Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Sexy Beijing is an interesting video blog / Internet TV station. The videos that I watched were well made, informative and entertaining. Here’s one about Beijing’s mass-transit system that I liked:
A little less than a year ago, I wrote a post titled Any Color as Long as it’s White, about the project at Tata Motors (India) to create the cheapest car ever built–cheaper even, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the Ford Model T. Here’s the car. See commentary from India, here and here.
And in China, a company called BYD Auto is launching a plug-in hybrid which is supposed to be available for sale (in China) this summer. Interestingly, the parent company of BYD is a battery manufacturer.
These cars won’t be available in the U.S. anytime soon, and will likely never be available in the U.S. in their present forms. There are issues of regulatory compliance, of consumer expectations, and of the need for a sales and support structure. But any U.S. auto executives who think that these announcements aren’t very relevant to them need to do some remedial reading. In their book The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor point out that disruptive innovations–those destined to change the structure of an industry–tend to attack from below. They usually first appear in a form that is in some ways inferior to the existing dominant technologies, and hence are unlikely to get the attention or respect of industry incumbents. I think it is quite likely that innovations developed by companies such as Tata and BYD–whether product design innovations or manufacturing process innovations–will in the not-to-distant future have a significant impact on the U.S. auto industry.
In my last post on China, Zenpundit mentioned that a lot of Westerners are confused about what China is and what it is not. That first post was an attempt on my part to try to create a predictive mental model for the future of Chinese politics. I did not, however, manage to cover even half of the terms I’m trying to cram into the thing. One glaring omission that Chinese people would pick up on right away is that I postulated a separate Canton in a putative breakup scenario. The truth is that there has been no strong Cantonese separatist movement since before the Republic, and currently that trend shows no sign of reversing itself. On the other hand, Canton has never in its entire history been as rich as it is now, nor contributed as much to the coffers of the North as it does today. So I weaseled out and finished with the thought that I just don’t have enough information to weight the terms in my model. Which is true.
My curiosity was piqued by Zenpundit’s post on the psychology of the Warlord, since a lot of my interest in China centers on the Republican period, otherwise known as the Warlord Era. That nomenclature is not without justification at one point in 1936 the Warlord Chang Hsüeh-liang felt empowered enough to arrest Republican President Chiang Kai Shek and order him to stop fighting the Communists and focus on the Japanese what became known to history as the Xi’an Incident. As an aside to the recent comments on this site about the length of historical memory and the importance of the Glorious Revolution to our Founders and the Civil War to our grandfathers, Chang (or more properly Zhang: å¼µå¸è‰¯) Hsüeh-liang remained under house arrest in Taiwan until 1990. He was freed upon the death of Chiang Kai-Shek’s son and successor, and died in Hawaii in 2001. This period is indeed still vivid in the living memories of Taiwan’s and China’s elites. And, as I will get to later in this post, Chang’s living memory included encounters with major actors in the Taiping Rebellion.
Certainly some of my interest in this time period is personal my father-in-law was a teenage GMD soldier of that era. However, the rest of my interest centers on the post-nation-state character of Warlord conflicts. It is not out of the realm of possibility that China could degenerate once again into regionalism in our lifetimes.
In the spirit of Dan’s latest photo post, here is a Flickr page with some marvelous recent photos of Chinese cities. (I don’t know who the photographer is. I found a link to his site on a photo discussion board that I visit.)