China’s revival is plausible not because of inevitability, but because it rests on durable structural advantages: long civilizational continuity, a large and mobilizable population, a developmental state capable of intervention, and a unifying national narrative shaped by the “century of humiliation.” These features confer a degree of resilience that many historically declining powers lacked. Yet revival is constrained rather than boundless, as demographic pressures, uneven educational outcomes, innovation bottlenecks, and external geopolitical resistance impose real limits on China’s trajectory.
Within this context, Sino–U.S. competition is best understood as a prolonged, structural, and multidimensional rivalry spanning technology, manufacturing supply chains, finance, global governance, and normative influence. The United States retains the theoretical capacity to reindustrialize, given its capital depth, institutional foundations, innovative ecosystems, and market scale, but doing so would require sustained political consensus and institutional reform. Persistent features of the American political economy—financialization, short-term incentives, polarization, and weak industrial coordination—make such transformation difficult, pointing toward an extended period of unstable competition rather than a decisive resolution.
Why Only China? Civilizational Continuity as the Key to Resurgence
Chinese civilization is historically unique in its continuity. Unlike other advanced civilizations, it has persisted uninterrupted from the Bronze Age to the present, maintaining its language, institutions, dominant ethnic core, and cultural foundations. Its writing system, for example, is logographic rather than phonetic, allowing classical texts to be transmitted directly across time and dialects, fostering a sustained sense of cultural community. Likewise, institutional structures such as the county system, the imperial examination, and scholar-official governance have evolved iteratively rather than being entirely replaced, creating a resilient framework that underpins modern administrative and bureaucratic practices.
This civilizational continuity distinguishes China from other historical powers. European empires like Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France achieved prominence largely through maritime expansion, colonial plunder, and early industrialization. Once these overseas structures collapsed during the post-World War II decolonization wave, these nations experienced a relative decline; their core societies lacked an institutional foundation to independently sustain technological and industrial dominance. Similarly, Russia’s Soviet-era rise depended heavily on centralized mobilization and planned economic strategies. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the rupture between Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet legacies left the nation with a fragmented civilizational narrative, undermining its ability to maintain coherent, long-term industrial and technological development.
In contrast, China’s identity is rooted in a civilizational, rather than strictly national or religious, framework. Historically, China absorbed and assimilated foreign and frontier regimes—from the Northern Wei to the Yuan and Qing dynasties—through a process of “re-Sinicization,” demonstrating remarkable cultural and institutional resilience. Even during periods of crisis, such as the “century of humiliation” from 1840 to 1949, Chinese civilization did not disappear; it merely entered a phase of dormancy. The continuity of language, philosophy, bureaucratic structures, and shared historical consciousness allowed China to modernize from a deeply entrenched civilizational base, rather than reinvent itself entirely.
This enduring civilizational identity also provides strong political legitimacy and long-term strategic vision. Unlike Western nation-states, whose legitimacy is often tied to territory, ideology, or short electoral cycles, China’s civilization offers a narrative of cumulative progress, recovery, and self-reliance. The historical trauma of foreign domination has transformed into a collective imperative for technological sovereignty and industrial modernization, fueling policies that prioritize strategic independence and sustained development. Civilizational memory, therefore, becomes a driving force for contemporary statecraft and long-horizon projects.
Ultimately, China’s potential for resurgence is rooted in its endogenous strengths: an unbroken civilizational core, a cumulative institutional legacy, and a cohesive cultural identity. While other great powers relied on external conquest, colonial exploitation, or ideological mobilization, China’s rise is fundamentally restorative, building upon millennia of continuous civilization. This combination of historical depth, cultural resilience, and institutional continuity explains why, comparatively speaking, China alone possesses the unique capacity to rise again as a global power.
Institutional Resilience and Governance Capacity in China’s Mega-State
China exemplifies a super-large-scale political community with a distinctive governance capacity that blends long-term planning, centralized coordination, and adaptive flexibility. At its core, this system integrates politics, economy, and society, with the party-state structure deeply embedded in both economic and social spheres. Long-term strategic frameworks—ranging from Five-Year Plans to Ten-Year Outlines and centenary goals—enable China to pursue projects with horizons far beyond the typical constraints of quarterly financial cycles or electoral politics. This combination of soft budget constraints and hard execution capability allows the state to channel resources decisively into strategic sectors, including new energy, semiconductors, and next-generation technologies such as 6G.
