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Dear Decoder,
We’ve met the players in the village; the rising stars and the exiled. We’ve seen the brutal three walls they face. Now comes the most important question:
What tool do they have to actually build anything?
The budget is zero. The mandate from above is simple: develop. The pressure from the villagers is immense: provide jobs, create wealth.
Their answer, for decades, has been a unique institution that is neither fully private nor fully public. It is the Township and Village Enterprise (TVE); the village’s secret weapon for conjuring an economy from thin air.
Think of a TVE not as a company, but as a legal and political Swiss Army knife. It is a hybrid entity that allows a village to:
The model wasn’t born in a Beijing ministry; it was a grassroots rebellion against poverty.
The first documented TVE emerged in 1969 in Huaxi Village, located in Wuxi City, Jiangsu. Under its legendary leader Wu Renbao, the village secretly started a small metal workshop during a period when such capitalist “tails” were forbidden. They hid it from inspectors; and it thrived.
This became the blueprint. Huaxi evolved from that single workshop into the massive Huaxi Group, dubbed China’s Richest Village by the 2000s, where every villager became a shareholder millionaire. It remains the ultimate archetype of what a TVE can achieve.
Its true explosion came a decade later. As China began its reform era in 1978, Deng Xiaoping saw the potential in this model. He realized TVEs could solve multiple crises at once:
Deng’s policy of “liang tou zai wai” (两头在外) obtaining raw materials and selling products outside the state plan gave TVEs oxygen to grow. By the 1990s, they employed over 135 million people and produced nearly half of China’s industrial output.
This is the fundamental vehicle the blank slate upon which a village chief, whether a rising star seeking a signature achievement or an exiled official plotting a comeback, must write their story.
The TVE is the chessboard. Over the next few days, we will see how the chief plays the game: the art of mobilizing resources, the politics of governance, and the social contract of profit.
Because before a single yuan of profit can be shared, as our readers astutely observe, the factory itself must first be willed into existence.
Your partner in decoding,
Lile Mo
P.S. The TVE was the blank slate, but the chief’s true tool was strategic instinct; the ability to build where others see only barriers. The most powerful ventures are rooted in deep assets; just as a village uses its land and community to launch industry. This is the Rooted Platform principle we decoded in Yongzhou; the complete toolkit is in the Sovereign Vault.
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We've decoded the village as a corporate HQ and a proving ground for the elite. But that's only the first path.
For every young star sent to the village to be forged, there is another official sent there to be forgotten.
The "Village to Beijing" pipeline isn't just a ladder; it's also a landscape of political exile.
Imagine a mid-level official. They make a move that offends a powerful patron. They back the wrong faction in a political shuffle. They fail in a public, unforgivable way.
Their career isn't terminated. It is rerouted.
A sudden posting to a remote, insignificant village is the system's classic and brutal signal. It means: Your prospects here are frozen. This is known as being "put on the cold bench" (坐冷板凳).
This means the village chief you meet could be on one of two radically different journeys:
This duality is a core, unspoken feature of the system. It is a mechanism for both talent acceleration and political discipline. It ensures that loyalty and political savvy are valued as highly as raw performance.
Understanding this is critical. When you see a village succeed against all odds, you're not just seeing a policy work. You're witnessing the triumph of an individual who is either a phenomenal talent, a cunning political survivor, or both.
The village is the ultimate test of character; for both the anointed and the exiled.
This dance between anointed talent and political exile is a timeless theme in the system. For a masterclass in the art of navigating and surviving these currents, I point you to Novel #15 in the Unlikely Library: The 50 Chinese Novels That Helped me Understand China. It chronicles the journey of a civil servant whose career becomes a lifelong lesson in walking this tightrope, filled with stark examples of the cold bench in action.
Your partner in decoding,
Lile Mo
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The numbers are staggering: Two million applicants. 30,000 positions. A 1.5% acceptance rate.
We've seen the brutal mechanics of China's civil service exam. But the real question is what makes this prize worth the years of sacrifice for so many, and what that calculus reveals about the fabric of modern China.
The conventional answer is one of prestige and power. And it's true but incomplete. The real story is a tapestry woven from threads of ancient tradition, modern anxiety, and profound contradiction.
In China's social hierarchy, a state role is the ultimate form of security and status. This isn't merely employment; it's:
Millions understand this. They are investing in a form of social capital that Chinese society has prized for over two thousand years.
