LGFVs are core to the story of China's economic development, and now central to many of the countries biggest challenges.

To scratch my own curiosity about them, and in hopes of adding texture to today's headlines, I explore the history of their rise and (potential) fall. It is a long and comprehensive post, and no offense will be taken should the reader choose to treat it as a source for reference material. Efforts were made, however, to make it an enjoyable read. cogitations.co/p/the-rise-and…

Criminally under-utilized resource providing most systematic overview of China's fiscal system I've seen.

A lot of data, long time horizon (1970s-present), and very in the weeds. Currently open access, authored by Peking's Lin Shuanglin. No english cites yet? General fiscal revenue (not including off-budget or other funds) has ebbed and flowed since 1978. In that year it was 30% of a small base GDP.

Then declined to just 10% prior to the 1994 fiscal reforms.

Steadily rising to nearly 25% in 2015. Now slowly dropping.

In his 2019 post "A Study Guide for Human Society," @Scholars_Stage argues that if your foray into the study of such a grand inquiry starts with big history books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, "you are doing it wrong."

I will beg to differ. A🧵on reading. scholars-stage.org/a-study-guide-… But first I agree wholeheartedly with the piece's fundamental premise: "History is the most important thing you can read."

"Why? Only a strong background in history can you tell you when writers in other fields are full of crap."

Prioritize history, deprioritize social science:

This Thanksgiving, here's something to be thankful for: The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. Despite being one of the most debated books of the last half century, few have actually read it! A shame, considering it’s one of the great books of our time.
Here, in Fukuyama’s own words, is the central inquiry of the book: “is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?”

End of History is a book of political philosophy, exploring human nature and the socio-political systems man creates.

It tries to ask and answer the question: is there a form of socio-political system which is capable of fundamentally satisfying man as man? If so, the discovery of such a system would herald the end of history in the sense of mankind’s ideological and socio-political evolution.

Understanding China's bureaucracy, its strengths, weaknesses, and peculiarities, is important. The ambitions of China's leadership runs in large part through bureaucratic facilitation, implementation & actualization.

Here's a thread of resources. Pls comment more suggestions! Theory

- Weber, Economy and Society
- Jowitt, New World Disorder
- Fukuyama, What is Governance?

Weber's modern, rational, and impartial bureaucracy is modified, per Jowitt, into a Leninist "neotraditional" variant.

Why was China’s “post-communist” transition relatively successful, esp. compared to Russia? Interesting discussion in this book of “partial reform trap” + refusal of Party to fully privatize, but a big difference, not mentioned, was there was a LOT less to privatize. When reform began in China it was arguably under industrialized. At the peak, China’s central plan only incorporated 791-1000 products.

Soviet central planners, meanwhile, had 48,000 plan positions for 12 million products. That’s a lot more fodder for oligarchs.

One of the most interesting things I've read on the Party's analysis of the CPSU's collapse.

It's very edgy, directly attacking the most popular narratives that have taken hold in the PRC.

This is an excellent find by CSIS' translation team. interpret.csis.org/translations/a… The author argues there are two main camps in China that study the fall of the USSR/CPSU.

Soviet history scholars vs Marxist theory scholars.

Over the last decade, she writes, it is the latter whose interpretation has won the initiative.

In “Against the Grain” James C Scott portrays himself as a maverick on a mission. The book is insightful and often captivating. Depending on your priors, it may be a radical reframe. But in truth, I’m not sure how novel the mission is..🧵 In brief, Scott wants to up-end received wisdom of early state development as one of clearly linear civilizational progress. Early state development, the book argues, was not only more complicated than neatly linear but, if anything, on balance a negative for human flourishing.

The year 2022, in books! My top ten:

#1 - The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville

Maybe the best book I've ever read. Brimming with insight on the human condition, in effortlessly elegant prose. I see why Wang Qishan made it mandatory Politburo reading. #2 - Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott

State's strive to create easily administrable, legible conditions ("statistics" derives from "state"), but when conjoined to an authoritarian state pursuing a "high modernist" ideology, as Scott vividly argues, tragedies unfurl.

Despite the odds (i.e. highly limited on the ground access) 2022 still produced some fascinating scholarship on China’s economy and governance.

Thread 🧵of articles published in 2022 that made an impression! I've missed a lot, so please comment/send me some of your favorites! The grid management system in contemporary China by @jcmittelstaedt journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Even small-town governance is infused with themes of Party's most recent documentary on "historical nihilism."

Top 16 of 43 "key tasks" for "defusing major risks" in this tiny town all focused on preventing "color revolutions" and ideological infiltration by hostile forces.

https://twitter.com/JonathonPSine/status/1598718147288334341

One clear difference in focus between the Party's 2006 and 2022 documentaries is not a change in Party leadership views on what caused the fall of the CPSU, but a change in what the Party deems important to emphasize to its cadres lower down the ranks.

“The Rise and Fall of Imperial China” by Yuhua Wang is a grand feat of a book. It covers an immense amount of history, undertakes extensive empirical work, and develops a powerful explanatory theory of state development..

But I have a fairly critical review of parts 🧵 The book is one in the tradition of “big history” books, striving to leverage history so as to develop a comprehensive theory that makes sense of a big chunk of the world. In this case how state's develop.

A series of documentaries on the fall of the Soviet Union by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences offer insights into the minds of Party ideologues.

History is a battleground. "Historical nihilism" is the enemy. Xi and his Party, the protagonists. jonathonpsine.substack.com/p/the-cold-win… Those who read Xi Jinping's speeches will not be surprised to learn that he is a man very obsessed with history. However, the logic undergirding his great concern with history is not often fully explained and laid out.

Almost one-half (40%) of all mankind's accumulated urban experience in traditional
societies—from the time neolithic man invented cities until 1800— is that accumulated by the Chinese who, fortunately, have kept some remarkable records of that experience. scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/hand… "The acquisition of wealth in China generally did not lead to systematic capital formation and to the deployment of resources to economic activities of the greatest return...

“it is true that Confucius considered antiquity as the repository of all human values. Therefore, according to him, the sage’s mission was not to create anything anew but merely to transmit the heritage of the ancients. In actual fact, such a program was far less conservative... than might first appear (Confucius himself played a revolutionary role in his time): the antiquity to which he referred was a lost antiquity, which the sage had to seek and practically to reinvent. Its actual contents were thus highly fluid...

Shum in Red Roulette joins the list of people pointing out that major changes ascribed to Xi actually began taking place around 06-08. "I’ve concluded that the retrenchment was inevitable. Sure, analysts can come up with all sorts of reasons why the Party regressed. The Arab Spring and the Color Revolutions sweeping across the Middle East in the 2010s scared China’s leaders. The Great Recession..." etc