I've been surprised by how many powerful and influential people still insist that we don't really need to worry about China because their authoritarian system is incapable of innovating and they can only copy the work of others. It strikes me as an example of rejecting new evidence in favor of more comforting prior assumptions. I fear that we won't wake up to reality until we have experienced our own Suez Crisis.
We already have examples of chinas cieling. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all have per capita gdps that are significantly lower than the west as well, and they have stopped growing. The East Asian model seems to cap out at 60% or so of what America is capable of.
Some of these “strengths” listed are actually bad things. Long hours studying and working aren’t translating to higher productivity. In fact productivity per hour worked is abysmal in east Asia. It’s a lot of zero sum red queen race bullshit.
People working 996 are unsurprisingly not having any children. What’s the point if building apartments in ghost cities for children that don’t exist?
China has scale. 1.4 billion x 50% of our gdp per capita would be a terrifying opponent if nukes hadn’t made major power war obsolete.
Luckily it’s also the case that the Chinese have started like zero wars since deng.
I’m more worried about America adopting Chinese “strengths”.
Yascha, my son’s father in law is from Taiwan with business in China. He tells a different story than what you describe. He thinks there is a lot of smoke and mirrors to the look given to tourists. Real estate is overbuilt and unaffordable for most people. People are not happy with Xi Jinping. Many of the rich people are moving their money out, expecting that when Xi Jinping is replaced, there will be chaos because of the power vacuum it will create. He also talks that in his most recent visit, he could not use his phone to summon a taxi because phones have to be registered with the government. He had to arrange with his office to be picked up and taken everywhere.
So how do people who are working 72 hours a week, 12 hours a day and 6 days a week, have time or energy to attend concerts, dress up for cosplay, etc.? If days off are so rare, when can they go to the doctor, or the grocer, or the mall? Is all shopping and leisure conducted only one day a week? Who's eating in all these restaurants or buying all the fancy good if the entire adult population is at work all day every day?
That still leaves the question, those who do 996, whom I assume are very numerous, even granting that they have no time nor money for recreation, when are they able to buy even their necessities? There was a time when the American workingmen also worked 12-hour-days, six days a week, but that was when women were "keeping the home fires burning" and this article is not talking about laborers but people who work in offices.
It's hard to imagine that all the glitz of stores and restaurants are only for, say, the top 5% of Chinese society. But then, there are more people in the top 5% of Chinese society than there are people in France or the UK!
It maybe doesn’t cover all of the cases but delivery is far more advanced in China. Office workers can get stuff delivered at home or at the office. Many buildings have lockers outside where delivery guys drop stuff off.
Thank you for your look at China without the reflexive “evil empire” lens, — offering a rare, objective view of a society whose governance, while undeniably authoritarian, has delivered stability and prosperity for the most of the population. One can almost call it a "perfect dictatorship": efficient, long-term in vision, and rooted in centuries-old tradition of respect for elders and authority.
The achievements of this model is a stark contrast to the Soviet experiment, and they deserve to be acknowledged without reverting to Cold War caricatures. Before 1949, it’s worth remembering, China had never initiated a war of aggression.
I hope you will address the "New Chinese" phenomena - wealthy elites tied to the Communist Party but driven more by personal enrichment than patriotism — mirrors the “New Russians” of the post-Soviet era.
And to those who argue China’s economic rise rests on “stealing” American technology — the hard truth is that much of it was handed over by U.S. companies chasing cheap labor, higher profits, and weakening labor movement at home in the process.
China’s strengths and flaws both deserve to be clearly understood and condemning its authoritarianism should not blind us to what it has achieved.
Are you unaware of China's demographic decline? Do you not know that it imports about 75% of its energy and about 75% of the agricultural chemicals needed to produce what food it does? Are you unaware that it does not have a blue water navy. Its ships can sail no more than 1000 miles, if unimpeded. The US, through Breton Woods, made globalization possible. Post USSR, the US has no interest in globalization. North America is the only region on the planet that exports both food and energy. If the US considered China to be a threat, all it had to do is wait. Xi Jinping has reduced the CCP to a cult of personality. He has eliminated anyone who might challenge his judgement or authority. So, he no longer has valid data upon which to make enlightened decisions. Do you really believe China to be a world power in a decade?
I'm grateful for the window and looking forward to your second installment. It's short-sighted, and probably idiotic, to ignore this former Sleeping Giant, which is now very much awake and competing all over the world in all economic sectors. PS Chinese food, even the American version, really is something else. Yum yum.
Thanks for this. You've articulated a sense that I haven't put my finger on.
