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.

The day I visited, there was also some kind of off-road 4x4 race called "Heroes of the Yellow River" going down. The event organizer said online that 500 racing teams from around the country were arriving in Hukou town for the event. Agriculture and redneck fun. Shanxi is home!

Ji County is about 90km west of downtown Linfen. Besides its apple economy, it also has the Hukou Waterfall, largest waterfall on the Yellow River and second-largest in China. That's Shaanxi on the opposite river bank.

"You don't save any for yourselves?" "Those are 20 CNY per jin. No one here pays that much for apples! You'll need a high end store in a big city." "Okay, then what do you have?" "I have red Fuji and striped Fuji. From our own orchard." "Okay fine. 来都来了. A bag of Fujis."

"Do you have Aifei, or Ruixue?" I ask the fruit vendor on the main street. (The Chinese names for Envy and Honeycrisp I know are grown here). I'm keen to finally get something other than the ubiquitous Fuji. She laughs at me. "Not here! We sell them all to the big cities!"

Ji County's entire economic and cultural identity is apples. It even bills itself as China's 苹果之乡 "Home of Apples". I'm sure other places in China claim the same though. Shanxi isn't even in the top 3 provinces for apple production... 15 kinds of apples are cultivated here.

Getting into town, probably half the buildings have been turned into temporary apple collection points. I also saw an apple exchange. Ji County is small (fewer than 90k people) but 80% of its arable land is used for apple production so production per capita is stunning.

Most of the apples were pretty roughed up, but I found some that looked basically fine and sampled a bite. Tasty. I asked the old lady nearby how much she was paying per kg for the bulk bruised apple collection and she wouldn't tell me. Trade secret?

Shanxi's "Home of Apples". A mountain of bruised apples grows in an empty parking lot in Ji County, Linfen, waiting to be turned into juice. It's getting to the end of the season for many apple planting regions, but Linfen is known for a later harvest season. Thread.

It's hard for me to comment on these ideas without going into ad hominem and personal attacks, because these are some of the most pernicious comments that can possibly be made - the idea that there's nothing for other counties to adapt or adopt from the the Chinese model of poverty alleviation or economic development because the Chinese people “saved themselves”. Ezpz. You both suck so very much - ignorant and dishonest hacks that deserve everything negative that comes your way. You value political preening and moral posturing over helping people. You would see the world suffer before daring to let the Chinese government get its due for engineering and then perpetuating the most spectacular economic rejuvenation of modern history - one that can and should be adapted where appropriate for other developing nations. For people interested a detailed look at how Chinese authorities created, refined, and improved the institutional processes that empowered economic growth in early years of reform, I strongly suggest reading How China Escaped the Poverty Trap by Professor Yuen Yuen Ang. Maybe a do a detailed book review so everyome can see what thoughtful scholarship on this important topic looks like. For more details on the last decade of targeted poverty alleviation, I recommend traveling the poorest parts of the Chinese countryside yourself and talking to people directly, because I'm not sure that book has been written in English yet. Ask people to whom they assign the credit for their improved economic situation. Ask them what processes or institutions helped make their lives better. Good or bad, they'll tell you. But you aren't going to learn about it from your office in California... Or over afternoon tea in Hangzhou.

This is just incredibly insulting and ignorant. If you believe the government has no hand in fostering the economic environment that enabled development, then it should be straightforward for every sufficiently motivated populace to do the same, right?

This is excessively and abundantly wrong. It's also deeply insulting to people in every country in the world that still struggle with poverty, because it's like you're telling them that it's their own fault for not pulling themselves out of it.

The reviews of this place had a guy complaining the noodles *weren't oily enough*. Shanxi people are built different lol

Damn Shanxi I didn't know you were moving like that

A middle-aged Chinese lady approaches me at the waterfall, phone in hand. I prep myself to take forced cheery selfies with a stranger. "Hi...I'm traveling alone too," she says awkwardly." Could you...take a few pictures of me with the waterfall?" I've never been more happy to.

Spotted in Shanghai. A courier driver is delivering a grocery order with two live lobsters. Someone is eating well tonight.

