Why the West Cannot Decide What China Is
The West’s long-standing effort to reshape China reflects a basic misreading of China’s developmental trajectory and reform logic. For decades, Western policymakers, academics, and elites have viewed China not as a civilizational peer pursuing its own path, but as an incomplete or delayed version of the West—one presumed to be progressing, eventually, toward Western political, economic, and social arrangements.
This misperception continues to drive strategic uncertainty. Is China a collaborator, a rival, or an adversary? The United States and the European Union increasingly define China as all three at once. Such a stance is inherently contradictory, akin to navigating an intersection where red, yellow, and green signals flash simultaneously—an arrangement that invites confusion rather than coherent judgment.
As a result, Western policy toward China swings between engagement, competition, and confrontation in the absence of a consistent conceptual framework. Even as cooperation is pursued on issues like climate change and global stability, the West accelerates economic decoupling, technological restrictions, and ideological contestation. This disjointed approach reflects not mere tactical inconsistency, but a deeper failure to grasp what China represents—and what it does not.
The Deeper Roots of Conflict: Civilizational Assumptions
Tensions between China and the West over trade, human rights, security, technology, and global governance are often framed as the central challenges in their relationship. In fact, these disputes are better understood as symptoms of deeper structural and cultural divergences rooted in history, values, and political traditions. At the core of these divergences lies a persistent Western fixation on the idea of “transforming China.”
Across centuries, Western interaction with China has been shaped by a strong civilizational self-confidence—frequently verging on presumption—that Western norms are universally applicable, morally superior, and historically destined to prevail. This outlook is well documented in Jonathan D. Spence’s Changing China: Western Advisers in China, which chronicles Western attempts from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries to refashion China through missionary activity, diplomacy, technical expertise, and institutional redesign. Despite their varied intentions, these efforts were united by a shared belief that China ought to be reconstructed in the West’s image.
Spence identifies a recurring dynamic in these encounters. Even when driven by sincere reformist intentions, Western actors consistently failed to comprehend China’s cultural frameworks and social organization. Their interventions frequently generated resistance, unintended outcomes, or outright collapse. The fundamental issue was not flawed execution alone, but a deeper cultural misrecognition—specifically, the refusal to accept that China could modernize along a path that did not replicate Western experience.
Missionary Modernity Reimagined: How Post–Cold War Engagement Reproduced an Old Assumption
The civilizational impulse to reshape China did not disappear with the end of colonial rule. Instead, it was reconstituted in the post–Cold War period as a belief that economic integration and market-oriented reform would naturally and inevitably produce political liberalization. Transformation was no longer framed as coercive intervention, but as an automatic outcome of participation in global capitalism—a secularized continuation of an older missionary mindset.
For roughly three decades, U.S. policy toward China operated within this framework. Prosperity was expected to erode authoritarian governance, markets were assumed to generate liberal social values, and modernity itself was equated with political pluralism and democratic institutions. China was not approached as a genuinely alternative model of modernization, but as a society temporarily lagging behind the West along a single, universal historical trajectory.
This outlook drew intellectual coherence from a set of mutually reinforcing theories. Modernization theory predicted convergence toward Western-style democracy; middle-class theory anticipated liberal political demands as incomes rose; the authoritarian–democratic dichotomy cast global politics as a moral struggle; and democratic peace theory linked liberal governance to international stability. Together, these assumptions formed the ideological foundation of Western engagement strategy, reinforced by the post–Cold War conviction that liberal democracy and free markets were not only superior, but historically inevitable.
China’s rise without political convergence exposed the limits of this belief system. What had been assumed to be a universal path to modernity revealed itself instead as a culturally specific projection—one that underestimated both China’s capacity for adaptation and the enduring influence of missionary modernity in contemporary Western thought.
Modernization Without Convergence: China’s Deliberate Developmental Choice
Contrary to long-standing Western expectations, China’s economic expansion did not weaken the state or erode political authority. Instead, growth reinforced state capacity, market integration enhanced institutional control, and participation in global capitalism generated confidence rather than ideological retreat. The assumption that prosperity would produce political convergence proved misplaced.