The adaptability of China’s governance system is evident in its hybrid approach, which combines state leadership with market mechanisms. Mixed-ownership reforms, as seen in cases like Changan Automobile, preserve strategic state control while introducing market incentives and private-sector dynamism. Similarly, the combination of top-down planning through Five-Year Plans and localized pilot programs—such as free trade zones and technology special zones—creates a feedback loop of experimentation and refinement. Decision-making emphasizes resilience over ideological purity, reflecting bottom-line thinking and gray-area pragmatism, exemplified in strategies like dual circulation and simultaneous pursuit of technological self-reliance and open innovation.
China’s institutional resilience contrasts sharply with the relative rigidity of the United States. Constitutional inflexibility, the dominance of financial capital in politics, and deep ideological polarization hinder the U.S. from implementing coherent long-term industrial strategies. These structural constraints contribute to a negative feedback loop of financialization, deindustrialization, and political deadlock, limiting the country’s capacity to reclaim comprehensive global leadership across manufacturing, finance, and culture. By contrast, China’s industrialization reflects a deliberate, state-directed strategy rather than the pursuit of short-term profits, leveraging structural protection and targeted development to sustain economic sovereignty.
The scale of China’s population and unified domestic market further amplifies its governance capacity. Centralized planning and fiscal and industrial tools allow the state to concentrate resources in strategic sectors, achieving economies of scale in manufacturing and technological deployment unattainable for smaller powers or fragmented economies. Through control over credit, land, and procurement, the state creates an industrial gravitational pull that channels private and public capital toward national priorities. This model of “state capitalism” draws on a long civilizational tradition—spanning the Han to Qing dynasties—where the state is the primary guarantor of social continuity and national development, rather than merely an arbiter of market forces.
In sum, China’s governance demonstrates a remarkable combination of scale, mobilization, and adaptive capacity. Its institutional resilience lies not in rigid authoritarianism but in a sophisticated hybrid system capable of pursuing long-term strategic objectives, integrating feedback from local experimentation, and maintaining systemic stability across a vast and complex society. This capacity positions China to undertake projects and industrial transformations at a scope and pace unmatched in contemporary history.
Civilizational Psychological Structure: A Vision Beyond the Nation-State
The Western concept of the nation-state emerged as a solution to feudal fragmentation, yet it faces intrinsic limitations in the modern era. Attempts to scale this model, such as the European Union, have revealed its structural weaknesses. Brexit exemplified that without a shared historical narrative and a deeper civilizational identity, institutional integration cannot endure. Similarly, the United States, often celebrated as a “creedal nation” unified by constitutional ideals, demonstrates fragility: economic stagnation, widening class divisions, and cultural polarization can hollow out its foundational principles, exposing the inherent paradox of the nation-state—its reliance on a homogeneous identity while navigating the complexities of diversity and modernity.
In contrast, China exemplifies a civilizational model that transcends the nation-state framework. Its stability arises from a unique blend of historical continuity, cultural integration, and pragmatic governance. Collective land ownership provides a buffer against disorderly capital accumulation and offers rural-urban mobility, while secular, performance-based legitimacy ensures that societal cohesion is anchored in development outcomes rather than ideological conformity. Engineering rationality—prioritizing infrastructure, poverty alleviation, and technological advancement—supersedes identity politics, allowing China to avoid the divisive tribalism observed in Western democracies. Unlike the EU, which lacks a unifying civilizational core, China’s integration relies on shared cultural participation, historical memory, and a consensus forged through centuries of collective experience.
China’s geopolitical structure further reinforces its civilizational resilience. Its vast temperate plains, strategic interior plateaus, and access to the sea provide both depth and flexibility, enabling it to withstand external pressures while sustaining internal circulation. This combination of continental and maritime advantages informs initiatives such as the Belt and Road, which seek to harmonize land-based and maritime connectivity, mitigating the historical vulnerabilities of purely maritime powers like Britain, France, and Spain. By leveraging strategic depth alongside technological and infrastructural capabilities, China ensures continuity and adaptability in the face of global shifts.
The limitations of the Western nation-state paradigm are increasingly evident. Its scale paradox demands population homogeneity to maintain identity, often resulting in fragmentation, as seen in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Universal suffrage and democratic governance collide with the global mobility of capital, undermining welfare systems and fueling social unrest. Identity politics emerges as a destructive force when upward mobility stalls, pitting groups against one another in existential struggles over belonging. China’s civilizational approach avoids these traps: national identity is rooted not in ideological adherence but in cultural literacy, historical continuity, and a shared sense of collective responsibility spanning family, nation, and the broader world.
