The Xiaogang Village Contract and the Household Responsibility System, 1978
On a winter night in late November 1978, in a small village in the hills of Fengyang County in the province of Anhui, the…
23 min read
Category
Economics
China’s Accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001
On 10 November 2001, at a ministerial conference held in Doha, the capital of Qatar, the members of the World Trade Organization approved by…
23 min read
China’s Industrial Surplus and the World Economy
China now produces more than a quarter of the world’s manufacturing value added, runs the largest goods trade surplus ever recorded, and holds a…
23 min read
The Lithium Race Below the Tibetan Plateau
The Qinghai–Tibet plateau holds some of the world’s largest lithium reserves in the form of brine pools — salt lakes where dissolved lithium lies…
18 min read
The Train Factory Outbuilt the High-Speed Era
CRRC — the Chinese state rail-equipment manufacturer — is the world’s largest train maker, producing roughly half of all the world’s locomotives and electric…
17 min read
How Hon Hai Became Foxconn
On 20 February 1974, in a rented shed in Tucheng, a rough suburb of Taipei whose name means earth city and which American reporters…
20 min read
Why China Makes Everything and Britain Doesn’t
Walk through any British high street or hospital store room and the same pattern repeats. The phone, the kettle, the solar panel on the…
21 min read
How China Built Its Own Brands
In 2014 Huawei became the first Chinese company to appear in Interbrand’s annual list of the world’s 100 best global brands, at 94th place.…
28 min read
How Samsung Built the Chaebol Model
Samsung began in 1938 as a small trading shop in Daegu selling dried fish, fruit and noodles. It is now one of the world’s…
21 min read
China’s Shipyards and the Race to Catch Them
In the first half of 2026, more than four-fifths of the merchant-ship tonnage ordered anywhere in the world went to Chinese yards. By deadweight…
20 min read
The Pharmacy Behind the Pharmacy
The pill in a Western blister pack is a finished object. It has a brand, a barcode, a country of origin printed on the…
9 min read
The Parcel at the Door
On 12 February 2023, in the first quarter of the Super Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, a thirty-second film appeared twice.…
33 min read
Xiaomi Is More Than China’s Samsung
Xiaomi is a consumer-electronics company that used phones as a beachhead, built one of the world’s largest IoT ecosystems, and then did what Apple…
9 min read
Build Your Dreams
In March 2025, a battery company from Shenzhen that had once made the electronics in your laptop overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest…
11 min read
The Numbers Behind China’s EV Battery Dominance
In 2025 the world’s electric vehicles took on more than 1,000 gigawatt-hours of new battery capacity in a single year for the first time.…
15 min read
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation
HSBC began not as an abstract financial empire but as a practical response to the extraordinary commercial growth of nineteenth century Asia. In the…
14 min read
Why the Pig Matters More Than the Panda
In a refrigerated warehouse somewhere in central China, behind doors that open by government order and not very often, sits a commodity most countries…
13 min read
How China Skipped the Credit Card
Walk down a market street in any Chinese city today and you will see something that still startles visitors. The fruit vendor, the dumpling…
14 min read
China Farms More Fish Than Everyone Else
In the fifth century BC, a man who had just helped destroy a kingdom sat down beside a pond and began, of all things,…
17 min read
How China Came to Dominate Shipbuilding
At the start of the 1980s, according to a New Zealand Asia Institute study of the industry’s restructuring, China’s shipyards ranked seventeenth in the…
16 min read
China’s Railways Across Africa
Across the African continent, railway tracks stretch through mountains, deserts, crowded cities, agricultural regions and vast open landscapes, carrying passengers and freight between places…
15 min read
Why China Tops the Container Port Rankings
Open a ranking of the world’s busiest container ports and the pattern is hard to miss. Shanghai sits at the top. Ningbo-Zhoushan, Shenzhen, Qingdao,…
15 min read
How China Came to Export Its Excess Capacity
For two decades China has repeatedly built more industrial plant than its own households and builders could absorb in a normal year. Steel, cement,…
14 min read
Baowu and the Making of China’s Steel Industry
China Baowu Steel Group made about 125 million tonnes of crude steel in 2025. That was enough to keep it first in the World…
13 min read