However, to stop here is to miss the full picture. For every aspirant dreaming of national influence, there is another simply seeking a harbor from a storm.
So, what makes the prize worth it? It is not a single thing, but a layered bargain.
Applicants are trading potential constraints for unparalleled security; they are swapping volatile market rewards for the steady accumulation of social status. They are betting that the long term stability of the "iron rice bowl" outweighs its limitations.
They are paying today in sweat for a lifetime of purpose, and stability, and prestige, and constraint. This multifaceted, often contradictory, calculation is what fuels the fierce competition.
Tomorrow, we'll see what happens when this carefully selected cohort faces its first real test where theory and ambition meet the hard, unyielding reality of local governance.
Decoding the signals,
Lile Mo
P.S. This social calculus; trading years of study for lifelong honor explains the competition perfectly. To see this system from the inside, Book #3 in my Unlikely Library is the definitive narrative guide. Explore the library here.
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They've passed the nation's toughest exam. They are among the intellectual elite. And now, they are handed a one way ticket to a remote village, often with no network, no luxury, and a dialect they can barely understand.
This is the moment theory dies, and a strategist is born.
The Village to Beijing system isn't just about placing talent. It's about forging it through a deliberate, brutal, and transformative reality shock.
A young official arrives with textbooks of economic theory and policy. They are immediately confronted with:
This is where the system's genius shines. The young official is forced to shed their academic skin. They learn to:
This process forges a specific kind of leader: one who understands high-level strategy but has a visceral, ground level understanding of how to make it work. A future minister who survived this will never be disconnected from the reality of their policies.
They don't just manage the village. The village rewires them.
But this proving ground has a shadow side. Tomorrow, we'll decode the other reason officials get sent to the village: not for promotion, but for political exile. It's the system's ultimate "penalty box."
Your partner in decoding,
Lile Mo
P.S. The most effective training isn't a seminar; it's a trial. It's being thrown into a situation where your theoretical knowledge is useless, and your ability to adapt, build trust, and deliver a small win is everything. Where did you experience your most formative "reality shock"?
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We've met the young officials who run China's corporate villages. But to understand them, you must understand the trial by fire that selects them: The National Civil Service Exam.
This isn't just a test. It's a national obsession and the most competitive tournament in the world of governance.
2+ million applicants for 30,000 positions
Imagine over two million university graduates many from China's top schools competing for roughly 30,000 entry-level positions. That's an acceptance rate of about 1.5%. For context, Harvard's acceptance rate is over 3%.
This isn't just about filling desks. This is about selecting the administrative elite.
The exam is a brutal, four-hour gauntlet designed to weed out all but the most resilient and analytically sharp. It's split into two parts:
This is a logic puzzle marathon. It tests everything from data analysis and quantitative reasoning to language skills and logical deduction under extreme time pressure. It's not testing knowledge; it's testing processing speed and cognitive agility.
This is where the statecraft begins. Candidates are given a dossier of real-world policy materials reports on rural healthcare, urban pollution, tech innovation and must synthesize it to analyze problems and propose practical, government-style solutions. It tests systemic thinking and the ability to frame issues within the official discourse.
The content is hard, but the competition is the true filter. Preparing for this exam is a full-time, year-long endeavor for many. Those who succeed have demonstrated a combination of raw intelligence, grueling discipline, and a deep hunger for a role in the system.
This is the first, massive filter in the Village to Beijing pipeline. It ensures that only the most capable and committed individuals even earn the right to be sent to that first, crucial posting in a village.
The village isn't just run by young people. It's run by the top 1% of young test takers, who now have to prove they can apply their theoretical brilliance to the messy reality of dirt, bricks and local politics.
But passing the exam is just the beginning. Tomorrow, we'll see what happens when this brilliant test-taker arrives in the village and faces their first real test: a wall of local suspicion, ancient clan politics, and a budget of zero.
Until the next insight,
Lile Mo
P.S. The most powerful systems understand that the quality of your inputs determines everything. This "first filter" principle is why elite organizations don't just hire for skills; they build processes that test for resilience and cognitive agility under pressure.
The Art of War Principle toolkit in the Sovereign Vault breaks down how to build such a dominant, self replicating institution from scratch. It is just one of 20+ strategic blueprints in the Sovereign Vault. Stop guessing and start deploying proven systems.