China’s modern governance and strategic orientation are informed by historical lessons of humiliation and subjugation, fostering elite and public consensus on capacity-building and long-term structural interventions. Its legitimacy derives not from procedural ideals but from tangible performance: sustained economic growth, technological advancement, and the preservation of civilizational continuity. By emphasizing scenario-driven innovation, engineering integration, and systemic collaboration, China achieves breakthroughs in fields such as AI, 6G, and new energy technologies. The result is a civilizational state whose stability, adaptability, and enduring identity transcend the limitations of the Western nation-state, offering a model of governance rooted in cultural cohesion, historical consciousness, and pragmatic performance.
China’s Development Model and Its Structural Resistance to Financialization
China’s relative immunity to excessive financialization stems from a fundamentally different development model than that of the Anglo-American economies. Rather than relying on laissez-faire principles and shareholder primacy, China practices a form of state-led development characterized by industrial policy, subsidies, long-term planning, and public control over strategic sectors. This approach counteracts the short-term bias of capital markets and prevents finance from exerting disproportionate influence over corporate strategy, such as the asset-light, outsourcing-driven model that has dominated the United States.
A key source of this resilience lies in how political authority and capital interact. In China, finance has not been allowed to dominate politics; instead, the Party maintains leadership over the financial system. Capital is treated as an instrument to serve national development goals rather than as an autonomous force dictating them. State-owned enterprises play a central role in this system, undertaking functional and strategic missions beyond profit maximization. Infrastructure champions such as the high-speed rail sector exemplify how economic activity is aligned with national connectivity, industrial upgrading, and long-term competitiveness rather than quarterly returns.
China’s land and urbanization system further constrains financialization. Collective ownership of rural land limits speculative real-estate dynamics and helps prevent the kind of land-finance-debt spiral that has plagued many market-driven economies. As a result, urbanization and growth do not automatically translate into runaway asset inflation or excessive leverage, preserving policy space for productive investment in manufacturing and technology.
These institutional arrangements are reinforced by a deeper civilizational framework. Unlike Western powers whose modern strength was closely tied to the nation-state, electoral cycles, and legal-financial constructs, China frames itself as a civilization-state with a long historical continuity. This identity enables institutional memory and long-horizon planning that transcend short-term political or financial cycles. It also supports a sustained commitment to “hard” technologies and strategic industries—areas where control over physical assets, skills, and supply chains is essential.
Seen in this light, China’s regulatory “rectification” of software and platform companies is not an anti-innovation impulse, but a deliberate recalibration of capital allocation. By redirecting intellectual and financial resources away from purely financial or algorithmic rent-seeking and toward fields such as AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing, batteries, and shipbuilding, the state aims to raise the productivity of hundreds of millions of ordinary workers. This prioritization reflects a civilizational judgment: technologies that strengthen broad productive capacity and strategic autonomy matter more to long-term societal resilience than those that merely optimize attention or financial returns.
In contrast to the U.S. experience—where financial markets pushed firms to shed assets and outsource labor in pursuit of higher investment returns—China’s system has preserved control over core capabilities. The result is an economy less vulnerable to the hollowing-out effects of financialization and more capable of sustaining industrial depth, technological upgrading, and long-term national resurgence.
Why Cold War Containment Fails Against a Resilient China
Peter Nolan argues in America’s Cold War against China: Destined to Fail (2025) that China cannot be meaningfully compared to the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia, and that U.S. containment strategies derived from the Cold War are therefore fundamentally misguided. His central claim is that China’s power rests on deep historical continuity and institutional resilience rather than on a brittle, ideologically constructed state apparatus. This distinction, he contends, explains why attempts to isolate or coerce China are unlikely to produce outcomes similar to the Soviet collapse.
A core pillar of Nolan’s argument is China’s long-standing meritocratic and bureaucratic tradition. For over two millennia, Chinese governance has been shaped by examination-based administrative systems designed to select, train, and discipline officials. While modern China is governed by the Communist Party, Nolan emphasizes that the Party has inherited and adapted these older statecraft traditions rather than replacing them wholesale with rigid ideology. This continuity has produced an administrative system capable of long-term planning, policy learning, and coordinated execution—features largely absent from the Soviet system, which was comparatively recent, ideologically inflexible, and structurally fragile.
