Had an educational conversation with a farmer last week in the Shanghai suburbs. He approached me while I was relaxing next to one of the canals and asked me if I had ridden my bicycle there (I had). We then started chatting about agriculture in SH.

"Where are you from?"🧵 "I'm from Anhui."
"Of course, Anhui. Maybe of the people working fields in the suburbs in Shanghai are from Anhui. I noticed before all of the strawberry greenhouses have Anhui people."

"It's not just strawberries. Almost all the agricultural work in Shanghai is done by outsiders. There are many of us from Anhui. Also some Henan, but mostly Anhui."

"So do you rent the land?"
"A big boss rents the land from the Shanghai people, then they divide it into smaller plots and rent it out to us."

"Where is the big boss from?"
"Also Anhui."

"Okay, so the big boss comes in, negotiates many land lease agreements with the Shanghai people here who don't want to farm the land anymore, and then makes a business renting that last back out to you. Do you live here all year round?"
"No, we go back between planting seasons."

"Do you still have fields back in your hometown?"
"We do, but most of them are rented out to big companies, to do large-scale farming."

"So you rent our your fields back home to big companies to do large-scale farming, and then you come here to the Shanghai suburbs to do small-scale farming?"
"Yes, that's right"

"Why?"

This Economist article on China's solar industry has some problems.

I won't waste ink getting all hyperbolic about it. I'll just highlight the places where I think a healthy copy-edit could have helped the piece a lot. 🧵

https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/2060506516776505392

It is a major oversimplification to say Chinese domestic demand for solar panels is falling "because the country's power grids have become overloaded with the things".

The real challenge right now is developers and banks still figuring out how to finance and build projects without policy-backed revenue guarantees.

Domestic demand was shored up in past years by a generous feed-in-tariff (FiT) scheme that ensured stable and predictable revenues. Following the the longstanding policy trend toward liberalization, last year solar generators were shifted out of FiTs and into a Contract-for-Difference (CfD) scheme. Guaranteed CfD volumes have quotas, with non-CfD volumes expected to find customers via open markets (i.e. merchant exposure). The piece acknowledges the policy change from last year, but doesn't seem to recognize the importance.

New solar capacity growth will likely be flat or even decline YoY in 2026 because generators and financiers are still inexperienced with merchant risk and renewable consumption quotas aren't quite high enough yet to drive more long-term renewable power contracting demand (which financiers rely on).

Yes, low prices in daytime spot power markets reflect temporal oversupply, but that's largely irrelevant for investment decisions, which are built around long-term contracts, not spot markets.

This post got me thinking about the interesting way small Chinese cities self-identify vs. the city that governs them.

The Yangtze River Delta is full of small cities with strong cultural and economic identities that have weak or zero feeling of kinship with their parent... 🧵

https://twitter.com/robert_baiguan/status/2050757825937432939

I've mentioned before in other essays how discussions of Chinese cities are usually focused on prefecture-level cities (地级市).

There are 337 prefecture-level cities in China, but IMO it's more appropriate to mentally organize them as "prefectures" in English (that is, an administrative tier smaller than a province and larger than a city).

For ease of governance purposes, many cities and counties in China are grouped together into "prefectures" in ways that aren't linguistically, historically, or culturally coherent; often they are simply geographically adjacent.

In this example, Robert was visiting Fenghua, which until 2016 was a county-level city governed by Ningbo (it is now a full district of Ningbo).

If we look at the administrative map below, we can see the denser urban area of what most people would recognize as "downtown Ningbo" (Jiangbei and Zhenhai) along with a large halo of suburban and exurban regions also governed by Ningbo. This is why I prefer a word like "prefecture" to translate 地级市. These areas not continuous urban agglomerations.

This thread is a deliberately nerdy look at Chinese administrative geography, but I think the outcome is helpful for understanding why people from small cities like Yuyao might not answer a simple question the way outsiders expect, and how we can think about these cities from a development perspective when we visit.

I rented a place for 5 days in this lovely seaside apartment complex in Bo'ao, Qionghai City, Hainan.

The same housing complex also had 12 lovely, unsold luxury villas, facing the ocean.

They were obviously abandoned and unlocked, so I gave myself a tour...😁

A fun thread. 🧵 As you can see, these units were designed to be quite fancy, with 4-5 bedrooms, pools, balconies facing every direction, a vaulted ceiling in the living room, even an elevator...

This complex was completed in 2013. The apartments all sold alright. But not a single villa...

Just back from 10 days in Hainan. A few practical observations on transportation to/around the island - this seems as good a place as any to start a place review. Hope it's helpful to anyone planning a trip.