China did not reject modernization as such; it rejected the West’s exclusive claim to define it. Rather than equating modernity with political liberalization, China has consistently understood modernity in terms of material strength, technological competence, and productive capacity. Manufacturing depth, infrastructure development, logistics networks, and integrated industrial systems are treated as the foundations of national power. Factories, ports, shipyards, energy grids, and supply chains are viewed not as market distortions, but as strategic assets.
Accordingly, industrial policy, state-guided investment, and long-term capacity accumulation take precedence over short-term profitability. Technology is defined in concrete, physical terms—advanced materials, batteries, robotics, electric vehicles, and industrial artificial intelligence—rather than abstract financial innovation. Persistent trade surpluses are treated as structural advantages, stability is prioritized over efficiency, and soft budget constraints are employed to sustain employment, preserve skills, and support long-term industrial learning.
This development path is neither accidental nor transitional. It reflects a conscious and sustained choice to modernize without convergence, demonstrating that economic advancement need not culminate in the political or institutional forms anticipated by Western theory.
Two Systems, Two Logics: How the United States and China Played Different Games
The United States and China have approached modernity from fundamentally different premises, resulting in two systems operating according to distinct strategic logics. American policymakers largely assumed that economic development would lead to political and institutional convergence, while China deliberately pursued a divergent path rooted in its own historical experience and national priorities.
These contrasting assumptions produced markedly different economic strategies. The United States came to view deindustrialization as a rational outcome of efficiency and comparative advantage, prioritizing shareholder value and financial optimization. China, by contrast, treated industrial capacity as a matter of national survival, organizing its economy around the accumulation of productive capability, technological depth, and long-term state capacity.
Because these systems were playing by different rules, Western policymakers misinterpreted China’s rise as compatible with—and ultimately subordinate to—the liberal international order. In practice, China leveraged that order to accelerate its development while simultaneously preparing to operate beyond its constraints. This divergence helps explain why Chinese policies are often portrayed in the West as violations, distortions, or acts of bad faith, rather than as the coherent expression of an alternative development philosophy.
From Misjudgment to Disorientation: The Psychological Impact of China’s Defied Expectations
For years, a prevailing assumption in the United States held that China’s political and economic system would ultimately collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. That expectation proved mistaken. Rather than faltering, China sustained growth, expanded its innovative capacity, and continued to export at scale, even after the disruptions of the COVID period and despite persistent Western narratives of “Peak China.”
The failure of this prediction has generated more than a strategic reassessment. It has produced a deeper psychological shock, unsettling long-standing assumptions about the direction and outcome of global competition. As China’s performance defied expectations, confidence in the inevitability of Western advantage began to erode.
Increasingly, some Americans fear that the contest may already be slipping away. China is perceived as faster, larger, and more cohesive in its execution, while the United States appears constrained by internal division and procedural inertia. Beliefs in automatic American predominance no longer feel secure.
This moment does not amount to an admission of defeat. It does, however, reflect a growing sense of disorientation. The frameworks that once guided strategy appear insufficient, and a clear replacement has yet to be articulated.
Building Power: Infrastructure, State Capacity, and Western Unease
China’s highly visible infrastructure achievements—high-speed rail networks, expansive urban development, large-scale housing construction, major ports, and monumental bridges—present a striking contrast to contemporary American conditions. Where China demonstrates rapid execution and physical transformation, the United States faces aging infrastructure, prolonged regulatory processes, and persistent housing shortages.
This divergence has become increasingly salient for Western policymakers and intellectuals. China appears as a system capable of mobilizing resources and delivering complex projects at scale, while the United States often struggles to complete even comparatively limited initiatives. The contrast is not merely material, but institutional, highlighting differences in state capacity and administrative effectiveness.
The reaction this contrast provokes is less admiration than unease. China’s ability to build challenges a deeply held assumption that liberal political systems are inherently more capable of effective governance and execution. What emerges is not simply comparison, but anxiety—an awareness that infrastructural performance has become a measure of systemic credibility in an era of renewed great-power competition.
Scale Shock: China’s Industrial and Technological Overmatch
What unsettles many Americans most is not any individual Chinese technological breakthrough, but the magnitude of China’s industrial and technological capacity as a whole. China’s dominance in green energy production—spanning solar, wind, electric vehicles, and batteries—alongside its leadership in drones, robotics, shipbuilding, and advanced manufacturing, signals a level of productive scale that exceeds conventional measures of competition. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and clinical research further compounds this perception, particularly as these areas were long regarded as core American strengths.
