The Curious Engineer

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The Tangled Woof

andrewbatson.com

Andrew Batson's blog. Musings on China, books, economics, jazz, history, and other stuff of interest.

Society / politics / economyMusicHistoryEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
468 from 29 May 2001 to 1 Aug 2026
Posting
now and then (4 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 1

  1. Real talk about the exchange rate

2025 12

  1. The best music I heard in 2025
  2. The best books I read in 2025
  3. China bows to de-industrialization
  4. Exams are everything in China
  5. First explorations in Indian classical music
  6. Historical trajectories of local government in India and China
  7. Who believes in China’s output gap?
  8. Readings on India
  9. India and the invidious comparison with China
  10. Robert Louis Stevenson, essayist
  11. Revolution, reaction, reform
  12. The death of a scientist

2024 6

  1. The best music I heard in 2024
  2. The best books I read in 2024
  3. What I’ve been listening to lately
  4. Eileen Chang on China
  5. China’s moment of flux: a podcast with Jude Blanchette
  6. 2023 blogging in review

2023 29

  1. The best books I read in 2023
  2. The best music I heard in 2023
  3. The education of Li Keqiang
  4. The fiscal consequences of a unitary state
  5. Max Weber on journalists
  6. What I’ve been listening to lately
  7. China wants those low-end industries after all
  8. The political position of the private sector
  9. Stimulus is never just temporary
  10. What I’ve been listening to lately
  11. The persistence of markets under Mao
  12. Peak globalization and China’s EV exports
  13. Some cadres cannot keep up
  14. Fear drives industrial policy
  15. Breaking down China’s manufacturing
  16. What I’ve been listening to lately
  17. Modern central banking in the modernization drive
  18. Beijing Q&A on growth and security
  19. Xi’s new growth synthesis
  20. Searching for Xuanzang
  21. How Chinese ruined a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun
  22. Pragmatism as ideology
  23. The political economy of financial discipline
  24. What I’ve been listening to lately
  25. Re-de-industrialization
  26. A podcast with David Kimberley
  27. The polarization of global R&D spending
  28. Interpreting China’s policy reversals
  29. Naming the blog

2022 26

  1. The best music I heard in 2022
  2. The best books I read in 2022
  3. The Jiang Zemin Consensus
  4. What I’ve been listening to lately
  5. It only looks like ideology from the outside
  6. Watching the gap between rhetoric and reality
  7. What was the Cold War, and is it over?
  8. What will self-reliance mean for China?
  9. Surpassing America
  10. What I’ve been listening to lately
  11. China’s housing crisis is an institutional crisis
  12. The strange case of China’s self-employment statistics
  13. Lessons from Hall Overton
  14. Robots in Chinese literature circa 1902
  15. What’s unprecedented about China
  16. The lived experience of market orders
  17. State capacity and the income tax
  18. What’s behind China’s boom in company formation?
  19. Hong Kong in 1945
  20. Why GDP growth targets are underrated
  21. The science fiction of social stagnation
  22. What I’ve been listening to lately
  23. What happened to common prosperity?
  24. Reviving and reversing the Sino-Soviet trade bloc
  25. Socialist, capitalist, Leninist: what to call China?
  26. The virtues of competition among states

2021 27

  1. The best music I heard in 2021
  2. The best books I read in 2021
  3. What I’ve been listening to lately
  4. The consensus on centralization
  5. Mobilization and modules: what’s changing in China
  6. What I’ve been listening to lately
  7. Some facts about China’s state capitalism
  8. Industrial policy, but for the whole society
  9. Contributing to common prosperity is compulsory
  10. Vogel vs. Soros on Xi vs. Deng
  11. China in the 2020s is not France in the 1960s
  12. Food security and structural transformation
  13. What I’ve been listening to lately
  14. The deep roots of China’s financial conservatism
  15. China census reveals the true scale of the Northeast’s decline
  16. Demographics might change everything for China–except the growth model
  17. What I’ve been listening to lately
  18. China’s fiscal policy and the new rhetoric of inequality
  19. Malthus reconsidered
  20. Misunderstanding Malthus’ mistake
  21. The definitive book on China’s industrial policy is also free
  22. What I’ve been listening to lately
  23. Is China experiencing an advance of the state sector?
  24. Reading “China’s Great Boom as a Historical Process”
  25. My upcoming talk “at” the University of Washington
  26. What makes China want growth
  27. The wisdom of the village Party secretary