For a while now I've had this feeling that the dissatisfaction in the U.S. , particularly from MAGA folks, is somehow mirroring the rise of China, not just in timing (they're winning, we're losing) but in form.
It feels similar to me to the way that the New Deal reflected the rising strength of the Soviet model in the 30s. Like people in the US were saying "I wonder if maybe _that_ is the solution" and so took working class poverty more seriously than before.
Now we see not just anger at and distrust of institutions in the US, but in a new "centralitarian" style, rather than the libertarian style I've known my whole life. It feels like Trump's appeal is partly, or maybe even primarily, his desire to centralize power. And not only (though obviously significantly) for personal aggrandizement. For the sake of being decisive, taking action. He boasted of taking action very extensively in his address to Congress.
And of course the abundance movement is now pushing similar values with a left leaning tilt.
So this feels like this fits. But if it does, my question is, how does this happen?? That is, through what mechanism might voters, most of whom don't analyze comparative politics, get such a sense? What clues lead them to think not only that China is strong, but to get a sense of why and how.
Germany is a part of the EU just as Ohio is part of the USA. Germany is not equivalent to the USA. The states of the USA were always intended to be quite independent of each other. That constitutional dictate has been stomped, nearly to death, by two political parties that have no governmental authority whatsoever.
My wife and I were in China for two weeks with a group of American couples adopting Chinese children. Our group visited Tiananmen Square. We were warned ahead of time, do NOT mention the massacre to anyone. Americans know more about the massacre than the Chinese do.
Still, it's a very open, friendly society. People were glad to intermingle with us, and us with them. Except for church. We had a Sunday service in an auditorium. No Chinese were allowed. Armed guards checked everyone's ID, the ONLY time or place where that happened.
I know that this article is just part 1. But I still warn everyone that China is a totalitarian state, no matter how you spin it. And the individual states in the USA are autonomous states, not unlike Germany is in the EU. Two parties in this country seek to erase anyone's knowledge of this essential fact.
Yes they are. You've just come to believe that what the two parties do is constitutional. The constitution specifies that the federal government's purpose is to see to things that the individual states can't reasonably see to. The federal government declares and prosecutes wars. It makes treaties and sets tariffs. It settles disputes between states.
The federal government has no authority to regulate education within a state, or healthcare, or retirement.
It is the states that created the federal government, not the other way around. Their intent was to NOT have an autocratic Big Brother government controlling everything.
If we eliminated the two parties, and followed the constitution, we would be very much like the EU.
Excellent and fair essay. I visited Beijing and Shanghai many times pre-covid, and recently spent 10 delightful days touring Yunnan. All of your observations align with what I've personally seen.
Yascha, your insights are precious gems. China obviously gets a lot of things right, consequently challenging Western assumptions on democratic liberalism as the preconditioning for high living standards, innovation, decency, and what not. Thus transpires the double squeeze from the allurement of the Chinese model and the nihilism of the right.
In 2010 I won a 4 year EC contract in Public admin reform and found myself in Beijing with a Danish colleague and expected to bring in a lot of mainly German officials for a week or so. After a month I found the situation too depressing - and resigned but left behind this 70 page paper on my impressions -
Yascha thanks. Reading this one gets a sense of forboding apropos China's role in the future of the planet. No doubt you will address the Belt and Road Initiative, known in China as the One Belt One Road and sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, which we all know is a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the government of China in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organizations. The real question has to be "what is China's end goal" when that country becomes the most powerful country in the World? And what will be the policy of the CCP when it does? After Bretton Woods and WWII, the USA policy of benign hegemony through out the world was born, and is where world dominance took that behemoth that is America. Chinas population is destined to fall to 600,000 in 2100 so some reports say. One hopes that this short series addresses these questions, as it seems that the spread of Communism to the whole world, unlike the dogma of the USSR, is not the aim of China?
Interesting article. Not sure I am aligned. Actually when it comes to China I'm not sure about much of anything. I would be extremely interested to hear from other readers what they think of a perspective that I have lately been evaluating: the Stephen Kotkin doctrine on China:
Most of this was true in 2015 and all of it was true in 2023. The real story here is the Western commentariat waking up (finally) to the biggest story of the 21st century. It’s been very interesting to watch.
The recent conversation Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze here is probably the best example of this. Tooze made the point that all of industrial progress (from ~1800 to today) is basically an introductory chapter to the book China is writing today. You can’t understand “modernity” without understanding China. The West is no longer driving history.
I've been surprised by how many powerful and influential people still insist that we don't really need to worry about China because their authoritarian system is incapable of innovating and they can only copy the work of others. It strikes me as an example of rejecting new evidence in favor of more comforting prior assumptions. I fear that we won't wake up to reality until we have experienced our own Suez Crisis.
