China’s rise over the past several decades was neither accidental nor the result of conspiracy or simplistic authoritarian control, but rather the outcome of pragmatic governance, long-term state coordination, and sustained investment in human capital, industrial capacity, and applied technology. Western observers have often misunderstood this trajectory by interpreting China through rigid ideological binaries—free versus authoritarian, good versus bad—rather than examining how the Chinese system actually plans, adapts, and executes development strategy. As Peter B. Walker argues in Powerful, Different, Equal: Overcoming the Misconceptions and Differences Between China and the US (2019), such dualistic thinking has distorted Western media and policy judgments, obscuring the structural logic behind China’s ascent.
At the same time, critiques of China frequently expose the roots of American decline. In You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World (2020), David P. Goldman highlights how the United States weakened its own innovation ecosystem by embracing short-termism, financialization, and a narrow, software-centered view of progress. From this perspective, China did not surpass the United States by defying historical norms, but by sustaining a development strategy—state-supported, production-oriented, and technologically grounded—that the United States itself once pioneered but no longer had the discipline to maintain.
Industry as Strategy: How China Built Power While the West Drifted into Abstraction
For decades, China approached industrial development as a central pillar of national power, while much of the West increasingly treated it as a residual or even obsolete concern. This divergence was not merely a difference in policy choices, but a difference in underlying assumptions about how economic strength, technological leadership, and political legitimacy are generated.
Western commentary often misread China through a narrow lens. It was described as an authoritarian imitator, a low-cost assembly hub incapable of genuine innovation, and a system whose growth would inevitably stall without liberal democracy. Such views underestimated the depth of China’s historical experience. For much of its civilizational history, political legitimacy rested less on electoral processes than on competence, order, territorial integrity, and the ability of the state to deliver material improvement. The legacy of the “century of humiliation,” along with sensitivities surrounding regions such as Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, reinforced a governing philosophy that prioritized national cohesion and capacity over ideological alignment with Western norms.
China therefore never accepted several assumptions that became commonplace in the West. It did not believe that markets alone would automatically generate national power, that innovation would arise spontaneously from institutional disorder, or that manufacturing was a temporary stage to be discarded once a country became “advanced.” Instead, Chinese policymakers viewed industrial capacity as enduring infrastructure—strategic rather than transitional.
Acting on this view, China treated manufacturing, hardware, and scale as inseparable from innovation itself. It deliberately built what might be called an “industrial commons”: dense ecosystems of suppliers, engineers, logistics networks, and production facilities. This foundation enabled leadership in consumer drones, electric vehicles, EV batteries, e-commerce logistics, telecommunications equipment, and increasingly in industrial robotics and humanoid robotics. Innovation did not replace production; it emerged from sustained engagement with it.
By contrast, the United States and parts of the West offshored factories, fragmented supply chains, and celebrated “asset-light” business models. In doing so, they transferred not only physical production but also process knowledge and tacit expertise—the subtle, experience-based understanding that cannot be easily reconstructed once lost. China absorbed these capabilities and compounded them over time, allowing technological advances to follow manufacturing depth rather than precede it.
This difference is now visible in emerging domains such as autonomous vehicles and connected mobility. Vehicle-to-everything systems, telematics, and dense 4G and 5G networks enable cars to perceive hazards beyond line of sight and coordinate in real time. China’s integrated industrial and communications infrastructure provides a structural advantage, while the West’s fragmented approach to manufacturing and network deployment has become a constraint.
In essence, China took industry seriously as a source of power, resilience, and innovation, while much of the West abstracted it away in favor of financial efficiency and theoretical markets. The result is not merely a shift in manufacturing geography, but a reordering of where technological momentum now resides.
Mobilizing Minds: How China Scaled Human Capital While the United States Let It Erode
Over the past several decades, China and the United States adopted sharply different approaches to human capital, particularly in science, engineering, and manufacturing. China treated technical talent as a matter of national survival and statecraft, while the United States increasingly regarded innovation as a byproduct of private markets and individual choice. This divergence produced not only different educational outcomes, but different capacities for sustained technological power.
In China, STEM education was elevated to a strategic priority. The state deliberately built a vast pipeline of engineers, scientists, and technicians, aligning universities, industry, and government around long-term national objectives. Technical careers were made socially prestigious and economically rewarding, and intense competition was accepted as the price of rapid advancement. Within a collectivist cultural framework, the subordination of individual preference to national development was widely normalized; what Western observers often described as authoritarian pressure functioned in practice as coordinated mobilization at scale.
