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The geopolitics of China in Chile’s lithium strategy and the trouble with critical minerals

July 29, 2025July 1, 2025 felipeirarrazavalaca9686fc3Leave a comment

the Chilean government confirmed a report published earlier that morning: Chinese companies BYD and Yongqing Technology (Tsingshan Group) had abandoned their planned lithium cathode production facilities in Chile. This announcement dealt a significant blow to the ambitions of a country with a longstanding mining tradition, now striving to build industrial capabilities and develop value-added products from its mineral resources amid the global energy transition. However, just one day later, the Chinese embassy in Chile both the initial report and the Chilean government’s confirmation. After consultations with both companies, the embassy clarified that neither had officially withdrawn their investment plans. Instead, they reaffirmed ongoing interest in maintaining dialogue with Chilean authorities. The embassy further emphasized Chile’s continuing attractiveness to Chinese businesses, highlighting the numerous firms eager to participate in the country’s National Lithium Strategy. the Chinese embassy’s statement—issued amidst escalating trade tensions and shifts in the international order—suggests this chapter is far from concluded.

This episode highlights the complexity and uncertainty confronting peripheral economies attempting to industrialize by leveraging their comparative advantages amidst the so-called energy transition and broader geopolitical tensions marked by trade wars. While significant global attention remains focused on the socio-environmental impacts of critical mineral extraction, less consideration has been given to examining how peripheral economies—countries heavily reliant on natural resource extraction—are strategically navigating or capitalizing on this “critical minerals moment” in relation to their own ambitions to industrialize.

Rethinking Economic Development from the Household: Property, Resilience, and Institutional Adaptation in Rural China

May 28, 2025 tingxulawLeave a comment

What if the story of economic development doesn’t begin with the market, but with the household? And what if property, often assumed to be a static bundle of rights, is better understood as a dynamic institution—adaptive, historically layered, and relational?

These questions sit at the heart of my recent research, which I had the opportunity to present at the Open University’s legal histories conference Land and Property Beyond the Centenary. While my work focuses on property governance and transformation in rural China, its implications stretch far beyond. It challenges dominant liberal narratives about property and development by presenting institutional change as a process of negotiated adaptation shaped by vulnerability and crisis, rather than a linear path towards free markets and individual ownership.

At its core, this work brings into dialogue three theoretical frameworks that are rarely combined: resilience theory, Martha Fineman’s vulnerability jurisprudence, and evolutionary institutional economics inspired by Thorstein Veblen. Together, they offer a rich toolkit for reimagining how development happens—and for whom.

Working Overtime or Being Laid Off: The Pressure under Hopelessness among Workers in Chinese Internet Companies

July 10, 2023July 12, 2023 yunyunyunaaaLeave a comment

“I’ve been working until 1:00 am or later, then getting up at 8:00 am to continue working this week, but my mentor still pointed out a lot of problems that need to be reworked. But there’s no space to escape, if I don’t work harder, I would be laid off in the next quarter. I couldn’t imagine if I lost this job, either I had a rich family to rely on or had some indispensable skills. Now there’s massive laid-off everywhere due to the economic downturn, and it would be extremely hard to find another job if I’m being dismissed. The most probable result of my life would be nothing.”
– Linda, a 26-year-old operation specialist in Tiktok, Shanghai

In China’s bustling urban centers, a significant number of young individuals are employed in Internet firms, driven by the desire for a more promising future characterized by secure employment and affordable housing. Linda’s experienced colleagues at Tiktok, who worked diligently like her, underwent a transformation in their lives. Originating as diligent students from rural or small-town backgrounds as Linda, known as “,”(“小镇做题家”) they excelled academically, performing well in entrance exams and securing places in top universities. While they lacked broader perspectives and social networks, they nonetheless successfully transitioned into urban elites with competitive salaries, stock shares and options from China’s most valuable company in the early years, becoming firmly established in first-tier cities.

However, this once cherished aspiration has been shattered due to the end of rapid growth and the impossibility of significant salary advancements. The soaring property prices in China, especially in big cities, make it impractical for most people to purchase an apartment in such a metropolis, diminishing the chances of achieving such an exciting miracle. Returning to their smaller hometowns or cities is a challenging prospect for these individuals, primarily due to the limited Internet-related job opportunities outside major urban hubs such as Beijing and Shanghai. Furthermore, young individuals like Linda, who often belong to the first generation of college graduates in their families, face immense expectations of securing respectable employment and surpassing their parents’ financial achievements. These young people are swashed down by hopelessness.

Overtime pressure still grows under hopelessness. According to Chinese labor law, workers should not work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, and overtime is restricted to 36 hours a month. However, staff in the Internet sector, especially at big tech firms, face unpaid compulsory overtime, . The pervasive in Chinese internet companies is exemplified by the widespread adoption of the (working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) and the (work six days a week, every other week). Despite the alarming occurrences of sudden due to long working hours, which serve as a warning to society, the common issue of excessive overtime work remains largely unchanged.