2020 20

  1. The best music I heard in 2020
  2. The best books I read in 2020
  3. Will China target inequality next?
  4. The upcoming Westad-Chen book on China’s long 1970s
  5. What I’ve been listening to lately
  6. The reserve army of rural labor
  7. Zhu Rongji nostalgia and Li Peng’s legacy
  8. What would it have cost China to support household incomes?
  9. Battling bureaucrats: an appreciation of *The Sandbaggers*
  10. What I’ve been listening to lately
  11. China’s security fears and the Cold War economy
  12. China’s grassroots market liberals
  13. Daqing and the resource curse under socialism
  14. Xi Zhongxun’s failed attempt to moderate land reform
  15. Why China isn’t sending money to everyone
  16. A Lee Konitz memorial playlist
  17. The coronavirus crisis and China’s inequality
  18. What I’ve been listening to lately
  19. The theater of state power
  20. Who won the battle of ideas in China?

2019 44

  1. The Coasian argument for duplicate investment
  2. The best music I heard in 2019
  3. What Xi Jinping thinks about development economics
  4. The best books I read in 2019
  5. Capacity to transform
  6. The afterlife of Marx’s footnote on Chinese currency
  7. A very fine reallocation of resources
  8. What I’ve been listening to lately
  9. Who deserves the Nobel for China’s economic development?
  10. Rawski on the costs built in to China’s system
  11. Kindleberger on the loss of technological leadership
  12. Housing and the Chinese middle class
  13. What I’ve been listening to lately
  14. What triggered the China backlash?
  15. Logistics and the demand for empire
  16. Does China have an ideological “red line”?
  17. Gu Mu, China’s champion of export discipline
  18. What you can see from the high speed train to Beijing
  19. There is no problem with small business lending in China
  20. A European inspiration for Chinese decentralization
  21. Three ways of looking at China and its history
  22. What I’ve been listening to lately
  23. Is state ownership turning into a core interest for China?
  24. The Simurgh fable of democracy
  25. Arguing about infographics with Galileo
  26. The difference between the new and old Cold Wars
  27. What I’ve been listening to lately
  28. Yasheng Huang on historic human capital in China and India
  29. The Belt and Road is about domestic interest groups, not development
  30. William James on the value of doctorates and diplomas
  31. Rediscovering the importance of export discipline
  32. Oliver Sacks on the nineteenth century’s love of facts
  33. How much did outside advice really change things in Russia and China?
  34. The Dave Hutchinson view of Europe grows increasingly plausible
  35. What I’ve been listening to lately
  36. The underrated role of fear in economic development
  37. How plausible is the China in Kim Stanley Robinson’s *Red Moon*?
  38. On atheism and the objective understanding of society
  39. Does the state still love state-owned enterprises even after they’re not state-owned anymore?
  40. A preview of Nick Lardy’s new book *The State Strikes Back*
  41. What I’ve been listening to lately
  42. What will it take to lower China’s investment rate?
  43. Xi vs. Stalin: What drives the reversal of economic reforms?
  44. The origins of the Communist party-state dual structure