Nolan further stresses the adaptive capacity of Chinese governance. Unlike the Soviet Union, which struggled to reform without undermining its own foundations, China has repeatedly adjusted its economic and institutional arrangements while preserving central political authority. The post-1978 reforms exemplify this pragmatism: markets were introduced not as an ideological conversion, but as tools subordinated to state goals. This blend of centralized control and policy flexibility, Nolan argues, has allowed China to absorb shocks, correct errors, and evolve without systemic collapse.
Finally, Nolan situates China within a broader civilizational and historical framework. China is not merely a modern nation-state but the contemporary expression of a continuous civilization with a deeply ingrained sense of historical time. This long perspective fosters strategic patience and social cohesion that external observers—particularly in the United States—often underestimate. In contrast to the Soviet Union’s abrupt emergence and dissolution, China’s state institutions draw legitimacy from endurance and historical memory. As a result, Nolan concludes that strategies premised on exhausting, isolating, or destabilizing China misunderstand its sources of strength and are therefore unlikely to succeed.
China’s Civilizational Resurgence and the Long Contest with America
The contemporary competition between China and the United States is best understood not as a conventional ideological contest between political systems, but as an encounter between two distinct civilizational relationships to time. American power has historically rested on short-term dynamism: rapid innovation cycles, flexible institutions, electoral accountability, and an unmatched capacity for self-correction. China’s resurgence, by contrast, draws strength from long temporal horizons—decades or generations of coordinated planning, institutional continuity, and a widely shared national narrative of historical recovery. This asymmetry in timescales, rather than regime type, increasingly defines the structure of their rivalry.
This divergence implies that Sino–U.S. competition will be prolonged and multidimensional rather than decisive or episodic. China’s capacity to rebuild industrial ecosystems, absorb shocks, and persist through setbacks makes the rivalry durable across military, economic, technological, and diplomatic domains. Rather than a short, decisive confrontation, the world should expect a sustained contest marked by adaptation, learning, and cumulative advantage. The competition is therefore less about immediate dominance than about endurance and compounding capability over time.
At the global level, China’s civilizational resurgence accelerates the bifurcation of international systems. Supply chains, technology standards, financial arrangements, and regulatory norms are increasingly splitting into parallel or partially decoupled structures. States will face growing pressure to align with one side or strategically hedge between the two. Simultaneously, U.S. efforts to contain China’s access to critical technologies—through export controls, investment screening, and alliance coordination—are reinforcing China’s drive for self-reliance in semiconductors, energy systems, and advanced manufacturing. Each side’s defensive measures thus generate a feedback loop that deepens structural separation.
Economically, the competition exposes a fundamental clash between financialized short-termism and state-driven industrial policy. In principle, the United States retains ample tools to reindustrialize: public procurement, targeted subsidies, tax incentives, and regulatory reform. In practice, however, redirecting capital away from short-term financial returns toward long-horizon industrial investment requires political consensus, institutional coordination, and cultural change in corporate governance—conditions that are difficult to achieve in a polarized democracy. China’s system, by contrast, more easily aligns capital, labor, and state objectives around long-term industrial goals.
The political and normative consequences are equally significant. China frames its rise as a civilizational restoration after historical humiliation, while the United States relies on a civic-national narrative rooted in pluralism and institutional legitimacy. Translating material success into a unifying national story is increasingly difficult for the U.S. amid social fragmentation and media-driven short-termism. As a result, domestic political capacity becomes a central determinant of external power. China’s resurgence thus challenges the United States less by ideological appeal than by demonstrating the strategic advantages of long-term coordination.
Ultimately, the implication is stark: the Sino–U.S. competition is a clash of temporal philosophies. If the United States seeks to remain competitive in an era defined by China’s long-horizon resurgence, it must confront its own structural bias toward short-termism. Doing so would require deep reforms in finance, politics, and information systems—changes that amount not merely to policy adjustment, but to a partial reconstruction of the American political economy itself.
Civilizational Constraints On American Reindustrialization
American calls for “reindustrialization” increasingly invoke China’s experience with state-led industrial policy, yet these comparisons underestimate a far deeper obstacle: the erosion of the United States’ civilizational foundations. The difficulty the U.S. faces is not merely economic or technical, but structural and cultural. Industrial revival requires long-term coordination, collective sacrifice, and durable national purpose—conditions that are increasingly scarce in contemporary American society.
