Executives may not be interested in Marxism-Leninism, but Marxists-Leninists are deeply interested in businesses. Companies are thus starting to think of China as a weird creature: one-third the China of old, which showers riches on the savvy; one-third Japan, an enormous market that won’t deliver booming growth; and one third Russia, a country one must potentially depart from in a hurry.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Sometimes commentators will launch a tendentious debate on whether China is capitalist or socialist, state-driven or market-driven. It is never one or the other, of course. Contradictory slogans like “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” allow the party wide scope for ideological maneuver. Beijing’s habit is to announce several mutually-incompatible policies to simultaneously pursue, tweaking priorities as it goes along.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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Over the last seven decades, China has experienced lengthy periods of stability punctuated by government-triggered chaos. The Chinese state is usually levelheaded; but every so often it succumbs to a manic episode, in which it grips the population, not relenting until it has shaken them out of their pots for backyard steel furnaces, out of their schools for class struggle, or out of their minds for dynamic zero clearing.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter

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