There are currently three commercial airports in Hainan: Sanya, Haikou, and Qionghai.

The first two have daily connections to pretty much any large city in China, plus a handful of international flights. Qionghai (琼海) is much smaller, with only a few flights each day, built primarily to serve visitors to the Bo'ao Forum ("Asia's Davos") which just wrapped up last week.

There is also a new commercial airport under construction in Danzhou (儋州), an industrial hub on the northwest coast, scheduled for completion by ~2030.

Bonus: If you fly to Hainan, there's a good chance you'll get to try Hainan Airlines, widely considered China's best airline. I flew in and out of Sanya Phoenix Airport, which is a rare example of an airport in China that feels undersized for its passenger load (most airports feel...very overbuilt).

There’s a brand-new Terminal 3 (opened Feb 2026) meant to ease perssure on Terminal 2 (2018) and Terminal 1 (built 1994, expanded 2011). But when I passed through, Terminal 1 still felt overloaded and disorganized - and this wasn't even peak season. March is a shoulder season before the summer lull (rain and typhoons).

But even the creaky old Sanya Terminal 1 still had better dining options than Shanghai’s Pudong, which remains an utter disgrace of a flagship international airport no matter how shiny it looks, and I will never stop hating on it until it does better.

Image: Sanya Airport Terminal 1

For my own education, I've been trying to make sense of China's industry exposure to the Iran conflict and Hormuz closure. I wanted to share what I have now:

My Level-1 taxonomy includes 5 buckets of products that are one conversion step away from crude oil or natural gas:🧵 Bucket 1: Refinery‑derived, petroleum‑based finished products (both fuels + non‑fuels)

I defined "finished refinery products" as mostly a pricing channel here. This includes the fuels: gasoline, diesel/gasoil, jet fuel/kerosene, fuel oil/bunker, and petroleum coke as well as non-fuels: bitumen/asphalt and base oils/lubes/solvents.

China refines most of its gasoline/diesel/jet fuel domestically, and has substantial policy levers (large strategic crude reserves and commercial inventories, export quotas) to stabilize local availability. The short-/midterm effect is more likely to be moderately higher costs, rather than shortages, as long as the reserves hold out (and they should be good for quite a few months). Anode-grade petcoke for aluminum smelting is a potential niche outlier here, as there is more import exposure, but that's really it.

Meanwhile, markets for non‑fuel refinery outputs like bitumen are slower‑moving and simpler to buffer via demand rescheduling and/or substitution, with moderate risk mainly via general price levels.

This is the least-concern bucket overall IMO.

China’s coal economics are shifting from "generate electricity → get paid" to a messy stack of flexibility revenues, grid services, and capacity payments.

The age of simple coal baseload cash cows is already over. But that doesn't mean it's easy to kick out coal. 🧵

https://twitter.com/CleanPowerDave/status/2021166302916698163

In a increasingly variable renewables-heavy system, only the coal plants that can ramp, cycle, and stay available on demand will survive. And the plants China's building these days are *tricked out*.

I'm talking lower minimum stable load (20-30%), faster ramping capability (in MW/minute), reduced hot/warm/cold start times, reduced start-up fuel burn, world-class fuel efficiency (<250g of coal/kWh), better thermal cycle stress management, modern DCS for better turbine/governor control and AGC tracking for ancillary revenues, ultra-supercritical heat rates...the works.

Older subcritical coal plants weren’t built for this new world. Those that can retrofit affordably will. But many can’t retrofit cheaply. They’ll be pushed out as the system prioritizes flexible, fast-response assets.

Some wonky add-on thoughts about this China green electricity/decarbonization of aluminum FT story:

1. Electrolytic aluminum smelting is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the world.

There's a joke that aluminum is "solidified electricity", and it's kinda true. 🧵

https://twitter.com/AssaadRazzouk/status/2020348532440592801

2. For this reason, globally, about half of all primary aluminum is produced using captive onsite power plants, and roughly two‑thirds of that captive capacity is subcritical coal.

This is the core reason aluminum has such a stubborn emissions profile.

nature.com/articles/s4155…

On China's Clean Energy "Morality":

There's an emerging "acceptable" way to talk about China's cleantech push: that it's less driven by altruistic intentions on climate change, and more driven by self-interest like economics, energy security, and pollution control. 🧵

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/2009796521642840424

mea culpa: I contributed to this narrative in the past to make it more palatable in media interviews. It's an easy one for China-skeptical editors and readers to accept: that this "good behavior" on climate issues is driven by self-interest that happens to be socially beneficial.

So many times, to so many people, I said things like: "what does it matter what the motivation is, as long as it works?" I wanted to emphasize the positive outcomes and so I embraced a convenient narrative that helped me get there.