At the core of the problem lies the United States’ inability to generate sustained political consensus. Unlike China, which can plausibly mobilize society around the idea that short-term hardship serves long-term national rejuvenation, the U.S. is ideologically and institutionally resistant to such logic. The American political tradition defines itself in opposition to centralized planning; industrial policy, five-year plans, and state direction of capital conflict with foundational myths of free markets and anti-communism. As a result, even when industrial policy is adopted, it remains fragmented, tentative, and politically fragile.
This difficulty is compounded by the replacement of class-based politics with identity-based mobilization. Economic redistribution, industrial investment, and labor-centered strategies require broad coalitions across income groups. Yet American politics is increasingly organized along racial, religious, and cultural lines. The left struggles to advance material redistribution in a fractured electorate, while the right relies on symbolic and cultural issues to maintain cohesion. Politics becomes tribal rather than strategic, leaving little institutional capacity for long-term national planning.
The hollowing out of national identity further weakens the prospects for industrial renewal. In the absence of a shared civilizational narrative, American identity increasingly fragments into sub-national affiliations—racial, ideological, or religious. Abstract symbols such as the Constitution, democratic ideals, or market freedom can sustain unity during prosperity, but they lack the emotional and historical depth needed to mobilize society through prolonged economic restructuring. Industrialization is not merely a technical process; it is a collective project that depends on shared meaning and legitimacy.
By contrast, China’s industrial success is inseparable from its civilizational continuity. Centuries of shared cultural memory and historical experience provide a foundation for long-term planning and societal endurance. China’s political system can coordinate resources, align institutions, and sustain strategic priorities across decades. This does not guarantee success, but it does enable coherence. The United States, by comparison, has pursued a century of financialization and globalization that privileged short-term shareholder returns over domestic industrial capacity, hollowing out critical sectors and reinforcing institutional short-termism.
None of this implies that American reindustrialization is impossible. The United States retains formidable strengths: technological leadership in key domains, deep capital markets, world-class universities, innovative firms, and policy tools ranging from tariffs and procurement to subsidies and antitrust. Partial successes—such as semiconductor subsidies—demonstrate that targeted intervention is feasible. However, translating these efforts into a sustained, systemic industrial transformation would require profound political and institutional change: reforming corporate governance, building long-term investment institutions, and, above all, forging a cross-societal consensus around national industrial capacity.
The likelihood of such a transformation in the near term remains low. Entrenched financial interests, polarized politics, and short electoral horizons systematically undermine long-term projects. Historically, the United States has only achieved deep integration and institutional restructuring under extreme pressure. Without a shock on the scale of a major geopolitical or economic crisis, reindustrialization is likely to remain partial and unstable.
The broader lesson is civilizational rather than tactical. China’s rise is not solely the product of policy design, but of cultural cohesion and historical depth that enable strategic patience. The United States is not simply declining; it is regressing from a unified nation-state toward a loosely connected tribal federation. It may repair segments of its industrial base, but without reconstructing a shared national purpose, comprehensive reindustrialization will remain extraordinarily difficult—if not structurally out of reach.
China at the Civilizational Inflection Point: The Deeper Challenge Within
China’s most consequential challenge does not primarily stem from external containment, but from reaching a critical juncture in its own civilizational transformation. The country’s rise has been enabled by formidable state capacity and a generally favorable global environment, yet this trajectory is not guaranteed. Structural vulnerabilities—an aging population, uneven educational quality that emphasizes scale over frontier innovation, regional development disparities, environmental stress, and latent innovation bottlenecks linked to institutional constraints—form a complex internal landscape. External pressures such as export controls, technological decoupling, and geopolitical friction matter, but they act less as the root cause than as amplifiers of underlying domestic tensions. Severe shocks—demographic collapse, deep technological sanctions, or a major financial crisis—could still interrupt or reverse accumulated gains.
As China moves from a historical “follower” to a system-defining power, the deeper question becomes normative rather than material: what kind of order will it project, and on what civilizational logic will that order rest? If it continues to draw on a hierarchical, relational tradition often associated with the “all-under-heaven” worldview, it must confront whether such a differential and ritualized order can coexist with the demands of global governance in a digital, networked age. Conversely, if China fully embraces the modern principle of sovereign equality, it faces the risk of normative absorption into an order whose rules and standards it did not originally shape.