Join the Sovereign VaultDear Decoder,
Yesterday, we saw the village as a corporate entity; the atomic engine of growth. But a company is nothing without its executives.
So, who is the CEO of Village Holdings Ltd.?
Often, it's a 25 year old who just aced the Civil Service Exam.
The Village to Beijing system is not just a framework of accountability; it's a pipeline for talent. And the first, mandatory posting for countless young, ambitious civil servants is at the village level.
This is a deliberate, institutional masterstroke. It's a dynamic I first understood not through policy papers, but through the stories of ambitious young officials in Chinese web novels. In fact, I've now compiled the key to my own education in my Unlikely Library: the 50 Chinese novels that became my key to understanding this superpower.
For a masterclass in this exact principle, Library Book #3 is essential reading. It's the genesis of my Village to Beijing framework, providing an unprecedented look at the bureaucratic ladder and the brutal realities of a civil servant's first post.
A freshly minted official from a top university arrives in a village with a theoretical understanding of policy. Their mission is simple and brutal: make it work.
They have to navigate local clan politics, manage land lease disputes, attract small scale investment, and hit their GDP growth targets. They learn to translate grand national strategies into hyper local, on the ground reality.
This is where theory meets the soil. An official who successfully increases their village's income and stability has proven more than their intellect. They've proven their executional grit.
This system acts as a dual purpose machine:
A Filter: It identifies who has the practical savvy, resilience, and political skill to be promoted upward. If you can't manage a village, you will never be trusted with a city.
A Forge: It imbues the entire bureaucratic class with a foundational understanding of the grassroots economy. A future minister in Beijing who spent two years in a village will have an intuitive, unshakable sense of how their policies will play out on the ground.
This is the human machinery behind the Adaptive Rigidity we've discussed. The rigid goals are set from above. The adaptive solutions are forged by these young officials in the field.
The village isn't just where policies are executed. It's where China's future leaders are made.
Your partner in decoding,
Lile Mo
P.S. The most robust organizations don't just hire talent; they design systems to pressure test it from day one. Where is the village in your career or business—the first, crucial posting that separates theoretical knowledge from proven execution?
Dear Decoder,
In my last note, I laid out a 13 year mission: to decode the economic DNA of all 707 Chinese cities.
A mission of that scale needs a starting point. Not just a first city on a map, but the fundamental unit of the entire system.
We could start with a masterplan from a mayor's office, like Hefei's semiconductor gambit. But that's like studying a forest by looking at the canopy. To truly understand, you must get to the roots.
And in China, the roots are buried in the soil of its 600,000 villages.
A gambit like Hefei's doesn't start with a billion-dollar investment. It starts in a rice paddy, with the constitution of a village.
Or more precisely, in the constitution of a village.
To understand the Village to Beijing system, you must first understand its atomic unit. Not the city, not the province, but the 600,000 villages where the system touches the earth.
Forget quaint images of simple farmers. The Chinese village is a sophisticated, semi autonomous corporate political entity. It is the first and most brutal arena in the national tournament.
The Constitution grants villages a stunning power: collective ownership of land.
This means the village, as a collective, is the sole shareholder of its most valuable asset. It can lease this land for factories, commercial real estate, or infrastructure projects. The village chief isn't just an administrator; they are the de facto CEO of Village Holdings Ltd.
Their performance is measured in one primary metric: raising the collective income of their shareholder residents.
This creates a relentless, hyper local engine for growth.
The Land Lease Engine: A village identifies underutilized land and leases it to a factory or a logistics company. The lease payments flow directly into the village's coffers, distributed as dividends to residents or reinvested. This is the primary fuel for rural industrialization.
The Sovereign Vault Engine: This is where your decoded city strategies trickle down. A village near Hengshui might build a dormitory for the Gaokao Cram School ecosystem. A village in Qionghai might partner with a resort developer, using its land as equity. They are micro applicators of the larger gambits.
The Village Party Secretary is the frontline commander. To get promoted to the township level, they must prove they can increase GDP, maintain stability and critically execute central policy directives at the local level.
This is where the Adaptive Rigidity framework is born. The goal from Beijing is rigid: Develop. Increase incomes. The method is adaptive: the village CEO must figure it out with the resources they have.
