This, combined with the absolute imperative to keep the grid balanced, can create negative prices, which have become common in China’s heavily populated Shandong Province.

But instead of just suffering or firing up diesel generators, millions of Pakistanis installed solar panels to free themselves from the grid. The country imported so many Chinese solar panels that the grid as a whole began to fall into what is called a death spiral. Customers started opting out, leaving the grid to charge ever higher prices, which led even more people to flee, and so on.

The duality of globalization.

The Chinese government has tried to get supply under control by pushing the strongest polysilicon firms to form a cartel and squeeze out lesser players who refuse to exit the market. But so far, this seems to be a long shot.

Very wild and fantastical timeline we’re in.

In 2018, the city of Shanghai lured Tesla in to build a gigafactory with what seemed like an especially attractive offer. For years, foreign automakers like Ford, GM, Volkswagen, and Toyota had dominated the Chinese car market—the world’s largest—but were required to form joint ventures with Chinese firms for the privilege of doing business in the country. Shanghai told Tesla it could fully own its Chinese operations. Subsidies for land and cheap loans were proffered as well.

Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory was completed in 168 days. It quickly became Tesla’s largest in the world. And it was fed by a network of local component suppliers that cropped up around it. The only problem—for Tesla, anyway—was that those local firms eventually became the basis for a Chinese supply chain that supercharged the nascent electric vehicle sector in the country. Nearly overnight, firms like Nio and BYD were producing plug-in cars that could rival Tesla in cost and quality. As with solar, a wave of entrants battled for market share, causing profits to evaporate but giving consumers great choices at excellent prices.

The Chinese really mastered the art of using capitalist logic to benefit the people consumers.

Excellent share, thank you! One quote in particular (I have commented elsewhere) was just sublime.

the headline seems so orientalist “the chinese manage to save the world only through their sheer incompetence and lack of discipline”

Interesting article. Although it seems to me like a lot of the “chaos” described here is a product of using markets to manage distribution and production rather than central planning. Or rather, it only looks like chaos if you look at individual parts of the system in isolation through the lens of market logic, but you miss the overarching planning that is happening on national level in China. A “can’t see the forest for the trees” situation.

Without reading the article the headline and summary remind me of a sales meeting I was roped into at my previous employer.

The sales manager said sales to Chinese firms were very good in the moment, but that can change at any moment because the government is completely unpredictable. All I could do was laugh internally.