Tag: china

China economic reforms

Most notably, there is finally talk about reforming China’s dominant state-owned enterprises, or SOEs. These behemoths suck up the nation’s resources and crowd out the private sector, though they are bloated, inefficient and hamper the development of the economy.

i haven’t seen much discussion on this. also:

The Chinese government will ease its one-child family restrictions and abolish “re-education through labor” camps

Shanghai FTZ

the proposed Free Trade Zone in Shanghai will have huge consequences for China’s financial markets and that of the world. It will be a tax-free zone; the RMB will be fully convertible; the FTZ will have its own rules and regulations that cannot be trumped by central government; it will be legally outside the Chinese Customs, in fact a separate territory inside China; it has the effect of abolishing control over capital account investment, so allowing freedom to set up all kinds of companies and moving capital in and out of the FTZ, meaning in and out of China; it will become an international settlement center for international trade and it will allow banks within the FTZ greater flexibility in conducting business. In short, the implications of the development of the FTZ, if the pilot scheme goes smoothly, will be humongous not just for China but for the global economy.

Broad group naysayers

There are many critics of the Skycity and broad group:

  • political allies of other builders who would lose business if broad group had runaway commercial success with construction methods that are faster and lower cost
  • workers who would lose work to a more efficient pre-fabrication process
  • city officials could see fewer payoffs for buildings that are put up in months instead of years
  • china critics who want to see china fail and who want to view the construction of an audacious skyscraper as a sign that china has overextended

123km underwater tunnel

This is some cool megaengineering: a 123km tunnel to cut travel time from 8h to 1h.

Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 123km long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s 2 longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through 2 fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century. And the project will cost a whopping $42.4B, nearly 3x as expensive as Boston’s Big Dig.

The drive between Dalian and Yantai takes around 8 hours. The Bohai Tunnel would shorten that to 1 hour. The State Council will begin reviewing the completed blueprint for the tunnel as early as next week.

The Bohai Strait tunnel would be 123km long, 90km of it under water. This would exceed the combined lengths of the 2 longest undersea tunnels on Earth, the Seikan Tunnel and the Channel tunnel. The project is estimated to cost $41n. Passenger vehicles would be loaded onto rail carriages and transported at up to 250km/h, shortening driving time between Dalian and Yantai to ~40 minutes. Currently ferries between the 2 cities, which are ~170km apart, require 8 hours to make a single trip. The investment was projected to break even within 12 years.

China is overbuilding

China at some points has had investment rates of in excess of 40% of GDP. there is no investment strategy under which this is the profitable thing to do. China is using physical capital as a loss leader in order to grow cities that will produce network effects will in turn foster the human capital that really makes a country rich. In this way China has become like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, a Destroyer-of-Worlds. You can’t win a physical capital accumulation battle against someone whose plan is to overinvest and lose money on the physical capital.

this is not the whole story, but an interesting way to think about china regardless.

Shut up the seatbelt alarm

china is definitely somewhere else on the convenience – safety continuum.

Chinese drivers hate to wear their safety belts. Instead, they wear specially designed clothing to pretend they are buckled up. But that won’t stop the seat-belt reminder lights and beeps, which are all extremely annoying. It is possible to click the belt in the buckle behind your back but that is uncomfortable. It is also possible to fiddle with the electronics but that is difficult. Creative and innovative Chinese companies finally found an easy solution.

Ethics arbitrage

In China, a research project aims to find the roots of intelligence in our DNA; searching for the supersmart

it would appear that the biggest sequencing lab in the world has no qualms about research that would not pass ethics approval in the west. of course, the results of that research will not be ignored by the west, how convenient.