Reading List 03/08/2025
China’s industrial diplomacy, streetlights and crime, deorbiting Starlink satellites, a proposed canal across Thailand, a looming gas turbine shortage, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at China’s industrial diplomacy, streetlights and crime, deorbiting Starlink satellites, a proposed canal across Thailand, a looming gas turbine shortage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
China's industrial diplomacy
Kyle Chan at the High Capacity substack has a piece about China’s “industrial diplomacy”: making strategic investments in countries around the world based on who its friendly with and where it can most easily gain access to markets:
Chinese companies are racing to build factories around the world and forge new global supply chains, driven by a desire to circumvent tariffs and secure access to markets. Chinese companies have been building manufacturing plants directly in large target markets, such as the EU and Brazil. And they’ve been building plants in “connector countries” like Mexico and Vietnam that provide access to developed markets through trade agreements. Morocco, for example, has emerged as a surprisingly popular destination for Chinese investment tied to EV and battery manufacturing due to its trade agreements with both the US and the EU…
In Europe, China’s Ministry of Commerce has told Chinese automakers like BYD, SAIC, and Geely to pause investments in EU countries that voted in favor of tariffs on Chinese EVs and increase investments in EU countries that voted against them. Chinese firms are prioritizing their EV and battery investments in EU countries that are more friendly to China. Hungary stands out as the largest recipient of Chinese FDI in Europe by far, including a massive $7 billion, 100 GWh CATL battery plant and a new BYD plant slated to start production this year. After Spain abstained from voting on Chinese EV tariffs—seen as a positive move by Beijing—CATL signed a $4.3 billion deal with Stellantis to build a battery plant in Spain
Streetlights and crime
Urbanist Jane Jacobs believed strongly in urban design that created “eyes on the street”: the idea that cities were made safer by passive surveillance of having lots of people around, and they should thus be designed in a way that would encourage the presence of people (such as by having residential and commercial buildings mixed together).
In the same vein of reducing crime by way of increased visibility, this SSRN paper found that expanding street lighting significantly reduced crime. From the abstract:
Street lighting is often believed to influence street crime, but most prior studies have examined small scale interventions in limited areas. The effect of large-scale lighting enhancements on public safety remains uncertain. This study evaluates the impact of Philadelphia’s citywide rollout of enhanced street lighting, which began in August 2023. Over 10 months, 34,374 streetlights were upgraded across 13,275 street segments, converting roughly one-third of the city's street segments to new LED fixtures that provide clearer and more even illumination. We assess the effect of these upgrades on total crime, violent crime, property crime, and nuisance crime. Results show a 15% decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence following the streetlight upgrades. The upgrades may account for approximately 5% of the citywide reduction in gun violence during this period, or about one sixth of the 31% citywide decline. Qualitative data further suggests that residents' perceptions of safety and neighborhood vitality improved following the installation of new streetlights. Our study demonstrates that large-scale streetlight upgrades can lead to significant reductions in crime rates across urban areas, supporting the use of energy-efficient LED lighting as a crime reduction strategy. These findings suggest that other cities should consider similar lighting interventions as part of their crime prevention efforts. Further research is needed to explore the impact of enhanced streetlight interventions on other types of crime and to determine whether the crime-reduction benefits are sustained when these upgrades are implemented across the entire City of Philadelphia for extended periods.
Deorbiting Starlink satellites
SpaceX’s Starlink requires an enormous number of satellites. As of February 2025, there are over 7,000 in orbit, and that may eventually rise to more than 34,000. 7000 is roughly 60% of the roughly 11,500 satellites in orbit around the earth.
As the system has evolved, older satellites are making way for newer, better satellites, and the old ones are being deliberately deorbited at a rate of several per day. From Space Weather:
In January alone, more than 120 Starlinks deorbited, creating a shower of fireballs.
“The sustained rate of daily reentries is unprecedented,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics who tracks satellites. “They are retiring and incinerating about 4 or 5 Starlinks every day.”
Planners have long known this would happen. First generation (Gen1) Starlink satellites are being retired to make way for newer models. “More than 500 of the 4700 Gen1 Starlinks have now reentered,” says McDowell.
SpaceX also has a Starlink Satellite Demisability report that has more information:
As part of our commitment to space safety, Starlink takes a conservative position on deorbit decisions based on the risk analysis of potential hardware failures. As detailed previously, Starlink began a proactive, large scale deorbit of early V1 satellites in 2024 after identifying a common issue in a small population of these satellites that could increase the probability of future failures. Many of these satellites were on-orbit for more than five years at the time of deorbit. Controlled, propulsive deorbit is much shorter and safer than a comparable uncontrolled, ballistic deorbit from an equivalent altitude and allows all Starlink satellites to maintain maneuverability and collision avoidance capabilities during the descent. Controlled, propulsive deorbit of Starlink satellites also allows SpaceX to continue sharing high fidelity future position and uncertainty prediction information, multiple times a day, with other operators and launch providers. As a result of this conservative risk posture, Starlink only has a single failed satellite in orbit and expects this number to reduce to zero by the end of 2025…
Starlink takes a belt-and-suspenders approach, where we design for demisability but also mitigate risk by targeting deorbits in unpopulated regions. While we design with the intent to be confident that satellites demise with extremely low impact energy, we also retain the paranoia that we might be wrong. Thus, Starlink implements a targeted reentry approach to deorbit satellites over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes. This targeted reentry approach is the result of significant technical development and on-orbit testing by Starlink, going above and beyond regulatory requirements for safe reentry.
And on the subject of SpaceX-generated space debris, SpaceX’s recent Starship launch ended with the Starship exploding during ascent, requiring commercial flights in the debris path to divert to avoid it. Scott Manley shares a video of the diverting aircraft on Twitter:
China, AI, and governance
We’ve previously mentioned DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model that made waves for reportedly being much cheaper to train than existing AI models. Now apparently the Chinese government is adopting it to improve efficiency. From the People’s Daily, by way of Teortaxes:
With the “sudden emergence” of DeepSeek, Numerous industries have “teamed up” with DeepSeek, and government service work is also keeping pace with the new wave of technological transformation. “Digital intelligence employees” have truly arrived.
Recently, Futian District in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, launched 70 AI “digital intelligence employees” based on DeepSeek. Through precise analysis across 240 government service scenarios, these AI employees are being applied to diverse areas such as document processing, public services, emergency management, and investment promotion, covering the entire chain of government services.
According to reports, after the launch of version 2.0 of the region’s government large-scale model, the accuracy of document format corrections has exceeded 95%, review times have been reduced by 90%, and cross-departmental task assignment efficiency has improved by 80%.
And from the Financial Times:
All the major cloud service providers, at least six car manufacturers, several local governments, a number of hospitals and a handful of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have moved to deploy DeepSeek, with the shift among traditionally conservative institutions particularly striking.
“Even though the [Chinese Communist] party has long been supportive of AI, DeepSeek has provided the impetus for government departments and SOEs to roll out LLMs,” said an SOE tech supplier who did not wish to be named. “DeepSeek changed everything. It started a nationwide effort to push forward Chinese AI,” they added.