2018 44

  1. The best books I read in 2018
  2. The best music I heard in 2018
  3. The world’s most unproductive entrepreneur
  4. What I’ve been listening to lately
  5. Ideology and the sources of policy error
  6. The US-China trade war as a conflict of values
  7. Gessen on Shalamov: “It was nothing personal. Just the twentieth century.”
  8. What I’ve been listening to lately
  9. Seizing the moment for artificial intelligence: my take on the US-China rivalry
  10. A novelist’s view of China’s rise, from 1983
  11. Are giant factories a symptom of labor repression?
  12. The Newcastle shipyards in world history
  13. What I’ve been listening to lately
  14. What surprised Pieter Bottelier about Chinese economic history
  15. Lessons from watching *Dying to Survive*
  16. Making sure our expectations for the future are sufficiently weird
  17. Nick Lardy on the crowding-out of private investment
  18. Varlam Shalamov’s prose of the future
  19. Richard Bush on Xi vs Trump, or, who is the real Maoist?
  20. What I’ve been listening to lately
  21. There are laws of history, and they work in China’s favor
  22. Should China be in the Global North or Global South?
  23. The size of a problem matters
  24. Pointless opinions about everything
  25. On reading ‘Alive in the Bitter Sea’
  26. A Weberian analysis of Xi Jinping’s power
  27. Chinese population controls before the one-child policy
  28. What I’ve been listening to lately
  29. Reading the Communist Manifesto with Xi Jinping
  30. The new form of hybrid institutions
  31. Timothy Snyder rehabilitates the state
  32. What is changing about the rule of the Chinese Communist Party?
  33. What I’ve been listening to lately
  34. Mudde & Kaltwasser on populism
  35. Centralization and the crisis mindset
  36. Symptoms of pseudoreform at the National People’s Congress
  37. How Chinese Communism is like religion: an anthropological analogy
  38. A close encounter of the Sun Ra kind
  39. What I’ve been listening to lately
  40. When will an objective history of China’s 1950 land reform be possible?
  41. Some of Marx’s earliest critics were right on the money
  42. Why was Kornai wrong about the sustainability of China’s market socialism?
  43. Toward a history of the siege of Changchun
  44. Privatization, growth and inequality in Russia and China

2017 65

  1. My year in blogging, 2017
  2. The best books I read in 2017
  3. The best music I heard in 2017
  4. Tianjin’s 1955 campaign to expel rural migrants
  5. Chinese economic history as seen through eyeglasses
  6. What I’ve been listening to lately: clarinet choirs
  7. Westworld in China anecdote of the day
  8. The spectacle of businesses begging to be beggared
  9. Thoughts prompted by an interview with CKGSB
  10. Which Chinese provinces are most dominated by state-owned firms, updated
  11. The 1917 October Revolution lives on in China
  12. SDR inclusion as commitment device
  13. What I’ve been listening to lately
  14. Hong Kong’s war of attrition against street hawkers