We already have examples of chinas cieling. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all have per capita gdps that are significantly lower than the west as well, and they have stopped growing. The East Asian model seems to cap out at 60% or so of what America is capable of.
Some of these “strengths” listed are actually bad things. Long hours studying and working aren’t translating to higher productivity. In fact productivity per hour worked is abysmal in east Asia. It’s a lot of zero sum red queen race bullshit.
People working 996 are unsurprisingly not having any children. What’s the point if building apartments in ghost cities for children that don’t exist?
China has scale. 1.4 billion x 50% of our gdp per capita would be a terrifying opponent if nukes hadn’t made major power war obsolete.
Luckily it’s also the case that the Chinese have started like zero wars since deng.
I’m more worried about America adopting Chinese “strengths”.
This is a terrific primer on the "current" China. Looking forward to the next installment.
Yascha, my son’s father in law is from Taiwan with business in China. He tells a different story than what you describe. He thinks there is a lot of smoke and mirrors to the look given to tourists. Real estate is overbuilt and unaffordable for most people. People are not happy with Xi Jinping. Many of the rich people are moving their money out, expecting that when Xi Jinping is replaced, there will be chaos because of the power vacuum it will create. He also talks that in his most recent visit, he could not use his phone to summon a taxi because phones have to be registered with the government. He had to arrange with his office to be picked up and taken everywhere.
Did you experience any of these things?
So how do people who are working 72 hours a week, 12 hours a day and 6 days a week, have time or energy to attend concerts, dress up for cosplay, etc.? If days off are so rare, when can they go to the doctor, or the grocer, or the mall? Is all shopping and leisure conducted only one day a week? Who's eating in all these restaurants or buying all the fancy good if the entire adult population is at work all day every day?
There’s a massive wealth gap and the wealthy do NOT do 996.
That still leaves the question, those who do 996, whom I assume are very numerous, even granting that they have no time nor money for recreation, when are they able to buy even their necessities? There was a time when the American workingmen also worked 12-hour-days, six days a week, but that was when women were "keeping the home fires burning" and this article is not talking about laborers but people who work in offices.
It's hard to imagine that all the glitz of stores and restaurants are only for, say, the top 5% of Chinese society. But then, there are more people in the top 5% of Chinese society than there are people in France or the UK!
It maybe doesn’t cover all of the cases but delivery is far more advanced in China. Office workers can get stuff delivered at home or at the office. Many buildings have lockers outside where delivery guys drop stuff off.
Thank you for your look at China without the reflexive “evil empire” lens, — offering a rare, objective view of a society whose governance, while undeniably authoritarian, has delivered stability and prosperity for the most of the population. One can almost call it a "perfect dictatorship": efficient, long-term in vision, and rooted in centuries-old tradition of respect for elders and authority.
The achievements of this model is a stark contrast to the Soviet experiment, and they deserve to be acknowledged without reverting to Cold War caricatures. Before 1949, it’s worth remembering, China had never initiated a war of aggression.
I hope you will address the "New Chinese" phenomena - wealthy elites tied to the Communist Party but driven more by personal enrichment than patriotism — mirrors the “New Russians” of the post-Soviet era.
And to those who argue China’s economic rise rests on “stealing” American technology — the hard truth is that much of it was handed over by U.S. companies chasing cheap labor, higher profits, and weakening labor movement at home in the process.
China’s strengths and flaws both deserve to be clearly understood and condemning its authoritarianism should not blind us to what it has achieved.
Excellent article!
We should rejoice in China’s strength especially as it has been gained at no great cost to the rest of the world.
I look forward to reading Part 2
Are you unaware of China's demographic decline? Do you not know that it imports about 75% of its energy and about 75% of the agricultural chemicals needed to produce what food it does? Are you unaware that it does not have a blue water navy. Its ships can sail no more than 1000 miles, if unimpeded. The US, through Breton Woods, made globalization possible. Post USSR, the US has no interest in globalization. North America is the only region on the planet that exports both food and energy. If the US considered China to be a threat, all it had to do is wait. Xi Jinping has reduced the CCP to a cult of personality. He has eliminated anyone who might challenge his judgement or authority. So, he no longer has valid data upon which to make enlightened decisions. Do you really believe China to be a world power in a decade?
I'm grateful for the window and looking forward to your second installment. It's short-sighted, and probably idiotic, to ignore this former Sleeping Giant, which is now very much awake and competing all over the world in all economic sectors. PS Chinese food, even the American version, really is something else. Yum yum.
Thanks for this. You've articulated a sense that I haven't put my finger on.