This bottom-up, profit driven, competitive pressure from 600,000 micro engines is what creates the fertile ground for a Hefei to succeed. It's a system that harnesses local ambition to fuel national strategy.
The Village to Beijing framework isn't a top down chain of command. It's a tournament ladder, and the first match is always played at home.
Tomorrow, we'll meet the people who run these corporate villages: the young civil servants for whom this is a mandatory, career making first test.
Decoding ahead,
Lile Mo
P.S. The most powerful systems are built on simple, clear incentives. The Chinese village's incentive is to turn dirt into dividends. Where is the village in your organization; the smallest unit with the power to generate its own growth?
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Subscribe to Daily InsightsDear Decoder,
After years immersed in Chinese novels, I reached a turning point. The stories had given me something priceless: an intimate feel for the culture, the ambitions, the unwritten rules. But I hit a wall.
Fiction could show me the what; the drama, the relationships, the human struggles. But it couldn't give me the how; the actual systems, the economic blueprints, the replicable strategies.
I realized that if I truly wanted to understand what makes China work, I needed to go beyond the stories and study the source code itself.
That's when the China in 5 project was born; a 13.6 year mission to decode all 707 cities, from Hefei (City #1) on July 2, 2024, to Shijiazhuang (City #707) on January 18, 2039. Each week we spotlight one of these cities.
To make this monumental task clear, I've organized it into 34 seasons, one for each of China's provincial level regions.
You can see the live progress and explore the journey on our homepage: China in 5
There, you'll find the living map of our progress, links to all our decoded cities, and the blueprint for the entire mission.
My methodology is simple but relentless:
Each week, I take one of China's 707 cities and reverse engineer its economic DNA.
So far, I've decoded 17 cities and uncovered powerful systems like:
This isn't academic research. It's a practical library of proven strategies, growing every week.
The journey continues every Week on Substack, where I publish the weekly deep dive for all subscribers (it's FREE). You can follow along as we decode City #18, #19, and beyond, all the way to 707.
Subscribe to China in 5 on SubstackTomorrow, I will show you what this process looks like in its purest form. We will step into the laboratory and I will walk you through the story of Wanzhou; a city that was physically drowned by a catastrophic flood and used that very disaster to build a new, billion dollar industrial empire.
You will see how I applied my four step method to decode its comeback, and more importantly, you will learn the universal Phoenix Principle that you can use to navigate your own periods of collapse and reinvention.
Yours in discovery
Lile Mo
P.S. I've included you in this journey from the beginning. Now I'm curious: does a 13 year mission to map the DNA of an entire civilization feel audacious to you, or inevitable?
If you would like to be receiving my daily insights just subscribe here:
Subscribe to Daily Email InsightsDear Decoder,
Yesterday, we saw how cities are the engines of China's growth. But a city doesn't run itself. Today, we pull back the curtain on the human ecosystem that actually drives urban development.
While the Party Secretary and Mayor form the official leadership, they operate within a complex web of influence and ambition. To understand any city's strategy, you need to know its key power players:
Party Secretary: The ultimate authority, focused on political direction and personnel
Mayor: The chief executive, managing daily operations and economic development
Standing Committee: The 7 to 11 member inner circle that functions as the city's true "board of directors" including the heads of Organization, Propaganda, Discipline Inspection and other key departments who control everything from promotions to public narrative.
Every major city project whether a new tech zone or infrastructure development emerges from negotiations among these groups. The Party Secretary might set the vision, but its execution depends on aligning these competing interests.
For example, when a city pivots to electric vehicles (as many are), it requires:
Tomorrow, I'll share how this understanding led me to launch the China in 5 project; my mission to decode all 707 cities and bring you their proven strategies each week.
Yours in discovery
Lile Mo
History's greatest shifts are never a surprise to those who know the signs.
The Roman, Spanish, and British empires didn't collapse overnight.
Their decline began in a quiet, comfortable consensus: the belief that their peak was permanent. It started when citizens grew comfortable, hunger faded, and they began to outsource the very engines of their power.
For the USA, the glorious post WWII era also contained the seeds of its sunset. A pivotal moment was letting its manufacturing capacity; the backbone of its economic and strategic independence erode, believing it was an efficient upgrade.
We are not here to assign blame or fearmonger. We are here to analyze through a historical lens. And the pattern is clear.