Of course this works, but it's only half-true. Which uncharitably means it's also half-false. Here's why...

Did Li Keqiang really say 600 million Chinese people earn <1000 CNY a month?

No, not quite. That comment is widely misunderstood, as explained in this paywalled article from The Economist.

If you don't subscribe, I'll summarize in a thread.🧵
economist.com/finance-and-ec… So where did this number come from?

In May 2020, then-Premier Li Keqiang famously said:

"...人均年收入是3万元人民币，但是有6亿人每个月的收入也就1000元, 1000元在一个中等城市可能租房都困难..."

"Our average annual income is 30,000 CNY, but China has 600m people with a monthly income of just 1000 yuan. You can't even rent in a mid-sized city for that much".

That's the phrase that was widely misunderstood, with Li's unfortunate framing adding to the confusion. It got a lot of attention both within and outside of China.
china.huanqiu.com/article/3yQjRY…

China’s New Play for Mid-Duration Energy Storage: Carnot Batteries

On December 25, State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC), announced its prototype “Chunuo” thermal storage system had passed expert review and met its performance targets.

What is it and why does it matter? 🧵 A Carnot battery, also called a pumped thermal energy storage (PTES), is an energy storage system that converts electricity to heat and cold, then converts it back to power when needed.

Instead of using chemical reactions like lithium-ion batteries, it relies on thermodynamics.

The only thing OP should regret is misleading his followers with his clunky charts and sloppy, unsophisticated analysis.

He has sadly ignored more tactful efforts to correct these issues, so enough is enough. Time to be blunt...

Let's break it down in a long thread.🧵

https://twitter.com/robin_j_brooks/status/2004221427382436188

1. The Premise is Flawed

If we must go about assigning a silly label like "green superpower" (which IMO is really just vanity contest clickbait pretending to be analysis) then it's too narrow to define "green superpower" by what percentage of a country's power comes from renewables. This is immediately obvious when we look at the list of countries that lead the world in % of power from renewable energy today - see any superpowers in there? It's lovely to be blessed with abundant hydropower or geothermal resources, but that hardly drives global change.

China, at around 36% renewables (and rising of course) both installs more than the rest of the world combined, and exports the technology to green the power sectors of developing nations globally. If we must have this conversation, then it should acknowledge absolute volume and international impact, where China is clearly dominant...

This post going viral reminded me of an interesting bit I read recently about "rising superstars" in China among the ranks of young cadres.

To be considered a high-flyer superstar, you need to be advancing through China's political ranks at a VERY advanced pace. Let's look. 🧵

https://twitter.com/DanCollins2011/status/1989874329308316120

The best way to measure "rapid advancement" is not necessarily by the title they currently hold, but the rank within the state civil service system vs. their age.

For instance, this is Mr. Wang Bo, currently one of 7 vice-mayors of Longyan City, Fujian. He is just 38 years old.

My newest essay on Feeling the Stones comes from Linfen, Shanxi, which was infamously declared "the most polluted city in the world" by the World Bank in 2006.

But I had a different reason for visiting: I wanted to assess life in China's "most median city".🧵

(link at end) If you've followed me for a while, you'll know that for 3+ years now, I've protested the over-sampling of opinions from China's 1st-tier cities and pursued this idea of capturing China's "median zeitgest" from smaller cities.

This 2022 trip started it:

https://x.com/pretentiouswhat/status/1541753290576531461?s=20

Twitter tourist slop.

I'm not in the mood to be polite today. If you truly believe all this trash, you shouldn't be teaching; you need to be taking classes instead.

Let's break it down: 🧵

https://twitter.com/slantchev/status/1984634570353099009

1. "...the massive production, which relies on exports by design".

Meaningless. How would you prove any industry relies on exports "by design"? Unless you've got a recent planning document that says "we will develop this industry with exports in mind", how could you determine production is "designed" for exports? Words have meaning. Use them with intention.

But more importantly than whether export reliance is "by design" or not, the bigger question is: is there actually reliance? Reliance that means something - that is usable for leverage? Since this is something we can asesss quantitatively, we should be very careful about making such claims without data.

The answer is: no. In 2025, very few Chinese industrial segments rely on export demand to ANY foreign country (not just the US) to any considerable degree, expressed in terms of revenue. The major exception is consumer electronics, with a honorable mention to electrical equipment (e.g. solar panels). It wasn't always like this. In decades past, production in many segments indeed was stimulated mostly by export demand. But that's the past. The main driver of this shift is growth in Chinese consumer demand growth- they are now consuming much, much more of Chinese production than their international counterparts.

