smartest people. (To be honest, I used to hold this belief too before I started doing research in China.)

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Kyle Chan

6 months

Amazing quote about Tesla from a Xiaomi supplier. I talk a lot about the benefits of bringing in top foreign firms to boost your domestic supply chain. But the biggest benefit by far is the cultivation of local talent who can launch a wave of domestic competitors.

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Kyle Chan

6 months

It would be a mistake to dismiss India’s growing share of iPhone production as “just assembly.” You’ve got to start somewhere. This is what China did in many industries.

@kyleichan

Kyle Chan

10 months

This is Chinese industrial policy 101. Go hard on the low-end part of the value chain, like semiconductor packaging or iPhone assembly. This creates jobs, builds domestic supply chains, and might give you a toehold for moving up the value chain.

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Kyle Chan

4 months

My research article on Chinese state-owned enterprises is now open access and free to the public: Later I’ll do a High Capacity piece on the main findings and Chinese SOEs more generally.

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Kyle Chan

6 months

This is from an incredible 2021 piece by @LiYuan6 on how China used Tesla to transform its own domestic EV industry. The piece is a must-read for anyone interested in industrial policy and development.

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In China, Tesla Is a Catfish, and Turns Auto Companies Into Sharks (Published 2021)

The electric car company is helping Chinese companies become global players in the emerging industry, posing a competitive threat to traditional rivals.

www.nytimes.com

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Kyle Chan

9 months

Some fun facts about the Beijing-Shanghai HSR I often bring up in my talks: - It cost more than the Three Gorges Dam - It took just over 3 years to build - It was deliberately used to create a set of tech and construction standards for the rest of China's HSR program

@arpitrage

Arpit Gupta

9 months

The Beijing Shanghai HSR route cost something like $34.7b in 2013 dollars. Now, 90 trains run a day; minimum time 4 hrs 18 mins, taking 35m passengers a year in 2021. Turned a profit in 2019 of $1.8b, despite subsidized prices (cheapest one-way is $70). So very NPV positive.

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Kyle Chan

2 years

My article on Chinese SOEs is out in the latest issue of CJS. I take a deep dive into two massive Chinese SOEs that are behind many infrastructure projects around the world and operate through a system of “managed competition.”

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Kyle Chan

2 months

I need to debunk a point about Chinese solar "overproduction" that keeps getting repeated: "China's solar panel production is more than double global demand." Solar capacity additions have been growing exponentially for years, overshooting IEA projections repeatedly. THREAD 1/4

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Kyle Chan

3 months

China's state firms make up 1/5 of the Fortune Global 500. But they're not the rigid, top-down orgs of the past. In many industries today, they try to combine the benefits of both market competition and state coordination. My latest High Capacity piece:

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"Managed competition" in China's state firms

China's state-owned enterprises are not the rigid, top-down organizations of the past. In many industries today, they try to combine the benefits of both market competition and state coordination.

www.high-capacity.com

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Kyle Chan

7 months

India’s electronics exports to the US have more than doubled over the past year. This is the main driver of India’s increase in relative share of electronics exports to the US (see last bar) rather than simply a decline in China’s exports.

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Kyle Chan

8 months

A big reason many people don't understand China's industrial policy is that it's very broad and very deep. It's not just tax breaks for a few firms. It's public R&D, land acquisition, special investment funds, state bank loans, consumer subsidies, etc. across dozens of sectors.

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Kyle Chan

6 months

@GabbbarSingh You're right--the data is public. And I want more people to see this striking trendline. I just thought a little credit to the OP wouldn't hurt.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

We forget how incredibly poor China was. Even after averaging almost double-digit growth for nearly half a century, China’s GDP per capita is still well below the US in 1960, adjusted for inflation. Just some perspective for other countries impatient with development.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

BYD is taking over EV markets like Brazil, Thailand, and of course China but faces a big challenge in Vietnam where homegrown EV maker VinFast has 150,000 exclusive fast-charging ports. VinFast even beats BYD on price and wants to compete across Southeast Asia. Great piece:

@restofworld

Rest of World

2 months

BYD, the world's top EV maker, faces challenges in Vietnam, where VinFast dominates the charging infrastructure, and consumers are wary of Chinese goods

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Kyle Chan

5 months

I love the way that China’s high-speed rail transports millions of passengers a day to virtually every major city in the country at speeds reaching 350km/h with a 95%+ punctuality rate and this is what people are impressed by

@hutcho66

James Hutcheon

5 months

So something very unique about the long distance trains in China - you can order food from restaurants in the stations along the way and they'll deliver it to the platform, when the train stops the attendants will take it and bring it to your seat.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

Imagine industrial policy that’s so bad it hurts other industrial policy programs. See the Jones Act, which tries to boost US shipbuilding by only allowing US ships to move between US ports, but makes it harder for offshore wind developers to set up wind turbines. In a recent

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Find “Japanese” in this chart. Fascinating paper about the role of written technical knowledge in Japan’s rapid industrialization.

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@juhreka13

Reka Juhasz

2 months

Happy to see our WP w Shogo Sakabe and @deweinstein (so many years in the making!) out. We examine the role of codifying knowledge in the spread of the Industrial Revolution. A little thread. 1/N

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Kyle Chan

2 months

India’s Finance Minister and Chief Economic Adviser signal more openness to Chinese FDI. If this happens, India should negotiate hard to get Chinese firms to help build up India’s supply chains. Get Chinese firms to send their engineers to Indian suppliers and share know-how.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Banned Nvidia chips being sold by the hundreds or even thousands at the SEG electronics market in Shenzhen:

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Kyle Chan

5 months

There’s vertical integration. And then there’s BYD vertical integration. BYD even makes its own semiconductor chips and runs a construction company to build factories.

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Kyle Chan

4 months

India has the world’s 3rd largest aviation market. Yet only 3% of Indians fly regularly. India’s rising middle class means its aviation sector is poised to take off—along with carbon emissions. I explain why India needs a national bullet train system:

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Kyle Chan

2 months

EUV lithography technology was “pioneered in America’s national laboratory ecosystem and largely funded by Intel.” The vast majority of the supply chain is German, Japanese, or American. So how did a Dutch company end up cornering the market?

@lithos_graphein

🌿 lithos

@lithos_graphein

2 months

Everyone associates ASML, a relatively obscure Dutch company, with EUV Lithography, but here's a good list of the other companies also supporting this emerging market that made the AI era possible.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

India's Gukesh (age 17) will challenge reigning champion Ding Liren of China for the title of World Chess Champion. As someone who studies China's and India's development, I find this so unbelievably perfect.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

“One of most interesting twists in the China decoupling story is the role of Chinese firms themselves in helping to move production to places like India and Vietnam.” BYD, Goertek, Luxshare -> Vietnam Wingtech, Desay, Sunny Optical -> India “While Apple

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Kyle Chan

6 months

China’s industrial robotics market used to be dominated by foreign firms. Now it’s 45% Chinese firms. One of the largest, Inovance, is known as “Little Huawei” and was founded by a team of ex-Huawei engineers. They’re also a large maker of EV motors and have a factory in India.

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Dan Grover

6 months

Heck of a graph in FT today:

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Kyle Chan

2 months

People focus on US manufacturing jobs going overseas. But check out the huge shift in US auto manufacturing jobs from Michigan and Ohio to California and Alabama.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

China’s dominance in the “old” industries—steel, concrete, aluminum, petrochemicals—gives it an edge in the “new” industries like wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. This is what I wrote about in this High Capacity piece:

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How China's carbon-intensive heavy industry powers its clean tech industry

China's heavy industries like steel and aluminum are a huge emissions problem. Yet, they also provide key inputs into China's clean tech sector, like EVs, solar panels, and wind turbines.

www.high-capacity.com

@FlyFifer10

FlyFifer

3 months

This photo is the steel reinforcement of the base of a wind turbine, you will still have to add between 600 and 800 M3 of concrete, which is a weight of nearly 2000 tons! Once the wind turbine is dismantled, this base will forever be buried in the ground.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

One of the coolest graphs I’ve seen showing what materials go into China’s high-speed rail: • 133 million tons of steel • 561 million tons of cement

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Kyle Chan

1 year

One of my favorite slides I like to show. China set up multiple JVs with foreign train manufacturers to absorb technology and ensure competition among foreign firms for access to China's market. China's high-speed train models look almost identical to their foreign counterparts.

