How the Lights Stay On

Chapter 15: The Lights in Shanghai

For nine years in Shanghai, I never experienced a blackout. Not one.

I lived in two apartments during those years. The first was visiting-faculty housing the university had assigned me when I arrived — an old walk-up, so old that the wiring inside the walls caught fire once. When the handyman came, I watched him drag a length of charred copper out of the plaster. The building was probably out of code. But even with burned wires inside the walls, the grid outside the walls never failed. The lights never blinked. The fridge never stuttered. The hallway bulbs came on at the same minute every evening as I climbed the stairs.

When I later moved to a newer rental across town — better building, modern wiring — the grid was still steady. Of course it was. It had been steady the whole time.

So I had a question I could not shake. Why, in a city of more than thirty million people, did the grid never once fail in nine years — even when the building it was feeding was a fire hazard? What was China doing that other countries were not?

The honest answer is one of the most important things this book can teach you, and it took me a long time to understand it.

There are real engineering achievements worth knowing about, and we should give them honest credit before we go any further.

Over the last twenty years, China built the world’s longest and highest-voltage power transmission lines. These are called ultra-high-voltage direct current lines — UHVDC, if you want to sound impressive at dinner. They run more than three thousand kilometers across the country, carrying electricity from hydroelectric dams in the western mountains and wind farms in the northern grasslands all the way to the dense, hungry cities on the eastern coast. The wires are thicker than your arm. The towers are the size of small office buildings. No country has built anything like them at this scale.

China also built solar panels and lithium batteries faster than any country in history. In 2023 alone, China installed more solar capacity than the entire United States had built in all the years before. China makes about eighty percent of the world’s solar panels. China makes most of the world’s lithium batteries. They have the supply chain. They have the factories. They have the ports.

And they planned for it. China’s central government decides what the country will build over five-year and ten-year horizons, and then it builds those things. When the government decides to put a transmission line across two thousand miles of territory, the line gets built. Land gets used. Villages sometimes get moved. There is not really a “no” anyone can say.

Those are real achievements. If you want to understand why the lights in Shanghai stayed on, you have to start by taking the engineering seriously.

But that is not the whole story. And the rest of the story is what this chapter is really about.

In the summer and fall of 2021, something happened in China that most Americans never heard about.

In a province called Guangdong, on the southern coast — home to about 130 million people, more than the entire population of Japan — the lights started going out.

Not all at once. Not everywhere. The pattern was specific.

Guangdong is where a huge amount of the world’s manufacturing happens. Cities like Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, and Guangzhou make phones, clothes, toys, electronics, furniture — most of the things you probably own. In May of 2021, twenty-one of those cities began rationing electricity to factories. By September, it was worse. Some factories were ordered to operate only two days a week. Some were told they could run one day a week. Some were cut off five days out of seven.

Sidewalks filled with diesel generators. Shopkeepers ran extension cords from the curb. Factory bosses, sitting in their offices by candlelight, told reporters they had not seen anything like it in a decade.

By the end of 2021, Guangdong had spent sixty-six days under power rationing. The province’s own government later confirmed the number. It was the worst year for the Guangdong grid since at least 2010.

And it was not just Guangdong. Sixteen of China’s thirty-one provincial regions ended up rationing electricity that year. In some northern provinces, the rationing reached homes — hospitals running on generators, traffic lights going dark, families losing heat in the early winter. In one frightening incident in the northeast, people were trapped in elevators when the power cut without warning.

This was happening at the same time my friends in Shanghai were going about their lives with no idea anything was wrong.

What caused it? The honest answer is that several things stacked on top of each other, the way things usually do when a system fails.

In late 2020, China had stopped buying coal from Australia after a political dispute. That removed a big source of the coal that fed Chinese power plants. Coal prices spiked.

The Chinese government had set the retail price of electricity by rule — utilities could only charge customers about 0.40 yuan per kilowatt-hour. But the cost of generating that kilowatt-hour, with expensive coal, had risen to about 0.60 yuan. Power plants were losing money on every unit of electricity they sold. Some of them simply stopped running.

Meanwhile, the southwestern province of Yunnan had a drought, which meant less water in the dams, which meant less hydroelectric power flowing east. The summer was hot. Demand was high. Air conditioners hummed across the country.

And on top of all of that, Beijing had set strict targets for emissions and energy use — a policy called dual control. Local officials, realizing they would miss their annual targets, abruptly ordered factories to shut down so the numbers would look better.

Stack those things together — the coal shortage, the price cap, the drought, the heat, the policy panic — and you get sixty-six days of darkness in the manufacturing heart of the country.

Here is the part that took me the longest to understand, and the part I most want you to remember.

When the Chinese grid runs short, it does not cut power randomly. It does not cut power proportionally — everyone losing a little. It cuts power according to a deliberate, designed order.

China Southern Power Grid, which runs the electricity in Guangdong and the surrounding provinces, said it openly in 2021. When supply ran short, they would prioritize residential users, public utilities, and key clients. Then, after that, ordinary industrial factories would be rationed.

That is the priority stack. Read it slowly:

Showcase megacities at the top — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou — protected hardest, because they are where foreign companies invest and where the country shows itself to the world. Then other residential users. Then “key clients,” which usually means state-owned enterprises and politically important businesses. Then ordinary factories, last.

When the lights in my Shanghai apartment stayed on for nine years, it was not because the Chinese grid is magically more reliable than the American one. It was because Shanghai sits near the top of the priority stack. When supply got tight, somewhere else got cut first.

The factory worker in Dongguan, sent home for the week because her assembly line was ordered offline, was not having a separate experience from mine. We were having the same experience, viewed from opposite ends of the priority list. Her dark factory was the price of my unblinking lights.

This is what authoritarian capitalism — sometimes called state capitalism, sometimes national capitalism — actually looks like in practice. It is not just that the government can build big things fast. It is that the government can decide, in advance, who matters less when there is not enough to go around. The reliability you see in the showcase cities is real. The mechanism that produces it is also real.

So when someone — a politician, a tech CEO, a friend at dinner — tells you that “China is beating us on infrastructure” or “China is winning the energy race,” there are two things you can hold in your head at once, without choosing between them.

The first is that some of what they say is true. China genuinely built the transmission lines the United States has been struggling to build for decades. China genuinely makes most of the world’s solar panels. China genuinely plans further ahead than American utilities are allowed to. There are things to learn here. The engineering is real.

The second is that the reliability outcome in Shanghai is not separable from the priority stack underneath it. You cannot copy the steady lights without also copying the choice about who gets darkness instead. The United States, with all its slowness and its arguments and its town meetings about where transmission lines can go, does not have that priority stack. A blackout in Manhattan and a blackout in rural West Virginia get treated with roughly the same urgency, because the regulatory structure is local and political accountability is local. That makes the American system slower to build. It also makes it harder to use as a tool of favoritism.

Both systems pay a price. Neither is winning. They are running different experiments, and the experiments cost different people different things.

Here is what I want you to take from this chapter. It is not really about China. It is a tool you can use for the rest of your life.

Whenever someone tells you that another country has better infrastructure, or better healthcare, or better trains, or better internet, the right next question — the one most adults will not ask, and the one that will make you smarter than most adults in the room — is:

Better for whom?

That question travels. Use it on every comparison you hear. Better infrastructure for whom? Better hospitals for whom? Better schools for whom? Most comparisons between countries collapse the moment you ask. Some get stronger. Either way, you learn something real.

For nine years, the lights in my Shanghai apartment did not blink. It took me longer than it should have to understand why. I hope it takes you less time than it took me.

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