Top all-time · #9249
Patrick Chovanec
Personal blog · chovanec.wordpress.comeconomicspolitics
Patrick Chovanec's personal blog at chovanec.wordpress.com covers economics and politics. Since 2010, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. The last post was in 2013, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Patrick Chovanec's blog, written by a Tsinghua University economist, for analysis of China's financial situation, including credit, shadow banking and questionable growth figures.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
An American Perspective from China
What Hacker News says?
Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most is…
Comment linking /2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-leadership-transition/
on “Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia”Submitted Going After Google as a story · 49 points
HN discussionThe Communist Party of China will only allow large corporations to function insofar as they retain some control over their operations, even if that control is only occasionally utilized. The degree of guanxi necessary to succeed at the less formal regulations present in China is at a minimum that a Party member gets some degree of control - and their loyalty is not to the company, but to the party, like a political…
Comment linking /2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-leadership-transition/
on “All the Western companies you’d have to combine to get something like Alibaba”Submitted China: Economy on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBeyond being impressed by Taobao's scale, I would caution HN readers not to fall into the trap of thinking about China as a monolithic unit. Assuming that China is homogenous is just as foolish as assuming America is homogenous. Taobao's success is also tied to their ability to understand the drastic cultural differences between different areas of the country, and understanding how to market to these "countries with…
Comment linking /2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-of-china/
on “Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD”Submitted China-Japan Rare Earth Fracas Continues as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wish it weren't true, since any economic collapse has global implications, but they've dug themselves into a serious hole and haven't made any drastic moves to pull themselves out. Numerous sources (and much better explanations of China's precarious financial situation) are in this post http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/china-data-part-1a-... It's a blog by an American economist who teaches at Tsinghua Univ…
Comment linking /2011/12/24/china-data-part-1a-more-on-property-downturn/
on “Go East, Young Man”There's an economist from Tsinghua University named Patrick Chovanec who used to do an amazing job of documenting China's explosive growth and the many ways in which it might have been artificially inflated (easy credit, shadow banking, fudged numbers, empty skyscrapers, etc.). His blog is still up, but unfortunately he switched from blogging to Tweeting in 2013 and it's been impossible to follow his train of though…
Comment linking /2009/09/23/big-losses-hidden-on-chinas-bank-balance-sheets/
on “China’s Economic Growth Looks Strong, Maybe Too Strong”Well here's a respectable (Western) (I don't imply that 'Western' mean 'respectable', just giving details) professor at Tsinghua, who regularly appears on CCTV on economic issues, who's been making the same claims for a while now, albeit in less dramatic terms: http://chovanec.wordpress.com/ ..
Comment linking /
on “China - The Mother Of All Grey Swans”