As a result, competition is increasingly experienced less as a balanced race and more as an asymmetry. This perception does not arise from doubts about the United States’ ability to innovate, but from the realization that China operates at a civilizational scale the West neither anticipated nor fully prepared for. Scale itself—rather than ingenuity alone—has become a decisive factor, reshaping how industrial and technological rivalry is understood.
Historical Echoes: Political Backlash and the Return of the China Trauma
The contemporary shock surrounding China’s rise has reactivated older anxieties embedded in American political history. After 1949, the question “Who lost China?” dominated U.S. political discourse, fueling McCarthyism and widespread repression within academic and intellectual communities. That episode reflected not only strategic failure, but an inability to accept China’s revolutionary transformation on its own terms.
A similar psychological pattern is visible today. Renewed scrutiny of universities, research institutions, and scientific collaboration is driven in part by legitimate security concerns, but it is also shaped by deeper unease. Beneath the policy response lies the collapse of a long-held belief that China was destined to evolve into a system resembling the West. As that assumption has faded, anxiety has returned in a familiar form—manifesting as political backlash against institutions associated with exchange, expertise, and engagement.
From Transformation to Coexistence: The End of the Convergence Illusion
By the late twentieth century, Western engagement with China was widely framed as a second opportunity to shape its long-term trajectory. Economic integration, trade liberalization, and market reform were expected to set in motion a process of political convergence. After four decades, that expectation has demonstrably failed. Capitalism did not transform China’s political system; instead, China selectively absorbed and reshaped capitalism to serve its own developmental objectives.
This recognition has increasingly surfaced in American political discourse. Critics such as U.S. Senator Marco Rubio have argued that the original premise of engagement rested on a flawed assumption: that economic success would lead China to adopt Western lifestyles, values, and political norms, aligning its long-term interests with those of the United States. On this view, the offshoring of American industries and jobs to China was justified by the belief that prosperity would produce liberalization. When that outcome did not materialize, economic interdependence came to be reinterpreted as vulnerability rather than mutual benefit.
Such critiques often portray U.S.–China economic relations as inherently exploitative, framing technology transfer, industrial upgrading, and supply-chain integration as evidence of strategic manipulation. While these claims are politically powerful, they also reflect a deeper source of frustration: the collapse of the belief that integration would result in transformation. What was once described as partnership is now recast as coercion, dependency, or betrayal, precisely because the original assumption of convergence proved false.
Even senior U.S. officials now acknowledge that decades of overt and covert efforts to reshape China’s political and economic system were unsuccessful. The strategic implication is unavoidable. Transformation is no longer a viable objective. The remaining challenge is how to manage competition, interdependence, and conflict within a framework of coexistence—accepting that China’s modernization has proceeded along a path that neither requires nor guarantees convergence with Western norms.
Modernization on Its Own Terms: China’s Self-Directed Transformation
China has undergone profound transformation, but it has done so in a distinctly self-directed manner. Change has been continuous rather than abrupt, shaped by experimentation, gradual adjustment, and selective learning rather than wholesale adoption of external models. Market mechanisms have been incorporated where they enhance growth and efficiency, while reforms perceived to threaten governance capacity or social stability have been deliberately constrained.
This adaptive, state-led approach underscores a central reality: modernization does not require Western political conversion, nor does it depend on Western validation. China’s experience demonstrates that economic development, institutional capacity, and technological advancement can proceed along alternative paths, defined by domestic priorities rather than external expectations.
Summary & Implications
The central illusion that must now be abandoned is the belief that China can—or should—be remade in the image of the West. The emerging global order is no longer convergent but pluralistic, multipolar, and ideologically diverse. China has not failed to become Western; it has succeeded in becoming modern on its own terms. The decisive question, therefore, is no longer how to transform China, but whether the West can recalibrate its own assumptions and adapt intellectually and strategically to a world in which alternative models of modernity not only exist, but endure.
References
- “America Is Waving the White Flag in the New Cold War”. David Wallace-Wells. January 22, 2026. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/opinion/us-china-cold-war-tariffs-trump.html