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Andrew Batson Profile picture
Andrew Batson
@andrewbatson
China research director for Gavekal Dragonomics. Aspiring blogger. Former Wall Street Journal. Places I've lived: Louisiana, Beijing, Pacific Northwest.
Nov 6, 2025 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Those bemoaning the eclipse of US manufacturing by China sometimes find comfort in the sheer difference in scale. Sure, they say, China produces a lot more stuff than the US -- but it also has roughly 10x as many manufacturing workers. 1/ Image This means that on a per-worker basis, US manufacturing still looks insanely productive: each worker produces over $200,000 in value-added, while in China each manufacturing worker produces less than $40,000 in value-added. So the US still has a productivity edge. 2/ Image
Oct 24, 2025 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Normally I would never say that there is just "one weird trick" that you need to master to understand China, but after reading the new book *The Highest Exam* I think I might nominate the exam system (gaokao) as the key that unlocks a lot of how Chines society works. Image It's a good book, short and readable, mixing together the authors' personal experiences with the Chinese educational and the results of their long careers analyzing that system. For me it was eye-opening.
Jul 28, 2025 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I went in quite ignorant to my first trip to India; imagine my surprise when I got there and everyone wanted to talk about China. Comparisons with China, implicit and explicit, lurk behind many of the debates on India's economy. So I made some charts to educate myself The big one is manufacturing, which has never taken off in India the way it did in China or the other East Asian export powerhouses. India's manufacturing share of GDP is (remarkably consistently) generally about half of China's level Image
Mar 17, 2025 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of people feel like China's "special action plan" on boosting consumption has too little action, or too much planning. These are understandable reactions, but I think misread the nature of the document, which is fundamentally political not economic. Pretty much by definition, a document issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party is not going to be a technical economic plan. Nor could a document published AFTER the government budget have any fiscal commitments not already in the budget.
Jun 1, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Interesting discussion here on the causes of China's high manufacturing share of GDP and the recent change. This is actually a question that can be answered more precisely -- here come some charts Since we know the value of manufacturing exports (~18% of GDP) and the share of domestic value-added in those exports (~80%) we can break down manufacturing value-added into the portions serving external and domestic demand Image
Dec 30, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A short thread on some China-related books read or written about in 2022 1/ Joseph Torigian's *Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion*, a historical take on Chinese elite politics, was quite thought provoking 2/ andrewbatson.com/2022/10/11/it-…
Sep 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The World Bank is now forecasting that China's GDP will grow just 2.8% in 2022. This number isn't out of line with what others are now expecting, but 2.8% is certainly a low number, so low that it was recently considered a purely hypothetical worst-case economic scenario. In its 2021 financial stability report, the PBOC ran banking-system stress tests based on various growth scenarios. In the worst one, the "severely adverse" scenario, it assumed 2.8% GDP growth in 2022. In other words, China is now actually in the severely adverse scenario.
Mar 7, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
What happened to "common prosperity"? Xi Jinping's new favorite slogan is almost completely missing from the government's official policy agenda for 2022, as presented in the documents for the annual legislative session. Li Keqiang's government work report contains exactly one mention of 共同富裕, which is rendered as "prosperity for all" in the official English translation. And it's a pretty generic statement.
Sep 17, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Everyone is trying to figure out when China's regulatory onslaught is going to end, or at least reach some kind of tradable turning point. I think we have to take seriously the possibility that it's not a quick campaign, but the start of preparations for the 2022 Party Congress. The always-thoughtful Jude Blanchette articulated the case for this in a good episode of the Sinica podcast. Relevant excerpts follow supchina.com/2021/09/16/red…
May 9, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The geopolitics of financial flows: the collapse of Australia's political ties with China has been mirrored by a reduction in financial ties, with Australian investors reducing China exposure in 2020 after years of increases. h/t to the Australian Financial Review for highlighting this interesting data
May 29, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
China's NPC session is now over, and from an economic policy perspective it is hard not to feel rather disappointed by the whole thing. Somehow I thought unprecedented circumstances would lead to some breakthroughs. But no. A thread. 1/ There was, for instance, no "big slate of market reforms." Of course there was plenty of rhetoric in support of the private sector and small businesses. The decision to extend tax breaks for them is substantive and very welcome, but temporary. 2/
Apr 27, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This piece correctly identifies the major reasons why the state share of China's economy stays high: the political pressure to keep growth high, and the resulting push of resources into sectors with high state ownership, infrastructure and real estate. Enabling all this of course is the rapid expansion of the financial sector, which is itself the sector with the highest level of state ownership. Other things being equal, rapid growth of finance, infrastructure & real estate increases the state's share of the economy.
Apr 16, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A new survey by the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University has some remarkable data on how China's SMEs fared during the Covid-19 lockdown. The charts are pretty easy to understand even if you don't read Chinese This one shows the daily revenues of SMEs from 2019 through the end of March. The collapse in transactions after the lockdown, and its failure to fully recover even by end-March, are pretty obvious.
Mar 10, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is true, but it's just as true that the existence of massive state intervention in China does not in any way support the arguments of the pseudo-socialists in the USA China in fact is irrelevant to the debate over "neoliberal" economic policies in democratic countries. China's economic policies are not the result of making rational, technocratic choices from a menu of options available to all modern mixed economies.