  15. The great stagnation of Hong Kong
  16. Zhou Tianyong says 100 million people have missed out on urbanization
  17. Why Siberia is not like the American frontier
  18. My guide to the debate raging over China’s Northeast rust belt
  19. Should hukou system reform focus on rural land rights?
  20. Anton Chekhov, the investigative data journalist
  21. Will centralizing power solve China’s economic problems, or worsen them?
  22. Is the Manchurian Recession over?
  23. What I’ve been listening to lately
  24. How the Soviet Union tried to control the growth of large cities
  25. Mapping China’s 19th century provincial incomes
  26. Is China making the right tradeoff between short term and long term growth?
  27. The historical roots of China’s industrial clusters
  28. Francis Spufford on ethics and economics in colonial America
  29. How long was China Communist?
  30. There never was a man named Vladimir Ilich Lenin
  31. Reinhard Bendix on the economic dilemma for nationalist politicians
  32. The divergence over the Great Divergence is narrowing
  33. Welcome to the land of soft openings
  34. What I’ve been listening to lately
  35. Why most older Chinese women do not work
  36. When provinces fought back against reform
  37. On Nightfall, What It Is, and Whether It Falls on Us
  38. The socialist urbanization series
  39. Soviet urbanization was highly coercive
  40. Friedrich Engels is still shaping Chinese cities, 120 years after his death
  41. In Beijing’s population cap, echoes of the Maoist and Soviet eras
  42. “Impatient with ordinary sunsets”: Eve Babitz’s one-liners
  43. Somehow I’m not surprised that Chinese housing subsidies also mainly benefit the better-off
  44. New industry clusters are springing up in the same old places
  45. What is the real driver of the Russian revanche?
  46. Ren Zhiqiang has an acerbic take on Xi Jinping’s urban planning
  47. Nobody is worried about South China anymore
  48. Layoffs and the limits of state-enterprise reform
  49. What I’ve been listening to lately
  50. Is it too late for China to reverse the over-concentration of elite education?
  51. So far, my favorite book about the 2016 election is one that came out in 2014
  52. Fu Chengyu’s frank talk on SOE reform
  53. The continuing relevance of Kornai for China
  54. What happened to the Chinese arguments for inland infrastructure investment?
  55. The real story of how China took over the world of metals
  56. Japan’s WWII war machine did not have enough machines
  57. The lasting influence of “Kornai fever” in China
  58. Xi Jinping is a giant Deng Xiaoping fanboy
  59. What I’ve been listening to lately
  60. How the anti-capitalist Cultural Revolution led to the revival of capitalism
  61. The debate over the alleged higher education glut in China
  62. Are Xi and Trump really so different?
  63. Who lost the battle for Manchuria?
  64. China raises its target for private-sector hospitals
  65. How stoves and lamps led to a turning point in China’s reforms

