The Tangled Woof

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Andrew Batson's blog. Musings on China, books, economics, jazz, history, and other stuff of interest.

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Real talk about the exchange rate
Aug 1, 2026 · original
(This post reproduces a thread I wrote on Twitter/X on July 29.) A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China’s real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency. After all, it’s called the “exchange rate”! But it’s actually not. Mostly, it’s about prices. A rant: China’s real effective exchange rate (REER) is a composite of two things, each themselves a composite: 1) an index of the renminbi’s exchange rate against a group of its trading partners, weighted by trade, 2) an index of China’s prices relative to its trading partners. The standard reference for the REER is the calculation by the BIS. Its numbers show the pure currency part, the nominal effective exchange rate, is now right back at the recent peak of March 2022. The CFETS index, the trade-weighted exchange rate targeted by the PBOC, is not too different. The REER, howev
The best music I heard in 2025
Dec 28, 2025 · original
Another good year for music. Thanks to some lucky coincidences I saw the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Knoell Scott, three times this year. Every show was different, and each a fun and life-affirming musical experience—see them if you can! Their most recent studio album is very charming, even if it lacks the wild avant-garde energy of yesteryear. The best-known standard-bearers of today’s jazz avant-garde, guitarist Mary Halvorson and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, both had outstanding albums this year ( About Ghosts and Abstraction Is Deliverance ) that have been widely reviewed; if you follow jazz you probably know about them already. I liked both records a lot, but for my list this year I wanted to highlight some other names. Here are my favorite discoveries from a year of listening, listed by date of original release: Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – Defiant Life (2025). At 84, Smith rema
The best books I read in 2025
Dec 17, 2025 · original
Here are the most memorable of the books I read this year, listed in roughly the order I read them. It seems like reading 19th century authors was a theme in the culture this year, and I ended up participating in this trend without really planning to: Twain, Stevenson, Whitman were some of my highlights. Fiction Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest . I re-read all of Hammett’s novels this year, and this, his first, held up the best. The later and better-known books seem more and more artifacts of their time: The Maltese Falcon is implausible and its plot famously incomprehensible; The Thin Man ‘s clever repartee feels empty. Red Harvest has both a harsh portrait of the breakdown of state capacity and the effects of social violence (the setting is based on Butte, Montana) and a truly harrowing detective plot (the narrator suspects himself). Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . I read
China bows to de-industrialization
Nov 23, 2025 · original
Reading China’s five-year plans, one of the most immediately striking things is just how many things they attempt to plan. These are not just documents about where to build airports or highways (although such proposals do go into the plan). Recent iterations also cover many things that are not obviously amenable to top-down direction, such as what sorts of technological breakthroughs will happen in the future, and how social mores and customs will develop. In China’s Leninist political system, government attempts to specify the contours of “national economic and social development” are the norm rather than the exception. In this context, restraint can be more notable than ambition. It’s not that surprising when plans declare extraordinary goals; it is more surprising when plans step back from attempted intervention. The 15th Five-Year Plan for the years 2026-30, now being drafted accordi
Exams are everything in China
Oct 19, 2025 · original
The first people you meet in life are your parents. That simple fact makes the family the foundational institution of society: learning how to be a person, and what other people are like, happens first in the family. After that, the next social institution most people encounter, in modern societies anyway, is usually schooling and education. Schools transmit social values to new generations, and help determine the specific social roles that the members of the new generations will occupy. Education is always a window onto society, and the new book The Highest Exam: How The Gaokao Shapes China , by the economists Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, is very illuminating on how China’s educational system has mattered for both social and economic outcomes, and on just why education is so important to so many Chinese families. More profoundly than that, though, it makes a case for how one specific set
First explorations in Indian classical music
Oct 12, 2025 · original
Two things happened this year to convince me to do some more intentional listening to Indian classical music, which I had long been aware of but had never really “got.” The first was the untimely death of Zakir Hussain, the beloved tabla virtuoso; he had been scheduled to play a concert near where I live and I thought I would finally take the opportunity to see him in person. Now I will never have one. The second, also unexpected, was an invitation to go to India for a conference, which would be my first time to visit. It seemed like a sign. So, on a day off in Delhi, I paid a visit to Radio & Gramophone House –a 74-year-old record shop and one of the last remaining, Indians like everyone else having gone mostly to streaming. I asked them for an introduction to Indian classical music, instrumental not vocal, and the friendly gentlemen set me up with a bag of CDs to take home; I was only
Historical trajectories of local government in India and China
Aug 29, 2025 · original
After doing a round of India-China comparisons that focused on commonly cited macro indicators like manufacturing, investment and literacy (see last month’s post “ India and the invidious comparison with China “), I wanted to highlight a lower-profile but perhaps even more interesting contrast: the structure of government and the nature of decentralization in large countries. One of the coolest China-India charts I have seen is in a 2020 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Devesh Kapur, “ Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed? ” It shows how public employees in India, China and the US are distributed across different levels of government: Notably, India has many more of its public servants at the state level than China does at the equivalent provincial level, and many fewer at the local (i.e. cities and towns) level than China does. (The China numbers come from a
Who believes in China’s output gap?
Aug 13, 2025 · original
I recently wrote a piece at my job , and somewhat unusually for us, it’s come out from behind the paywall so that everyone can read it. Here’s the opening: There are two statements about China’s economy that receive broad agreement today. One is that China faces a long-term structural slowdown in its growth rate, due to a laundry list of factors including the law of large numbers, changing demographics and less catch-up potential as an upper-middle-income country. The other is that China’s economy has recently been underperforming, suffering from extended deflation and weak employment, and would benefit from more aggressive cyclical stimulus. It’s not contradictory to believe both of these things, but there is some tension between them. The way people resolve that tension is, at least implicitly, by taking a view on the output gap–the difference between actual economic growth and its und
Readings on India
Aug 5, 2025 · original
Around my trip to India I did some not-very-systematic reading, and had pretty good luck. All of these books were worth reading and helpful in different ways: Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (expanded second edition, 2021). Anderson’s range of erudition is impressive–I read this book after finishing his latest, Disputing Disaster , a deep dive into the historiography of the First World War–and he packs a lot of information into his short, polemical account of Indian politics. The book’s aim is to destabilize what he calls the mainstream narrative of India’s liberal intelligentsia: the celebration of a stable, secular, multicultural democracy. He re-examines key episodes in India’s independence struggle and early history to emphasize the enduring roles of religion, caste and social division. Rukmini S., Whole Numbers And Half Truths: What Data Can And Cannot Tell Us About Modern India
India and the invidious comparison with China
Jul 28, 2025 · original
In June I went to India for the first time. It was a quick trip, just a week, but I still got a pretty intense introduction to current debates on the Indian economy at the India Policy Forum in Delhi. As a China specialist with only a newspaper-reading level of familiarity with India, I was quite intimidated by the prospect of joining a roomful of people who have spent their entire lives working on tough economic questions of India. It turned out, though, that if you’re going into the equivalent of a high-level graduate seminar on Indian economics as an outsider, having a background in China is not the worst preparation. Almost every paper and every talk about India’s economic problems seemed to be motivated by some implicit comparison with China. At first I thought I was over-interpreting things because I am biased to look at things from a China perspective, so I asked around to check m

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