Of course Chinese policymakers would like consumer demand growth to be even higher. We see lots of signs consumption demand will be a big focus in the 15th FYP. But the longer you go on believing it's *weak*, the longer you will miscalculate re: trade and exports - sometimes catastrophically.

I've just wrapped a 10 days on the North Yunnan loop route, hitting Dali, Lijiang, Diqing/Shangri-la, and Nujiang. Some of the most beautiful places I've seen in China.

Lots of essay content from the trip coming soon, but here's a summary of the route first, 1 tweet per city.🧵 ...oh, and I'm writing this partly as a travel report/guide for others who might like to do a similar tour in the future, and partly as a foundation for the essay content that's coming next.

So I'll try to provide both travel details and some background info for each spot...

I've already seen many helpful summaries of Xi's announcements at the UN Climate Summit regarding China's new emissions goals, so I won't repeat them here. Go read them!

I will focus my analysis on the power item specifically; namely: 3600 GW of wind and solar by 2035. 🧵 This was described as a 6x escalation over the 2020 numbers. This is basically correct.

China had roughly 535 GW of wind and solar at the end of 2020 so 6x would be 3210. So actually, 3600 GW is 6.7x the 2020 numbers.

China today has roughly 1600 GW of wind and solar.

A fun thing about Chinese rivers I learned from my research last week:

This map shows the ancient courses of the Yellow River (in blue) and the now-disappeared Ji River (in red). The upper blue line the Yellow route during the Western Han. The lower is its modern path. 🧵 Actually, the Western Han route of the Yellow is one of the MANY known routes it has taken over the last 2000 years, as you can see from this image.

From 1128-1855, the Yellow spent 700+ years flowing in an entirely different direction - southeast. During that period, it merged with the Huai River near modern-day Huai'an in Jiangsu, and then traveled northeast again to dump into the ocean. The silt deposits around its estuary pushed the coastline out dozens of kilometers over those 700 years.

Involution 内卷 or 卷 doesn't have to be a hard word, but I keep seeing it misused in China commentary, e.g. this article, which I also have mixed feedback on.

Simply: Involution is the state of intense competition AND the symptoms of that competition.🧵
csis.org/blogs/trustee-… Quick history lesson:

内卷 (nei juan) is the original word for involution used today to describe a state of intense and fruitless competition. It literally translates as "inward coiling" and was borrowed from the anthropology field.

It began to see its new use in China around 2019-2020, initially as a noun. Students and young people feeling exhausted by intense competition in school, for jobs, and society in general described those environments as having 内卷.

China's National Computing+Energy Strategy:

This is the layout for China's national computing strategy. Under the "East Data, West-Computer" 东数西算 slogan, high-priority tasks are handled by local clusters, while lower-priority tasks are outsourced to the energy-rich west.🧵 According to China's renewable consumption quota policy, all new data centers in these hub regions must buy at least 80% of their power from renewable sources.

This should be no problem for the blue hubs, located in renewables-rich regions. Might be trickier for red hubs.

Oh no...🤦‍♂️

This op-ed on Chinese cleantech overcapacity and competition was in The Wire China a few days ago. Unfortunately it contains many huge errors about Chinese cleantech sectors I can't ignore.

Paywalled. I'll provide screenshots and comment. 🧵
thewirechina.com/2025/08/31/bei… [Oh, and this will be another long thread. It probably should have been a long-form essay instead, but I already wrote more than half of it before I realized how long it had gotten. Sorry in advance.]

This piece has problems immediately in the second paragraph, starting with:

"China's domestic demand for green tech has also peaked given the massive frontloading of installed capacity during the last few years, fueled by subsidies."

This has two big errors:

1. Chinese demand for green tech has not peaked, as evidenced by the steadily rising annual installed capacity figures for wind and solar. In fact, the installed capacity isn't just rising each year, but even the volume of new installs in a single year has grown every year from 2020-2024. Last year saw 277 GW of solar PV and 80 GW of wind.

Even now in 2025, with the offtake policy reforms starting from 1 June, it looks like solar is going to at least match the capacity growth from last year, while wind is actually going to EXCEED the capacity figures from last year. Domestic demand is strong. As for next year, we'll see what the market reforms bring.

2. Chinese newbuild solar and wind farms have not been subsidised for several years already now (since 2021). Over the past few years (until 1 June 2025) they were built on a feed-in-tariff (FiT) basis, which means they earn a fixed on-grid price from the gridco, independent of what's happening in power markets.

If market prices are high, the FiT may be less than the market rate. If market prices are low, the FiT may be more than the market rate. In a power market context, this is very different from a subsidy (although it could be construed as/look like a subsidy if market prices end up lower than the FiT rate for long periods).