You might be wondering, Are we there yet? There is no whistle, but there are signals.
One of the clearest recent signals was the trade war tariffs. The expected outcome was for China to buckle. Instead, it was unfazed, using the pressure to fast track its own capacity and become more self reliant. That is the behavior of a rising power, not a declining one.
Each held the crown for roughly a century. Each believed their reign was permanent.
But the patterns of history are clear: no empire, no matter how powerful, maintains its prime position forever. The conditions that create a superpower; innovation, demographic energy, economic dynamism are inevitably replicated and surpassed elsewhere.
The United States has held the primary position since 1945. The cycle is turning.
The center of global economic gravity is not just shifting; it is reverting back towards Asia. This isn't a collapse of the West. It is the rise of the Rest, led by a civilization with a 5,000 year head start in statecraft and a recent explosion in scale, technology and ambition.
This is the single most important strategic reality of the 21st century. If you are operating on a map where the US and Europe are still the undisputed centers of the universe, you are planning for a world that no longer exists.
I am here to help you prepare and get ahead of the curve. This shift will impact your career, your business, your investments and your community.
For the next 10 days, I will be your guide. I will walk you through what China really is and how it works.
But first, tomorrow, I have to share the funny story of how I was first awakened to the real China. It wasn't in a boardroom or a policy paper. It was in a story.
(Don't be surprised by how I saluted you. It's because we are on a very long journey to decode HOW China actually works, what has caused its rise, what we can learn from it, and how we can apply this to our lives. With that, you are a qualified decoder like me. Welcome to the journey.)
For the mission,
Lile Mo
P.S. You might be thinking, I'm not an economist nor a historian; why does this matter to me? Think of it this way: this is about understanding the forces that will shape the world your children will inherit, the prices you'll pay for goods, and the new opportunities that are being created right now.
This isn't meant to scare you, but to make you curious and prepared. The future is not something that just happens to us; we can learn to see it coming. My goal is not to overwhelm you with complexity, but to give you a clear lens to see the simple, powerful patterns that are already changing our world. Let's demystify it together.
Yours in discovery,
Lile Mo
P/S: Does this historical pattern resonate with you? What's one question you have about this global shift? Reply and share your thoughts with me.
Yesterday, I told you about my compass breaking. Today, I'll tell you about the unorthodox map I found to replace it.
After my collapse, I wasn't reading for insight. I was reading for survival. My escape of choice wasn't business books or self help; it was the sprawling, dramatic universe of Chinese web novels.
What I thought was an escape was secretly my education.
I wasn't just reading about a CEO crying his way to the crematorium; I was learning about the immense social pressure and razor sharp business tactics of China's new elite.
I wasn't just following a forced marriage to a comatose heir; I was getting a front row seat to how dynasty families pivot into tech and electric vehicles, building empires across generations.
I wasn't just engrossed in a civil servant's rise from a village to Beijing; I was decoding the very machinery of Chinese governance, power brokering, and the critical role of relationships (guanxi).
Without realizing it, I was being handed a key. These stories became my immersive, emotional bootcamp into the ambition, strategy and psyche driving the world's most complex economic transformation.
The media shows China through two lenses: politics or tourism. I needed a third lens: the How. How does the society actually work? What are the rules, the pressures, the ambitions that drive ordinary people? Most analysts look at GDP charts, policy papers and military budgets. I found the key in a place they never look: the stories people tell themselves.
The novels gave me that. They opened a window into the facets of life I couldn't see; the boardroom negotiations, the family scheming, the bureaucratic ladder climbing. Yes, it was fiction, but fiction born from the reality its readers recognize.
For the first time, I wasn't just hearing about China; I was seeing it from the inside. And as I began my 707 city project, a powerful thing happened: I started encountering in reality the very systems and scenarios I'd first seen depicted in the stories. The fiction had given me a map; now I was checking it against the territory.
These stories were my true decoder ring. They translated abstract concepts into human ambition, fear, and strategy.
The 707 city project was born from this simple truth: to decode a nation's trajectory, you must first understand its people's ambitions. And ambition is written most clearly in its stories.
Soon, I'll share my recommended Curated list of 50 novels that built this foundation.
Tomorrow, we will move from the stories to the system. I will lay bare the real engine of China: the dynamic structure that runs from the smallest Village all the way to Beijing.