This dilemma becomes sharper as China exports not only goods and capital, but systems: infrastructure, industrial capacity, and increasingly digital platforms. Such exports promise development and connectivity, yet they also raise concerns about asymmetry, dependence, and data power. The prospect of hundreds of millions of sensor-equipped Chinese electric vehicles operating across global road networks illustrates both the scale of opportunity and the magnitude of unease. The informational and intelligence value embedded in such technologies is immense, but so too is the potential for a civilizational trust deficit.
Ultimately, China’s ascent tests not only its economic resilience or technological prowess, but its ability to articulate a form of leadership that others can accept as legitimate. Rising is comparatively easy; being trusted and integrated as a shaper of global order is far harder. Whether China can navigate this transition—balancing power with restraint, innovation with openness, and civilizational distinctiveness with universal legitimacy—will determine whether its transformation culminates in renewal or in a new, more complex impasse.
Historical Lessons: Civilizational Renewal Requires New Universals
History suggests that the ultimate test of a civilization’s renewal is not merely its capacity for growth or power, but its ability to offer a new form of universality—ideas, institutions, or public goods that others find broadly usable and legitimate. Civilizations that endure do more than succeed domestically; they supply frameworks that organize economic life, political order, or moral purpose beyond their borders. Material strength without such universality tends to remain transient.
Western liberal democracy, at its peak, rested on tacit historical conditions that are now eroding. Stable representative systems depended on relatively cohesive societies: shared civic norms, common media environments, high social trust, and institutions capable of mediating class conflict through redistribution and growth. Globalization, mass immigration, fragmented information ecosystems, and rising inequality have strained these foundations. As economic mechanisms for broad-based prosperity weaken, politics increasingly shifts from interest aggregation to identity competition, placing democratic legitimacy under sustained pressure.
The United States illustrates these tensions acutely. Its national identity is fundamentally civic and constitutional rather than ethnic, anchored in a shared commitment to political principles. This model functions only when there is broad agreement on how those principles should be interpreted and applied. As partisan polarization intensifies and constitutional meanings are contested, civic nationalism loses integrative power. Institutions become politicized, long-term industrial or strategic planning grows harder, and identity politics fills the vacuum once occupied by consensus-driven governance.
China, by contrast, possesses institutional capacities suited to long-horizon projects and strategic coordination, but at the cost of political pluralism and constrained civil liberties. History shows that earlier rising powers achieved global influence by pairing capability with a universal offering: Iberian empires through maritime connectivity and religious mission, Britain through markets and parliamentary modernity, and the United States through a postwar order combining technology, consumer abundance, and human rights discourse. Economic output alone was never sufficient.
For China’s contemporary revival to be more than quantitative, it must similarly contribute new universals. This could include a development philosophy that restrains financialization and prioritizes shared prosperity, a technological ethic that directs AI toward productive and industrial use rather than pervasive surveillance, and international public goods that integrate digital infrastructure, green development, and developmental security. The lesson of history is clear: civilizations rise highest and longest when they provide not just growth, but governing ideas that others can adopt without becoming copies.
Final Thoughts
The end of China’s “century of humiliation” is best understood not as revenge, but as transcendence. China’s rise is singular because it combines civilizational depth, a unified narrative of recovery, immense scale, and strong state capacity—conditions that enabled systemic resurgence where smaller or fractured powers failed. This does not mean decline is inevitable for the United States: it retains enduring strengths in innovation, capital, and alliances. Yet reversing financialization and rebuilding industrial capacity will require sustained political will, institutional reform, and a national narrative that commands broad public consent. What lies ahead is not resolution but prolonged rivalry—partial decoupling in critical sectors, intensified technological and geopolitical competition, and mounting pressure on third countries to choose sides or carefully balance.
Framing this dynamic as a zero-sum “challenge” reflects a Westphalian mindset that misses the deeper civilizational logic at work. As the I Ching suggests, extremes give way to change, change to renewal, and renewal to longevity. China’s historical lesson is not hatred but transformation: civilizations endure by converting crisis into new order, not by clinging to hegemony. Each side still has something to learn—the United States from long-term industrial strategy without replicating China’s political system, and China from the value of open scientific exchange, institutional autonomy, and genuinely innovative ecosystems. This moment is not proof that “China has won,” but that a 5,000-year-old civilization has completed a coming-of-age—and that the world now stands at the threshold of a new civilizational cycle, one whose outcome depends less on capitals and strategies than on whether societies still believe that civilization can renew itself.