Western narratives frequently misunderstood this system. China’s education model was portrayed as rote, obedience-driven, and hostile to creativity or critical thinking. These critiques reflected a Western bias toward individual genius and disruptive brilliance, while underestimating the power of systematic talent cultivation. Innovation, however, does not emerge solely from isolated prodigies; it also depends on large, disciplined cohorts capable of executing complex technical work across entire industries.
The results are visible in the numbers. Roughly one-third of Chinese university graduates are engineers, and China now produces far more STEM PhDs than the United States. Chinese students trained in elite U.S. universities increasingly return home, bringing advanced expertise into a domestic ecosystem designed to absorb and deploy it. China did not merely train talent—it built institutions and incentives to retain it.
The United States followed a different path. Engineering became a niche rather than a mainstream aspiration, with only a small fraction of undergraduates pursuing it. Faculty positions in technical fields stagnated, incentives for hard-science and manufacturing careers weakened, and top talent flowed disproportionately into finance, law, consulting, and various forms of digital and financial abstraction. The U.S. came to rely heavily on foreign students for advanced STEM training, many of whom ultimately contributed their skills to China’s industrial and research base.
In effect, China expanded human capital as a system-level project, while the United States allowed its technical foundations to thin out. The contrast is not simply educational, but structural: one country built depth and continuity in its talent pool, while the other gradually hollowed it out—at growing cost to its long-term technological competitiveness.
Strategy over Faith: How China Sustained Industrial Policy While the United States Let It Wither
China never accepted the Western assumption that markets alone would efficiently allocate innovation or build national power. Instead, it adopted a developmental-state model in which the government actively coordinated long-term industrial priorities. This approach was neither novel nor uniquely Chinese; it closely resembled strategies once employed by the United States itself during the twentieth century, as well as by Japan and South Korea during their periods of rapid industrial ascent.
Operating from this premise, China treated industrial policy as a tool of statecraft rather than ideological deviation. It used planning mechanisms to target strategic sectors—such as semiconductors, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, energy systems, and robotics—while tolerating short-term inefficiencies in pursuit of long-term capability. Subsidies, protected domestic markets, and enforced learning curves were not viewed as distortions, but as instruments for accelerating mastery and building national champions.
Western critiques often framed this approach as unfair, inefficient, or incompatible with market principles. Yet this reaction reflected a selective reading of history. The United States itself rose to technological dominance through extensive state-directed innovation: the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, DARPA, Cold War defense R&D, and massive public investments in highways, education, and scientific research. Throughout much of the twentieth century, American prosperity rested on a mixed economy in which government coordinated, funded, and de-risked innovation while private firms executed and scaled it.
What changed was not the effectiveness of industrial policy, but Western ideology. As neoliberal thinking gained influence, industrial coordination was recast as central planning and market distortion. The United States dismantled much of its Cold War–era institutional capacity for strategic coordination, corporate R&D laboratories declined, and venture capital increasingly prioritized fast returns in software and consumer-facing applications. Core industrial technologies—such as advanced semiconductors, displays, and telecommunications equipment—were allowed to migrate offshore.
China, by contrast, refined rather than rejected state involvement. It treated the government as a strategic coordinator, not a micromanager, focused heavily on dual-use technologies with both civilian and military applications. Rather than blindly “picking winners,” China selected sectors, forced competition within them, allowed firms to fail, but ensured that national capacity and accumulated know-how were preserved. Scale, subsidies, and protected markets were used not to freeze inefficiency, but to push firms steadily up the value chain.
In essence, China practiced industrial policy as disciplined execution, while the United States increasingly outsourced its technological future to ideology and financial incentives. Where China emphasized capability-building and endurance, the U.S. relied on market faith and short-term returns. The result is not simply a policy disagreement, but a structural divergence in how each country converts innovation into sustained economic and strategic power.
Material Power versus Abstract Innovation: Divergent Paths of China and the United States
Over the past several decades, China and the United States have followed markedly different development trajectories. The United States increasingly prioritized abstraction—software, digital platforms, and financial engineering—while China concentrated on building tangible systems rooted in hardware, manufacturing, and physical infrastructure. This divergence has shaped not only their economic structures but also their respective positions in global technological competition.
In the United States, innovation came to be defined largely through software platforms, cloud services, advertising-driven business models, and financial practices such as share repurchases aimed at maximizing shareholder value. These choices often coincided with the offshoring of manufacturing to lower-cost regions, including China and Mexico. The implicit assumption was that innovation could remain detached from physical production, floating above material constraints without strategic consequence.