5. "Many of the things this administration does have good reasons behind them but the incompetents seem to always choose the worst possible way of doing them, with the end result sometimes leaving us in a worse position than before." This is a tangent now. But I would blame the overall breakdown of instutitional standards rather than individual incompetence. We have always had incompetent people in the system, but the prevailing institutions were generally sucessful in marginalizing them so their potential for causing real damage was limited. But something changed in the enabling environment, and now the incompetent people are increasingly elevated to positions of ultimate authority, and the systems to check them are enfeebled beyond relevance. These days, there's no accountability - on social media or otherwise - for blown forecasts or predictions. Bald illiteracy and innumeracy are no longer disqualifying. There was a time when displaying public ignorance would incur real political or professional damage. Those days are gone. We're in the post-facts era, and I'm not sure we're going back.

4. "This means the US is in a weaker bargaining position in the short- and medium- term, and it cannot take advantage of China’s long-term structural weakness that makes its “perpetual export growth” model unsustainable (they have to increase domestic demand)." In other words: "I'm actually stronger; the other guy happened to win on a technicality". 🤔 This allows for no introspection about the failures. The United States walked into a trade war assuming it had leverage on trade that it didn't have. It assumed China had reliance on exports that it didn't have. It assumed China couldn't adopt responses it turned out to be totally capable of taking. And all this was so knowable in advance. In other words, it went bady because some in the USG seemingly forgot how to use Google. Pretending China won on a technicality is loser cope. By the way, China doesn't have a perpetual export growth model. No one is even bothering to debate this because it's quantitatively false. If you aren't a tourist and have paid attention to the China econ debate sometime over the last 15 years, you'll know the core debate is whether China has an unsustainable investment-led growth model...not a export-led one.

3. "it will take longer for the world to get saturated with Chinese goods to the point they stop buying them than for the US ton start hurting real bad from the restrictions on rate earths China imposed." This is true, but not for the reason OP thinks. Rare earth export controls bite instantly, yes, but the reason it would take a long time for the world to get saturated with Chinese goods is because the flow of Chinese goods to RoW is still relatively small compared to how big it COULD be - and certainly small compared to the flow of Chinese goods to Chinese consumers. It's a big ol' world out there, and Chinese producers have now been inspired in 2025 to build nascent sales channels to markets that weren't even on their radar back in 2016. Many of them are small, or micro markets, but there are decent-sized ones too, and as we can see from the export numbers, it's clearly enough in aggregate to keep growth numbers strong. The idea pursued by Brooks et al that rising Chinese exports to new destinations is a sign of weakness is a funny backwards-thinking cope mechanism. Exports in aggregate are up. Exporters have more money in their bank accounts than they did before and their revenue sources are more diversified too. Any risk manager can tell you their vulnerabilities have decreased. And for industries that aren't consumer electronics, exports are still just the "cherry on top" of their domestic revenue (which is the actual ice cream sundae).

2. "Beijing can’t risk a deflation at home because a serious drop in production would mean unemployment and very many unhappy people." Reality is more nuanced than this boring old trope. Employment is important, but so is sector health. Multiple times before, China has shown itself willing to restructure entire industries, creating unemployment, for the improvement of sector health overall. In 2015/16, the Supply-Side Structural Reform program was expected to lead to 1.8 million job losses in the steel and coal sectors. This was forecasted and planned for. It was pursued nonetheless, because it was deemed to be necessary and healthy for the sector. Since 2021, the Three Red Lines policy aimed at curbing bad debt in the real estate sector has contributed to a real estate downturn that has trimmed probably a third of the 30M jobs that existed in real estate construction back in 2020. Many were likely absorbed by green infrastructure. This was surely expected in advance. It went ahead anyway. China worries about unemployment as much as other countries do, but is still able to made hard choices when they are seen as necessary. The idea that China is uniquely vulnerable or susceptible on exports because it can't risk shuttering production over fear of unemployment is a naive one. It's also a non sequitur in this conversation, since Chinese productive employment is less reliant on export demand anyway. reuters.com/article/business…

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.