2016 91

  1. My year in blogging, 2016
  2. The Soviet Union’s pivot to Asia
  3. Cormac McCarthy’s contribution to the theory of increasing returns
  4. The best music I heard in 2016
  5. The best books I read in 2016
  6. Can economics offer more than a counsel of despair to struggling places?
  7. What I’ve been listening to lately
  8. The practitioner’s view of economic development: “We do what we must and then adjust as we go along”
  9. The American left has a surprising new enthusiasm for states’ rights
  10. Zhao Lingmin on the roots of Chinese elite support for Trump
  11. China’s Northeastern Rust Belt is headed for demographic crisis
  12. Still waiting for signs of real centralization in China
  13. The most famous Swede of his age
  14. The Politburo wants to fight regional inequality, but does it have the right tools?
  15. What I’ve been listening to lately
  16. Can our imagination cope with the inevitability of inequality?
  17. Jürgen Osterhammel unearths the “prehistory of the present day”
  18. If Chinese investment declines, will savings decline too?
  19. If you think China has an SOE problem, take a look at Russia
  20. Some surprising continuities in Chinese economic history
  21. Why didn’t I read René Girard in Anthropology 101?
  22. What I’ve been listening to lately
  23. Regional convergence has stalled, says The Economist
  24. Daring to sympathize with China’s unhappy police
  25. Those waiting for the demise of the nation-state may be waiting for a while
  26. Which Chinese people are more likely to marry foreigners?
  27. What not to expect from Chinese SOE reform
  28. How a Shandong grocery store’s accounts unlocked China’s 19th century economic history
  29. About that China infrastructure paper that is making the rounds
  30. Saying rude things about ‘supply-side structural reform’
  31. Good China stories that I missed in the summer doldrums
  32. The Hirschman explanation for China’s egalitarian turn
  33. What I’ve been listening to lately
  34. Regional convergence versus regional aid
  35. Some light summer reading
  36. Stalin and Mao are not making a comeback, but nationalism sure is
  37. Was actually existing socialism really an egalitarian system?
  38. The resource curse is alive and well in Mongolia
  39. Is China’s growth now increasing rather than reducing global inequality?
  40. The return of the random Sun Ra title generator
  41. The brief renaissance of Chinese market economics in 1961
  42. The case against targets in healthcare liberalization
  43. Is there are an ideological divide over China’s regional divide?
  44. When “It’s the economy, stupid” falls short
  45. Three books on Russia
  46. What I’ve been listening to lately
  47. Why targets make sense for healthcare liberalization
  48. What is socialist about “socialism with Chinese characteristics”?
  49. Explaining catch-up growth with China and commodities
  50. What is nationalism anyway, and why is it so powerful?
  51. Freeing up China’s service sector: the why and the how
  52. Of ice cream and industrial restructuring
  53. What I’ve been listening to lately
  54. Deng Xiaoping was an outstanding Chinese nationalist
  55. Inertia is not helping China’s inland provinces
  56. Saving labor isn’t everything: charts on capital in China
  57. What Xi Jinping really said about Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong
  58. A new variation on the hex grid tile map of China
  59. Benedict Anderson on the classical heritage and nationalism in Europe vs Asia
  60. The salt monopoly and the purpose of state-owned enterprises
  61. The next book I want to read about the Chinese internet
  62. What I’ve been listening to lately, International Jazz Day edition
  63. Why is China not a “transition economy”?
  64. A Singaporean perspective on American and Chinese nationalism
  65. Is steel excess capacity a symptom of China’s system, or of its size?
  66. Where is Chen Yun when we need him?
  67. The raw material of urbanization: recommended readings on steel
  68. Winter has come: the state of steel in China
  69. What I’ve been listening to lately
  70. Did Australia invent central bank transparency?
  71. Unpacking the many consequences of China’s housing boom
  72. Can China deliver a consumer-focused fiscal stimulus?
  73. Who is Lev Gumilev?
  74. Unconstrained experiments in 21st century state capitalism
  75. Go read “China’s two-speed economy”
  76. Mapping China: The spread of the nominal growth slowdown
  77. Is the People’s Daily jumping on the data journalism bandwagon?
  78. A prediction about Chinese agriculture
  79. What I’ve been listening to lately
  80. Along with many other things, ‘Spotlight’ is about the joy of figuring stuff out
  81. Mapping China: The Soviet influence in the 1950s
  82. Why are Chinese policymakers so fixated on Japanese toilet seats?
  83. Reluctant pioneers on China’s northern frontier
  84. The most instructive comparisons are those that surprise
  85. The geopolitical effects of China’s slowdown
  86. What I’ve been listening to lately
  87. Is China’s slowdown really so hard to understand?
  88. Manchuria rediscovers the resource curse
  89. Some excellent points about state-owned enterprises
  90. China’s size matters. But do we understand just how it matters?
  91. The African drone manifesto