For a while now I've had this feeling that the dissatisfaction in the U.S. , particularly from MAGA folks, is somehow mirroring the rise of China, not just in timing (they're winning, we're losing) but in form.
It feels similar to me to the way that the New Deal reflected the rising strength of the Soviet model in the 30s. Like people in the US were saying "I wonder if maybe _that_ is the solution" and so took working class poverty more seriously than before.
Now we see not just anger at and distrust of institutions in the US, but in a new "centralitarian" style, rather than the libertarian style I've known my whole life. It feels like Trump's appeal is partly, or maybe even primarily, his desire to centralize power. And not only (though obviously significantly) for personal aggrandizement. For the sake of being decisive, taking action. He boasted of taking action very extensively in his address to Congress.
And of course the abundance movement is now pushing similar values with a left leaning tilt.
So this feels like this fits. But if it does, my question is, how does this happen?? That is, through what mechanism might voters, most of whom don't analyze comparative politics, get such a sense? What clues lead them to think not only that China is strong, but to get a sense of why and how.
Just a few observations:
Germany is a part of the EU just as Ohio is part of the USA. Germany is not equivalent to the USA. The states of the USA were always intended to be quite independent of each other. That constitutional dictate has been stomped, nearly to death, by two political parties that have no governmental authority whatsoever.
My wife and I were in China for two weeks with a group of American couples adopting Chinese children. Our group visited Tiananmen Square. We were warned ahead of time, do NOT mention the massacre to anyone. Americans know more about the massacre than the Chinese do.
Still, it's a very open, friendly society. People were glad to intermingle with us, and us with them. Except for church. We had a Sunday service in an auditorium. No Chinese were allowed. Armed guards checked everyone's ID, the ONLY time or place where that happened.
I know that this article is just part 1. But I still warn everyone that China is a totalitarian state, no matter how you spin it. And the individual states in the USA are autonomous states, not unlike Germany is in the EU. Two parties in this country seek to erase anyone's knowledge of this essential fact.
The political systems of the European Union and the federal United States of America are not close to being the same.
Yes they are. You've just come to believe that what the two parties do is constitutional. The constitution specifies that the federal government's purpose is to see to things that the individual states can't reasonably see to. The federal government declares and prosecutes wars. It makes treaties and sets tariffs. It settles disputes between states.
The federal government has no authority to regulate education within a state, or healthcare, or retirement.
It is the states that created the federal government, not the other way around. Their intent was to NOT have an autocratic Big Brother government controlling everything.
If we eliminated the two parties, and followed the constitution, we would be very much like the EU.
Bro...
Excellent and fair essay. I visited Beijing and Shanghai many times pre-covid, and recently spent 10 delightful days touring Yunnan. All of your observations align with what I've personally seen.
Yascha, your insights are precious gems. China obviously gets a lot of things right, consequently challenging Western assumptions on democratic liberalism as the preconditioning for high living standards, innovation, decency, and what not. Thus transpires the double squeeze from the allurement of the Chinese model and the nihilism of the right.
In 2010 I won a 4 year EC contract in Public admin reform and found myself in Beijing with a Danish colleague and expected to bring in a lot of mainly German officials for a week or so. After a month I found the situation too depressing - and resigned but left behind this 70 page paper on my impressions -
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-chinese-mission.html
Yascha thanks. Reading this one gets a sense of forboding apropos China's role in the future of the planet. No doubt you will address the Belt and Road Initiative, known in China as the One Belt One Road and sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, which we all know is a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the government of China in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organizations. The real question has to be "what is China's end goal" when that country becomes the most powerful country in the World? And what will be the policy of the CCP when it does? After Bretton Woods and WWII, the USA policy of benign hegemony through out the world was born, and is where world dominance took that behemoth that is America. Chinas population is destined to fall to 600,000 in 2100 so some reports say. One hopes that this short series addresses these questions, as it seems that the spread of Communism to the whole world, unlike the dogma of the USSR, is not the aim of China?
Interesting article. Not sure I am aligned. Actually when it comes to China I'm not sure about much of anything. I would be extremely interested to hear from other readers what they think of a perspective that I have lately been evaluating: the Stephen Kotkin doctrine on China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aQfzDs7RzI
Most of this was true in 2015 and all of it was true in 2023. The real story here is the Western commentariat waking up (finally) to the biggest story of the 21st century. It’s been very interesting to watch.
The recent conversation Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze here is probably the best example of this. Tooze made the point that all of industrial progress (from ~1800 to today) is basically an introductory chapter to the book China is writing today. You can’t understand “modernity” without understanding China. The West is no longer driving history.