From time to time, I accumulate a critical mass of material worth mentioning, but that I cannot turn into full-fledged articles or reports. So this week, I wanted to share with you interesting links, graphs, articles, and reports.
China
BYD’s Founder Story
First a very interesting & short biopic on Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD, increasingly the winner of the great Chinese EV war, and the trigger for panic among automakers in the West.
Almost as if selling decent cars (EV or not) for $12,000 could shine a light on how unproductive Western industrial companies have become…
No official biography exists apparently, which is a pity considering the man’s early life and later achievements:
His father made his living as a carpenter. His mother was a stay at home mom, taking care of the eight children. Wang’s father died when he was 13. His mother died when he was about to graduate from junior high. The family fell on hard financial times during these years, so his older brother dropped out of high school to work and support the family. Meanwhile, Wang’s five older sisters were married off and his younger sister was given up to foster care.
Underpinning all these events is the division between two distinct parts of China.
One part is the well-to-do, educated, liberal, cosmopolitan, younger, critical, investor/capitalist China.
Another one is the low-income, traditional, less-educated, less-informed, unquestioning, small-town, and relatively older China.
I speculate they are only 10% (plus and minus 5%) of all Chinese people. So they are (only) around 80m - 200m. At the high end of this estimate, they are greater in number than any nation in Europe and even comparable to the size of the entire United States. But it’s only just 5%-15% of the population.
By definition, “Liberalist China” is what outsiders interact with (in >99% of cases) when dealing with China, simply because “Liberalist China” is more able to communicate externally.
… urban elites should be careful about what they wish for. If China were a 1-man-1-vote system, "you thought we would elect a Ronald Reagan, but in fact you will only get a Hugo Chavez", stoking and capitalizing on strong populist sentiments. Such is the reality in China and how the 基本盘(the “core constituency”) looks like.
The Supreme People’s Court and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security published a lengthy essay Friday about labor violations and unreasonable overtime, labeled ‘996’ because of the common practice of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
China’s tech giants are grappling with public outrage over their grueling schedules, a backlash fueled by a growing chorus of complaints on social media and even deaths. Tech billionaires from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder Jack Ma to JD.com Inc. chief Richard Liu have long endorsed the practice as necessary for survival in an intensely competitive industry -- and the key to accumulating personal wealth.
The controversy over long working hours was fueled earlier this year by the deaths of two workers at Pinduoduo Inc. One woman collapsed while walking home with colleagues at 1:30 a.m. and could not be resuscitated, while another employee committed suicide.
Internet companies including ByteDance Ltd. and Kuaishou Technology have in recent months taken initial steps to dial down working hours.
China can aim to approve as many as 10 new nuclear reactors a year to accelerate its rapid expansion of capacity
Three or four new reactors will be added to the national fleet this year to take China’s capacity to about 60.8 gigawatts, according to Lu Tiezhong, chairman of China National Nuclear Corp.
For reference, the previous, “slow” plan was to build up to 6-8 reactors a year, on top of the 37 reactors built in the last decade. So now the plan is to triple the speed of the previous build, which was one the largest ever.
In this article in American Affairs, you will find an honest discussion of the limitations of using GDP to understand military power. A few exerts:
A dollar of GDP generated by a casino is fundamentally different from a dollar of GDP generated by extracting oil. Since economies like China and Russia have far larger mining and manufacturing industries, their relative economic importance is far greater than even a PPP-adjusted GDP figure shows.
Let us examine Russia and the United Kingdom. If we look at the military expenditure in raw dollar terms, we will conclude that Russia and the United Kingdom are relatively similar in terms of military power.
a modern Russian 3M22 Zircon anti-shipping missile has a top speed of around Mach 9, or 6,900 miles per hour!
A credible case can be made that a ship could defend itself against one of these missiles. A credible case could even be made that it could defend itself against ten of them. But what about a hundred or a thousand? At a certain point, it becomes prima facie illogical to make the case that a large ship can defend itself against hundreds of anti-shipping missiles moving at Mach 9.
Yet it may be possible to come up with a market value, or something resembling one, and the case of the anti-shipping missile might give us a hint of what that might be. A piece of weaponry is only as valuable as it is potentially successful on the battlefield.
Under conventional military procurement, if an arms manufacturer could convince a government to purchase extremely well-constructed trebuchets with expensive aiming technology for millions of dollars, the prices of those trebuchets would be millions of dollars. But that would not stop the trebuchets from being worth exactly nothing on the battlefield. Their stated price may be millions of dollars, but their value would be zero.
from 2005 to 2020, the number of Chinese suppliers in the U.S. defense-industrial supply chain has quadrupled. And third, between 2014 and 2022, American dependence on Chinese electronics increased by 600 percent.
At the government and DoD’s behest, defense OEMs have enthusiastically pursued lean production and financial efficiency, delivering weapons systems just-in-time from deliberately minimalist production lines to a military which has kept its inventories as small as possible.
And Some Laugher
And last, a very nonsensical video that even just 5-6 years ago would have been an obvious comedy sketch.
Better to laugh about it I guess.
The pitch?
In the middle of an enemy naval blockade & US Navy failures in Yemen, the ongoing collapse of Ukrainian defense lines, ammunition shortages, the threat of global nuclear war, a trade war with China, and the escalating civilian death toll in Gaza, the US military top brasses bring their rightful gaze toward the solution (follow the link for the 1min video):
