Hi! I often tweet long threads about China's energy sector, mostly grid, renewables, and nuclear. This is a master collection of my favorites, from oldest to newest. I will add more as they are created and remove oudated ones.

Chinese households have spent decades allocating more income away from consumption, even as incomes continue to rise. Why? Part 1 of my new essay explores the complex relationship between property, balance sheets, confidence, and consumption in China. feelingthestones.com/p/the-c…

That adaptive difficulty mechanism is no joke. Humbling!

This framework for viewing the Chinese cleantech sector has broader implications for understanding the health of many sectors across the Chinese economy - and their investability. When the political economy has been optimized around delivering consumer benefits at the expense of producer margins and their market power, the typical metrics of producer performance like stock prices or market caps become less valuable indicators of productivity or competitiveness. China has multiple companies that, judged on tech, scale, market position, and strategic importance, would enjoy massively higher valuations in a different political economy. Their valuations are held down by the (correct) expectation that much of the value they create will ultimately accrue to buyers rather than shareholders. If you assume the objective function of the system is shareholder value maximization, then a system that compresses producer returns by design is (understandably) going to be pretty unattractive. You don't have to play. But also resist the urge to evaluate the system's performance according to a metric it's not optimizing for.

Do not follow this advice, unless you want to be wrong. Chinese officials concurrently hold positions within both the Party and the PRC government. If you don't know the difference, you aren't qualified to comment. Xi's proper top title within the Party is the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. There is no "Chairman of the Communist Party" (this role was abolished in the 1980s). In Chinese, it would be 习总书记, i.e. "General Secretary Xi" although you'd typically only see this used in readouts or summaries of Party affairs specifically. If we're being precise, Xi could be correctly referred to as "Chairman" in his capacity as leader of either the Central Military Commission or National Military Commissions (i.e., the Party one or the State one; he is Chairman of both) but we know that is not the intention here. Because Chinese leaders almost always travel abroad in their capacity as PRC state leaders, and not Party officials, it's correct on his visit to the US to refer to him by his state leader title, which is President of the PRC, 国家主席 or just President Xi. Typically the only time he would travel abroad with his title of General Secretary (and not just as the PRC President) is for explicit Party business, for example party-to-party exchanges in Vietnam. If you wanna be a pedantic twit, don't half-ass it. You'd think a former diplomat would be more sensitive to the precision of diplomatic protocol.