About High Capacity

High Capacity

High Capacity is a Substack newsletter on China, artificial intelligence, technology and geopolitics written by Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. Chan, who was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, has built High Capacity into one of the most widely cited independent publications on Chinese industrial policy and United States-China technology relations. The Sinica podcast describes him as one of the sharpest, most empirically grounded voices on the subject and as the all-time record holder for name-checks in its recommendations segment. The newsletter, published at highcapacity.org, combines long analytical essays on China’s electro-industrial technology stack with a companion podcast.

The Author: From Princeton Fieldwork to Brookings

Kyle Chan joined the Brookings Institution in October 2025 as a fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center, where his research concentrates on China technology issues and industrial policy. Brookings’ own announcement notes that he also writes the popular Substack High Capacity. He is a 2025 fellow with the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations, and before Brookings he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociology Department at Princeton University and an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton.

Chan’s path into China technology research, as he described it to Brookings China Center director Ryan Hass, began with a personal connection and a systems question. He grew up in Los Angeles as the child of immigrants from Hong Kong, travelled to China during college, and became fascinated by the puzzle of China’s development. After college he volunteered at a non-governmental organisation in Delhi and worked in management consulting before returning to academia for a doctorate, wanting to understand how large countries work at a systems level. At Princeton he conducted in-depth fieldwork in both China and India over several years, with earlier work comparing railway development and the role of the state in the two countries, research affiliated with Princeton’s M. S. Chadha Center for Global India and its Wythes Center on Contemporary China. That comparative, infrastructure-first training is visible throughout High Capacity: technologies are treated not as isolated products but as stacks resting on industrial bases, supply chains and state capacity.

What High Capacity Covers

High Capacity publishes widely cited essays on China’s electro-industrial tech stack, electric vehicle and battery supply chains, and AI chips, in the summary of the rollout research record. Chan’s stated research range at Brookings and in his university biography spans artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, electric vehicles and batteries, together with the industrial policy that connects them. The newsletter’s organising idea is that China’s strengths in these sectors are not separate accidents but overlapping, mutually reinforcing ecosystems: consumer electronics fed batteries, batteries fed electric vehicles, and the supplier networks built for motors, sensors and gearboxes now feed robotics.

The publication has expanded beyond essays. The High Capacity podcast carries extended conversations with researchers on Chinese technology, including an episode with American Enterprise Institute researchers Ryan Fedasiuk and Satvik Pendyala on their report “Voltcraft: Industrial Competition in the Age of AI,” discussing whether China could meet most of its domestic AI chip demand by 2028, what happens when China begins exporting AI chips and competing with the American AI technology stack globally, and the global spread of Chinese open-source AI models. The format underlines the newsletter’s role as a convening point for a research community, not only a broadcast channel for one author.

The Great Reversal: China at the Technological Frontier

Chan’s most discussed argument is the “Great Reversal” in global technology flows, set out in a Financial Times op-ed and a longer High Capacity essay and explored in depth on the Sinica podcast. The argument, as Sinica summarised it, is that China now sits at the global technological frontier in a growing range of sectors, from megawatt electric vehicle charging to LFP batteries, and that technology and know-how increasingly flow from China outward rather than only into it. His longer essay pushes back against the dominant decoupling narrative, arguing that even as politics tries to pull the United States and China apart, powerful structural forces, including scale, market incentives and technological complementarity, keep pulling the two economies back together, illustrated by cases such as Waymo and Zeekr and by Unitree robots.

The Sinica conversation also records the texture of the argument: what China still wants from the United States, including software tools and talent; the playbook by which Chinese-founded firms such as HeyGen and Manus adapt their corporate identities under geopolitical pressure; and Chan’s insistence on empirical grounding over slogans. Sinica’s host introduced him as having emerged as one of the sharpest and most empirically grounded voices on U.S.-China technology relations, and noted, only half in jest, that his record for recommendations from other guests had made him ineligible for further name-checks, like a guitarist retired from an annual award after winning it too often.

Writing for the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and the New York Times

High Capacity sits at the centre of a wider writing practice. Chan’s commentary has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and the New York Times, and his research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Asian Survey, Current Sociology and the Chinese Journal of Sociology. His New York Times op-ed, “In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant,” argued to a general audience the wake-up-call version of his thesis: that China now manufactures roughly a third of the world’s cars, a dominant share of its electric vehicles and batteries, and the supply chains that feed them, and that an outdated Western image of China as a maker of cheap goods badly misleads policy. The op-ed’s afterlife as a podcast and debate topic shows how High Capacity essays and their mainstream versions move between specialist and public audiences.