We will dismantle the biggest misconception; that China is a monolith driven solely from the top; and show you the competitive, entrepreneurial ecosystem that actually powers its rise.
Once you understand this Village to Beijing framework, everything else will click into place.
Yours in discovery
Lile Mo
Most political systems work top down orders from the capital, obedience from below.
China is different. Here, power doesn't just trickle down. It surges up.
If you try to understand China by only watching Beijing, you will miss everything. The real engine of the nation is a vast, layered, and intricate system of governance that runs through every town, county, Municipality and province.
Before we can appreciate what China has achieved, we must answer the fundamental question: Who actually decides and how does power truly flow?
Because without understanding this hidden structure, you'll miss the real story behind every policy, every economic miracle, and every city's rise.
At every level from a small village to a massive province China has two rulers, not one:
The Government Head (Mayor, Governor): Runs the day to day administration budgets, services, local projects.
The Party Secretary: The real authority. Ensures political loyalty and controls personnel, ideology and the ultimate direction.
A simple rule: The mayor runs the city. The Party Secretary owns it.
China's system is a strict vertical ladder:
Villages → Towns → Counties → Municipalities → Provinces → Beijing
At each step, the same rule applies: Party first, Government second. A mayor obeys the Party Secretary above them. Why? Because promotions don't come from voters; they come from the Party.
There's a third, powerful player at every level: The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and its local branches.
They act as the system's immune system. Their mandate is to investigate corruption and enforce party discipline at all levels. They maintain vast records and conduct inspections, ensuring that officials remain accountable to the party's rules.
Their presence is a continuous audit. It's a mechanism to root out the corruption that could rot the system from within, ensuring that the massive engine of governance continues to run according to its design.
This structure isn't just stable it's self reinforcing. It's a machine of control, continuity, and compliance that outlasts individuals and resists chaos.
Tomorrow, we'll place this structure on the map. I'll show you how China's 707 "cities" are not what you think, and how this power system uses them as its primary levers.
Yours in discovery
Lile Mo
Dear Decoder,
Now that you understand how China is run, let's look at where this system operates.
If I told you to imagine a city, you'd picture skyscrapers, subways and dense urban life.
In China, you must forget that definition.
Here, a city is first and foremost a unit of administration; a container for governance, economic planning and resource allocation. It can be:
When we say China has 707 cities, we're not describing 707 skylines. We're describing 707 distinct laboratories for governance, economic strategy, and human civilization.
This is one of the world's most diverse administrative landscapes:
This administrative imagination explains why:
From Shenzhen's 40-year rise from fishing village to tech megacity, to Lijiang's UNESCO old town, to a micro city like Horgos becoming a crucial border trade hub; each one is a unique experiment.
This hierarchy is China's framework for balancing breakneck development with cultural continuity. Each city is a container for a different facet of the national project.
Tomorrow, I'll show you exactly why these 707 cities are the most powerful lens for understanding China's real story; and how this perspective reveals what headlines consistently miss.
Yours in discovery
Lile Mo
Dear Decoder,
We've seen the hierarchy of power. Now, let's see how it moves.
Beijing's role is to be the strategist for 1.4 billion people. It looks at the horizon and sets the grand aspirations: the 100 year vision, the 50 year dreams and the concrete 5 year plans.
But a destination is not a journey. A goal is not an execution.
The monumental task of how to achieve these goals falls to China's 707 cities and counties. They are the navigators.
This is the fundamental mechanism of Chinese governance:
Beijing broadcasts the "What": A national goal is set, e.g., "Become a leader in artificial intelligence" or "Achieve carbon neutrality."
The 707 Cities Compete on the "How": Each city, from the provincial powerhouse to the small county, must then ask: "What is our piece of this puzzle? What can we contribute based on our unique assets, location, and capabilities?"
A tapestry of local solutions emerges:
This is not a top down dictatorship. It is a massive, distributed problem solving network.
This is why you must look at the cities. Beijing's plans tell you the intention. The cities' actions show you the reality. You see which strategies are working, where the bottlenecks are, and where unexpected innovations are blooming.
The city is where the abstract national will is forged into concrete local action.
Tomorrow, we will pull back the curtain on who really makes these local decisions. Beyond the official Party Secretary and Mayor, you'll meet the dynasty families, the dealmakers and the local networks that actually chart a city's course.
Yours in discovery
Lile Mo