China pursued the opposite logic. It invested heavily in factories, fabrication plants, supply chains, tooling, logistics, and industrial capacity. Rather than focusing primarily on abstract ideas, China sought to dominate manufacturing ecosystems end to end. This approach reflected a belief that software and design, when separated from hardware and production, lack strategic depth and long-term leverage.
As a result, China now leads or competes strongly in sectors where complex physical systems matter most: telecommunications infrastructure, displays, batteries, electric vehicles, industrial robotics, and advanced manufacturing. These successes are not accidental but stem from deliberate efforts to master entire systems—semiconductors, power grids, logistics networks—rather than isolated components.
Western commentary often misread this strategy. China was frequently criticized for copying, incremental improvement, or a perceived lack of originality. Such critiques confused form with function. Incrementalism, in China’s case, was a method for absorbing complexity, scaling production, and achieving reliability at national and global levels. The focus was not on symbolic innovation, but on operational control.
Underlying this strategy is a cultural and policy framework that values tangible capacity. In this view, wealth is fragile unless anchored in production, and national strength depends on material self-sufficiency rather than abstract capital markets. By contrast, the United States excelled at inventing foundational digital technologies yet gradually relinquished the capacity to manufacture many of them.
The implication is stark: invention alone does not confer power. Control accrues to those who build, scale, and sustain physical systems. China internalized this lesson early, while the United States assumed that innovation could remain unmoored from material reality. In an era where technology and geopolitics are increasingly intertwined, that assumption is proving costly.
Strategic Patience and Short-Termism: China’s Long Horizon versus America’s Quarterly Logic
One of the most consequential distinctions between China and the United States lies in how each approaches time, strategy, and national development. China has consistently operated with long horizons measured in decades, while the United States has increasingly optimized for short-term outcomes. This divergence in temporal logic has profoundly shaped their respective approaches to innovation, industrial policy, and global competitiveness.
China’s strategy has emphasized planning over twenty- to thirty-year horizons, accepting short-term inefficiencies in exchange for long-term positioning. Success has been measured not by stock prices or quarterly earnings, but by the accumulation of capabilities—technological, industrial, and institutional. This orientation reflects a belief that durable power emerges from sustained capacity building rather than immediate financial returns.
By contrast, the United States gradually lost patience with long-term research and development. Financial markets came to exert disproportionate influence over corporate and policy decisions, encouraging optimization for consumption, shareholder value, and quarterly performance. As a result, long-term investments that did not promise rapid returns were often deprioritized, even when they were critical to national competitiveness.
China’s political structure, whatever its shortcomings, enabled sustained focus. Long-term objectives could be pursued across leadership transitions without being reset by frequent electoral cycles. This allowed China to invest through cycles: through successive five-year plans; through decade-long initiatives such as Made in China 2025; and through ambitious, multi-decade national projects comparable in scope to the U.S. Apollo program, including China’s long-term effort to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. These programs were designed to compound advantages over time rather than deliver immediate prestige.
Western observers often misread this approach. China was frequently portrayed as aggressive, impatient, or singularly driven by a desire for domination. In reality, its political culture places greater emphasis on continuity, gradualism, and risk containment. Progress is deliberately paced, with an emphasis on maintaining momentum and avoiding strategic reversals that could dissipate accumulated gains.
The United States followed a markedly different rhythm. Electoral cycles—two years for the House, four for the presidency, and six for the Senate—fragmented strategic continuity and encouraged frequent policy shifts. Political polarization further constrained long-term planning. A clear example was the decision in January 2017, when President Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiated under the Obama administration, ensuring it could not be ratified or enter into force. Such reversals signaled that major strategic commitments could be undone within a single political cycle.
Ultimately, China did not seek rapid victory. Its focus was on avoiding the loss of compounding advantages by maintaining consistency, patience, and long-term investment. The United States, by optimizing for the quarter, often traded strategic depth for immediate performance. The contrast reveals how differing attitudes toward time—not ideology alone—have shaped the balance between long-term national capacity and short-term optimization.
Selective Openness and Strategic Control: China’s Pragmatic Use of Globalization
China’s engagement with globalization has often been misunderstood in Western discourse. Contrary to the assumption that China rejected or resisted global integration, it instead embraced globalization selectively, using openness as a tool rather than a constraint. The defining feature of this approach was not isolation, but disciplined participation without surrendering strategic control.
China deliberately absorbed foreign technology, managerial practices, and talent while its own domestic capabilities matured. Students and researchers were sent abroad with a clear purpose: to learn, return, and institutionalize knowledge at scale. Technology transfer requirements, frequently criticized in the West, were part of a broader strategy to ensure that external inputs translated into internal capacity rather than permanent dependence. Throughout this process, China retained sovereignty over critical sectors it viewed as essential to long-term national strength.