His testimony record gives the newsletter an additional layer of authority. Chan testified as an expert on China’s industrial policy before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, including at its February 2025 hearing on “Made in China 2025 — Who Is Winning?”, where he argued that China had succeeded or made significant progress in most of the target sectors of the original Made in China 2025 programme, from telecommunications equipment and industrial robotics to high-speed rail and clean energy, and that Chinese industrial policy uses a far broader array of tools than tariffs and subsidies alone. Readers of High Capacity are therefore reading an analyst whose arguments are also being tested in congressional-hearing settings.

An Account of How Chinese Industrial Policy Works

Across the newsletter and his interviews, Chan advances a distinctive account of why Chinese industrial policy succeeds where it does. Industrial policy works, in his analysis, where it reshapes incentives and provides targeted support at bottlenecks or choke points in the innovation and scale-up process; his standard example is batteries, where Beijing combined protectionist and positive measures to build the industry. He contrasts national styles of risk: Americans celebrate private-sector risk-taking but are profoundly risk-averse in public programmes, letting a single failure such as Solyndra haunt policy for years, while China takes a portfolio approach, tolerating some failure and waste in support of sector-level progress. In his Brookings interview he argued the United States could combine strong accountability with a greater capacity for bold bets on emerging technologies.

He is equally specific about limits and frictions. Discussing Beijing’s Fifteenth Five-Year Plan on the Brookings Beijing Brief podcast, he described the weirdness of a policy landscape in which Chinese policymakers hit the brake and the gas at the same time, signalling seriousness about involution and overcapacity while continuing to drive the sectors producing them. That willingness to describe incoherence as well as strength is part of why the newsletter is trusted by readers who are sceptical of both triumphalist and dismissive accounts of Chinese technology.

AI Chips and the Contest of Tech Stacks

Artificial intelligence hardware has become one of High Capacity’s most active beats. Chan has been measured about timelines: in an American Enterprise Institute question-and-answer he noted that United States compute capacity exceeds China’s by one or two orders of magnitude and that the gap could grow. At the same time, the newsletter tracks the scenario that most concerns strategists, a coming volume of Chinese AI chips sufficient first for domestic needs and then for export, allowing a Chinese AI stack to compete globally with the American one. The podcast and essays treat open-source Chinese models, lithography workarounds and chip self-sufficiency as parts of a single industrial question rather than as separate headlines.

This balance matters to the publication’s influence. High Capacity is read in the technology-policy world precisely because it neither dismisses Chinese capabilities nor inflates them. Its essays quantify, compare and specify mechanisms, and its author’s academic training in sociology shows in the attention paid to bureaucracy, state capacity and organisational behaviour inside Chinese state-owned enterprises and ministries, subjects of his earlier journal research.

Place Among China Newsletters and Podcasts

High Capacity belongs to the generation of independent Substack publications that has reshaped English-language China analysis, alongside titles such as Sinocism, ChinaTalk and Pekingnology. Its particular territory is the industrial and technological core of the U.S.-China contest, written by a scholar-practitioner who moves between the newsletter, elite podcasts, congressional testimony and the op-ed pages. The Sinica podcast’s description of Chan as the record holder for recommendations within that community is a measurable proxy for peer esteem: other specialists, asked to name one thing to read, name High Capacity more than anything else.

The Brookings connection reinforces that standing without changing the publication’s independent character. The China Center’s 2025 year in review welcomed Chan as a fellow whose research would focus on Chinese industrial policy and technology, and its programming, from the Beijing Brief podcast to policy dialogues, draws on the same material the newsletter develops at length. For readers, the arrangement offers an unusual combination: the speed and voice of a personal newsletter with the verification environment of a major research institution.

Readership and Continuing Output

High Capacity is published from the United States; Beijing is the nominal city assigned in this rollout for foreign-based China-focused outlets, following the precedent of earlier batches. Its readership spans the communities its author works in: technology-policy researchers, government and congressional staff, investors and industry strategists following electric vehicles, batteries, robotics and AI hardware, and journalists who need a grounded first interpretation of a Chinese industrial development. The newsletter remains active, with new essays and podcast episodes continuing through 2026, including its coverage of the AI chip competition and of Beijing’s latest Five-Year Plan ambitions in AI, robotics and semiconductors.

For anyone trying to understand the central economic contest of the coming decades, High Capacity offers something rare: a single, continuing, empirically disciplined account of how China built technological capacity, where that capacity is genuinely world-leading, where it still lags, and what structural forces bind the Chinese and American systems together even as their governments push them apart. That is why the publication is cited so widely, and why its author’s name recurs whenever specialists are asked what to read.