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Kyle Chan

7 months

In almost the same time it’s taken the US to negotiate CHIPS Act funding for semiconductor projects (still talking), Japan has approved, funded, and built a new $8.6 billion TSMC semiconductor plant.

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Kyle Chan

10 months

This is Chinese industrial policy 101. Go hard on the low-end part of the value chain, like semiconductor packaging or iPhone assembly. This creates jobs, builds domestic supply chains, and might give you a toehold for moving up the value chain.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

This is a cool paper that shows how German companies—Merck, Siemens, Infineon, etc—could play a larger role in US-led efforts to constrain China on semiconductors. But they resist because they feed into Germany’s auto industry, which is significantly exposed to China.

@steve_rolf

Steve Rolf

3 months

Our research uncovers how German chipmakers are deeply entangled with Germany's auto industry - and, therefore, with China's economy. Firms like Merck, SÜSS & Siemens are big suppliers of Infineon - which is a key supplier of Germany's big three: Mercedes-Benz, BMW, & VW. [5/7]

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Kyle Chan

2 months

The real test for Chinese EV companies is not whether they can beat US automakers in the US but whether they can beat Japanese automakers everywhere else.

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Kyle Chan

3 months

China’s dominance in rare earths today is partly thanks to partnerships with US, Canadian, and Japanese firms who shared technology as China was first developing its rare earths industry in the 1980s. From @ErnestScheyder ’s fascinating book on clean tech minerals The War Below:

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Kyle Chan

4 months

I’ll write a High Capacity piece later on why India should go all-in on bullet trains and lessons from China’s experience building its national HSR system (positive and negative lessons) drawing from my fieldwork studying railways in both countries.

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Kyle Chan

7 months

How did Chinese crane manufacturer ZPMC come to dominate 70% of the global market? 1. ZPMC builds cranes on a special island for making port equipment, reducing costs. 2. ZPMC delivers its cranes fully assembled using its own shipping fleet, saving ports from on-site assembly.

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Kyle Chan

2 months

Chinese wind turbine manufacturers produced 2/3 of global new wind capacity in 2023. 4 of the top 5 manufacturers are Chinese: Goldwind, Envision, Windey, Mingyang. But 97% of Chinese manufacturers’ installations were in China. Only 1% of Europe’s new wind capacity was Chinese.

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Kyle Chan

5 months

As Chinese EVs face obstacles entering US and EU markets through the front door, I’m closely watching their efforts to enter through side doors. Geely is the most interesting case, using its ownership of Volvo and Polestar to sell Chinese-made EVs to US and EU markets. Polestar

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Kyle Chan

3 months

A technological breakthrough, like in solid-state batteries, could come from anywhere—Japan, Korea, the US—and threaten China’s dominance in EVs. This is a point I was trying to make in my piece “Why Chinese EVs will not take over the world.”

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Kyle Chan

2 months

This is from Justin Yifu Lin on Chinese industrial policy and the Third Plenum. You don’t have to buy the explanation of Japan’s lost decades. But I do think this view is widely held among top Chinese economic policymakers:

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Kyle Chan

2 months

In the US, 3% of cars sold by GM are EVs. In China, 38% of cars sold by GM and its joint ventures are EVs or hybrids. One of GM's best-selling EVs is the Wuling Hong Guang MINIEV. It's made by GM's joint venture with SAIC and Wuling Motors and costs around $4,600 (RMB 32,800).

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Kyle Chan

5 months

Huawei is literally becoming the Apple, Nvidia, AWS, Android, HP, IBM, and Cisco of China. I guess why not have multiple national champions be the same company?

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