This strategy reflected a deep cultural continuity. China’s emphasis on education is not new but rooted in a long civilizational tradition, exemplified by the imperial examination system, which for centuries linked learning to state capacity and social advancement. Knowledge acquisition has historically been treated as a collective investment rather than an individual luxury. Modern outcomes reflect this orientation: global assessments have shown China producing millions of STEM graduates annually, far exceeding Western totals, reinforcing its ability to absorb and operationalize advanced technologies.
What is often framed in the West as “theft” is more accurately understood as a civilizational learning strategy—adaptive, cumulative, and pragmatic. China did not pursue ideological purity in economic organization. Instead, it developed a form of state-led capitalism that preserves private-sector dynamism while aligning private incentives with national priorities. This alignment has been particularly visible in indigenous innovation efforts, where private firms and state institutions jointly pursue breakthroughs in strategically sensitive areas.
Crucially, globalization was never allowed to override national objectives. China leveraged open markets and international collaboration while maintaining control over finance, infrastructure, and core technologies. The goal was not to dominate globalization, but to prevent it from dictating domestic outcomes. In this sense, openness was conditional and reversible, always subordinate to long-term capability building.
The United States followed a different assumption: that openness alone guaranteed leadership. Over time, the separation of design from manufacturing hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, weakening the feedback loop between innovation and production. Innovation itself became increasingly associated with apps, platforms, and financial instruments rather than with industrial depth. China’s contrasting path demonstrates that globalization rewards those who engage it strategically, not those who assume it will automatically preserve advantage.
The Strategic Irony: Converging Conclusions from Opposite Camps
An irony runs through the work of two authors who begin from sharply different ideological positions yet arrive at the same underlying conclusion. Stripped of polemics and defenses alike, both identify a common reality: China’s rise is not an historical anomaly, but a familiar pattern—one the United States itself once mastered and later abandoned.
China’s success, they argue, rests on acting in ways strikingly reminiscent of America at its mid-twentieth-century peak. China’s long-term space program, including its plan to land astronauts on the moon by 2030, echoes the logic and ambition of Project Apollo. Its intensive push to develop an indigenous extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography prototype—achieving a working system by early 2025 under external pressure—parallels the Manhattan Project’s fusion of state coordination, scientific concentration, and national urgency. Massive investments in expressways and high-speed rail mirror the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, while systematic efforts to channel STEM talent into strategic industries resemble the National Defense Education Act’s role in building America’s Cold War scientific workforce.
The irony deepens when viewed from the other side. The United States did not lose ground because its earlier model failed, but because it consciously dismantled it. Flagship programs such as Apollo and the Manhattan Project were treated as historical exceptions rather than templates. The NDEA’s logic of national talent mobilization gave way to a more fragmented, market-driven approach. Under the influence of neoliberal assumptions, strategic coordination was increasingly outsourced to the private sector, with agencies like NASA relying on commercial actors even for missions once considered core national endeavors.
In this reading, China’s ascent has less to do with authoritarianism or cultural incompatibility than with discipline, coordination, and seriousness of purpose. At precisely the moment China adopted long-term planning, institutional focus, and state-backed technological ambition, the United States became more financialized, politically fragmented, and strategically distracted. What one author removes is moral panic; what the other removes is complacency.
Together, they reveal the central irony: China advanced by rediscovering methods the United States itself pioneered, while the United States declined by turning away from the very strategies that built its dominance. The contrast is not one of values alone, but of commitment—to sustained national projects, to coordinated capacity building, and to treating technological leadership as a matter of collective resolve rather than short-term convenience.
Final Thoughts
In retrospect, China’s success rests less on ideological divergence than on disciplined execution. It took engineering seriously, protected and rebuilt manufacturing, coordinated the state, academia, and industry, and treated innovation as a long-term national mission rather than a market byproduct. Western observers often misread these differences as threats, assuming liberal norms were prerequisites for development and failing to recognize that China was adapting America’s own earlier playbook. By ignoring ideological judgments, preserving and modernizing industrial civilization, and investing relentlessly in people, production, and applied science, China compounded advantages over time.
The United States, meanwhile, mistook financialization for innovation, confused services with strength, and dismantled the industrial ecosystem that once underwrote its dominance. China did not outperform America by rejecting Western ideas; it did so because the United States stopped practicing its own best ones.
References
- Powerful, Different, Equal: Overcoming the Misconceptions and Differences Between China and the US, Peter B. Walker, July 12, 2019
- You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World, David P. Goldman, 2020