Dependence and ecology in contemporary Latin America, part 2: Limits to sub-imperial autonomy

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 georgeshepherd1867Leave a comment

Brazilian agribusiness’s fervour for Soybean cultivation has manifested itself domestically as much, if not more so, than externally, with deforestation accelerating as plantations abound with similar velocity in both the Brazilian Amazon and the Paraguayan Chaco. The domestic intensification of Soybean cultivation can, in large part, be attributed to growing demand from China, the world’s primary soybean consumer (Song et al, 2009). China is the largest market for both Paraguayan and Brazilian soy, with both nations essentially relying on continued Chinese imports to balance their trade deficits (Giraudo, 2020). Accordingly, the impact of Chinese demand on Brazilian agriculture, and on other resource sectors across the region (Ganchev, 2020; Oviedo, 2015), replicates many of the dynamics previously mentioned with regards to Brazilian ‘Subimperialism’ in Paraguay.

As soybeans are typically exported with minimal processing, and monocrop agriculture generates comparatively little employment (Giraudo, 2020), few of the benefits of the soybean supply-chain are appropriated within Brazil. Meanwhile, cheap Brazilian soybeans indirectly support the Chinese labour system by lowering the price of staple foods, especially pork, allowing Chinese manufacturers to keep wages low, thereby maintaining the competitiveness of Chinese exports (Wise & Veltmeyer, 2018). With Chinese demand likely to remain high, it seems inconceivable that either the Brazilian or the Paraguayan economies will wean themselves off of soy and will instead remain conditioned by, and dependent on, the whims of the Chinese industrial system

Furthermore, this integration of soybeans into the Chinese industrial economy exacerbates the existing China-Brazil trade imbalance. 98.4% of Chinese exports to Brazil are manufactures, whilst the majority of Brazilian exports to China are primary-resources, with soybeans representing the single most valuable export-commodity (Jenkins, 2012). Low-price Brazilian commodities thereby fuel an industrial system which exports value-added goods back to Brazil, creating a trade-deficit which entrenches the nation’s dependence on the industrialised core, reproducing the fundamental dynamics observed by dependency theorists in the mid-twentieth century (Frank; 1966; Prebisch, 1962).

The Co-evolution of Diversity in Property and Economic Development: Evolutionary Economics and the Vertical Dimension (Part 2)

August 18, 2022September 23, 2022 tingxulaw3 Comments

Having laid out the horizontal dimensions of diversity in property in Part 1, I here offer a critique of the assumption in mainstream economics that all kinds of property institutions need to be or will be transformed into private property to promote economic development. I also reflect on my previous work that applies and develops Darwinian mechanisms of variation, inheritance, and selection—which has been extensively discussed in evolutionary biology and evolutionary economics—to study property regime transformation in China.

While working on , Professor Erik Reinert introduced me to two very important books and encouraged me to think about the relevance of the work of Darwin and Veblen to study property regime transformation in China: by Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Harvard biologist and historian of science; edited by Erik himself and Francesca Viano. Erik also introduced me to the work of evolutionary economists including of Columbia University.

The Co-evolution of Diversity in Property and Economic Development: Key Concepts and the Horizontal Dimension (Part 1)

August 18, 2022September 23, 2022 tingxulaw2 Comments

This blog post builds on the ‘Institutions, Economic Development, and China’s Development Policy for Escaping Poverty’ piece and comprises two parts dealing with the key concepts (Part 1) and mechanisms (Part 2) for evaluating the co-evolution of diversity in property and economic development. I argue that diversity in property plays a key role in economic development and that there are two dimensions that are important for examining the co-evolution of diversity in property and economic development—horizontal (Part 1) and vertical (Part 2).

In this post, I offer a critique of the assumption in mainstream economics that private property is the only kind of property institutions that can stimulate and preserve economic development (I am, of course, not the first to offer critiques of this assumption; for existing studies, see e.g., ). I focus on the meaning of ‘diversity in property’, which concerns the horizontal level analysis.

Institutions, Economic Development, and China’s Development Policy for Escaping Poverty

June 14, 2022June 20, 2022 tingxulaw8 Comments

I recently have had opportunities to reread the works of Professors Erik Reinert and Peer Vries and to reflect on my previous work on the relationship between institutions, economic development, and China’s development policy for escaping poverty. Professors Reinert and Vries have studied, along with a few other distinguished economists and economic historians, ‘poverty traps’ at national and transnational levels for decades (eg, Serra 1613; Landes 1998; Reinert 2007; Reinert 2009; Vries 2013). Both argued that innovation and structural change are the keys to escaping poverty.

Professors Reinert’s and Vries’s work on economic development has brought the work of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) to light. In this blog post, I will review how the work of Schumpeter, Reinert, and Vries helps us explore three key questions: First, what kind of development does a country need to escape poverty? Second, what kind of institutions can promote development? Third, how to develop? These three questions are crucial to understand China’s escape from poverty.

Professors Reinert’s and Vries’s arguments can be well supported by China’s national development policy. Below are a few highlights of rich empirical evidence. In 1984 the Chinese government proposed a development-oriented poverty reduction policy to replace the previous aid reliance policy (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council 1984; for critiques of relying on massive foreign aid to escape poverty, see e.g. Moyo 2009; Hubbard and Duggan 2009; Banerjee and Duflo 2011). On 18 January 1992, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997, leader of the PRC from 1978 to 1989) made a famous speech in his Southern Tour, emphasising that ‘development is the absolute principle’ (fazhan cai shi ying daoli). Since then, China’s economic development has entered a new stage. In 1994 the Chinese government fully adopted the development-oriented poverty reduction policy as a national policy.

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