When China’s Industrial Policy Works — and When It Doesn’t Wei Chen and Shiping Tang @ShipingTang argue that China's industrial policy succeeds when a powerful lead agency can coordinate procurement, technology transfer, firm discipline, and research support. Excerpt from paper:

New Factful Friday up on LI! 👉China overproduced. America got the deficit. Case closed? Not so fast. 👉Run the very same arithmetic backwards: America underproduced, China got the surplus. 👉Same sum, opposite villain. 🌟An identity that can blame either side has proven neither's culpability. 👉Meet the symmetric-blame fallacy. I'm not saying the overproduction narrative is wrong. I'm saying we need a lot more thought and evidence before accepting it as true. The way it's usually put, it sounds self-evident. But it is not. linkedin.com/pulse/did-us-un… cc: @AdamPosen, @IMD_Bschool, @cepr_org, @adam_tooze, @jasonfurman, @BrankoMilan, @ChrisGiles_, @ChadBown, @CER_Grant, @jburnmurdoch, @jamescrabtree, @NIESRorg, @ezraklein, @elerianm, @erikbryn, @GitaGopinath, @gabriel_zucman, @Hugodixon, @kaushikcbasu, @k_sonin, @lugaricano, @lugaricano, @lindayueh, @MarkJCarney, @MaxCRoser, @NOIweala, @Nouriel, @NOELreports, @ojblanchard1, @paulkrugman, @politico, @agnesbq1, @DannyQuah, @RBReich, @RayDalio, @SimonEvenett, @simonjhix, @sjwrenlewis, @scottlincicome, @D_A_Irwin, @michaelxpettis

There is so much amazing, high-quality, very obviously non-partisan China influence research out there. Up until a couple of years ago, my main concern about the integrity of the Chinese influence research space was that progressives sometimes dismissed high-quality research as racist and fear-mongering when it wasn't. So I spent a lot of my time defending good China influence research from those criticisms (and calling out bad China influence research when it actually was racist or fear-mongering). In other words, I spent a lot of my time trying to be a bridge between progressive and conservatives on this issue, trying to help achieve consensus on what constitutes high-quality China influence research. But now, far and away my biggest concern about the China influence research space is the rise of this new phenomenon — the hard-right abuse of China influence research to wage a domestic ideological war against progressives and other domestic targets, using China links merely as a tool to achieve that goal. Not only does this damage the integrity of the China influence research space, it's also anti-democratic and echoes the playbook of the very authoritarians that China influence research is supposed to combat.

Shahin Vallee and I have a new piece in Foreign Affairs, arguing that the G7 (and the g7 plus) will only succeed at reducing imbalances if they reinvigorate currency diplomacy & make currency misalignments the center of international economic policy foreignaffairs.com/china/rea…