2015 73

  1. Geoff Ryman’s science fiction for development economists
  2. A portrait of a Beijing park
  3. Tibet’s Potemkin economy
  4. More on the Manchurian Recession
  5. The best music I heard in 2015
  6. What will China do about its zombie companies?
  7. The best books I read in 2015
  8. Looking back on my first year of blogging
  9. David Moser recalls the early days of the Chinese jazz scene
  10. Lessons from Douglass North, plus an amazing GDP chart
  11. Will the New Silk Road be smooth or bumpy?
  12. Alternate economic histories: What if China had not been united?
  13. The political history of China’s economic growth targets
  14. Rocket scientists, secret cities and runaway brides: the stories behind the one-child policy
  15. Propaganda for propaganda
  16. What if innovation requires irrationality?
  17. Lost masterpieces of jazz-gamelan fusion resurface
  18. The Russian origins of Chinese economic reform
  19. An ode to the surprising complexity of Chinese ice cream
  20. Marxist numerology, or why seven workers are different than eight
  21. Mapping China: Which provinces are most dominated by state-owned firms?
  22. Du Runsheng, world’s most influential economist?
  23. W. Arthur Lewis on stagnation, slowdowns and traps
  24. The concept of progress: appreciating Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz
  25. Unirule’s caustic take on state-owned enterprise reform
  26. On regional gaps, the growth slowdown and the missing middle-income trap
  27. Are African economies doing better or worse than we thought?
  28. Why China is confusing, in one picture
  29. Coping with industrial decay
  30. Is Singapore the future of language?
  31. Some good sense on Chinese consumption
  32. The Manchurian Recession
  33. Here are 10 absolutely killer jazz albums
  34. Still wanted: some frank talk about China’s growth prospects
  35. A history of Singapore’s next 50 years
  36. Style is a special case of technique
  37. China goes after occupational licensing
  38. How state ownership came to China
  39. Is diffusion the answer to the US productivity puzzle?
  40. The real source of China’s local government money problems
  41. Is food security the untouchable “third rail” of Chinese politics?
  42. Some less desirable consequences of China’s climate-change commitments
  43. Bringing the wonders of the hex grid tile map to China
  44. Feedback between the stock market and real economy
  45. Finally, China starts to tackle the high cost of hiring
  46. What I read on my summer vacation
  47. One book, twenty views about China
  48. Risks and politics in capital account liberalization
  49. Does this plan for tackling China’s excess capacity have a chance?
  50. Mapping China: Six decades of population flows
  51. In China of the 2010s, some echoes from the 1970s
  52. Has China’s pollution held back life expectancy?
  53. Joining the Paulson Institute
  54. In the future, all economic debates will be conducted through rap battles
  55. A warning on Chinese education
  56. Jazz discoveries so far in 2015
  57. How many China predictions still hold up after 113 years?
  58. Everything you need to know about China’s slowing growth
  59. How to think about Chinese consumption
  60. Mapping China: base and superstructure
  61. Remembering the North China Herald
  62. Jeff Sachs is right about Why Nations Fail
  63. Why Chinese save, or the death of the precautionary savings hypothesis
  64. The bureaucratic theory of technological stagnation
  65. Things from the UK that I’m enjoying
  66. Feeling the elephant of state-owned enterprise reform
  67. The where and why of East China
  68. Holiday reading recommendations, Chinese New Year edition
  69. Can a closed internet be good industrial policy?
  70. Why is Justin Lin still obsessed with 8% growth?
  71. Endless maps most beautiful, China edition
  72. Is bigger really better for China’s GDP?
  73. Here’s some clear thinking about the causes of the Industrial Revolution

2014 13

  1. The best music I heard in 2014
  2. How to compete with state-owned enterprises
  3. The third wave of culinary globalization
  4. How strategic are China’s state firms?
  5. The best books I read in 2014
  6. Where to find China’s recession
  7. A French jazz discovery
  8. Find a city, find myself a city to live in
  9. The hierarchy of Chinese restaurant workers
  10. The woes of China’s mining belt
  11. What are small businesses good for?
  12. Small Business Won’t Save China
  13. Jazz genius reincarnated as Chinese electric bicycle

2013 2

  1. The best books I read in 2013
  2. The best books I read in 2012

2010 3

  1. Tech Supply Chain Exposes Limits of Trade Metrics
  2. Rising Wages Rattle China’s Small Manufacturers
  3. China Starts Looking Beyond Its Era of Breakneck Growth

2009 2

  1. China Inc. Looks Homeward as U.S. Shoppers Turn Frugal
  2. China Takes Aim at Dollar

2008 2

  1. China Bets Highways Will Drive Its Growth
  2. China’s Rebuilding Effort Takes On Breakneck Pace

2007 5

  1. Dissent Slows China’s Drive For Massive Dam Projects
  2. Communists Move to Adapt Their Rule to a Richer China
  3. China Tightens Local Oversight; Crackdown Aims To Enforce Safety, Environmental, Labor Rules
  4. China Reconsiders Fairness Of Transplant Tourism
  5. As China’s Bishops Die Off, Clash Looms With Vatican

2006 2

  1. For Chinese Tycoon, Solar Power Fuels Overnight Wealth
  2. China’s Rise as Auto-Parts Power Reflects New Manufacturing Edge

2001 1

  1. Rivals of China’s Postal Service Claim Unfair Competitive Practices