Recent U.S.–China tensions have increasingly been framed not only in strategic terms but also through uncomfortable cultural and racial subtexts. In a widely cited remark, State Department official Kiron Skinner described China as the first U.S. “great power competitor” that is “not Caucasian,” a statement that prompted debate about how perceptions of race, status, and identity intersect with geopolitics. For some observers, American unease reflects a broader anxiety about declining dominance in a more multipolar world—an anxiety that mirrors domestic fears of lost privilege and fuels a renewed Cold War mindset, even when such reactions may be more emotional than rational.
At the same time, public discourse—especially on social media and within U.S. tech circles—has grown more complex and contradictory. Many commentators contrast China’s visible investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, and human capital with what they see as America’s prioritization of military spending and regulatory constraint. Firsthand accounts from visitors and expatriates increasingly challenge caricatures of China, portraying it instead as a modern society of ordinary lives, rapid development, and notable technological ambition, from manufacturing scale to advances in artificial intelligence.
Beyond Exceptionalism: Rethinking Racialized Narratives in Western Interpretations of China
Western interpretations of China’s rise have long been shaped by assumptions that extend beyond economics or politics into deeper cultural and racialized frameworks. Embedded in much commentary is the implicit belief that genuine innovation, modern governance, and sustainable development are uniquely Western traits, while non-Western success must be derivative, conditional, or temporary. This lens has not only distorted analysis of China but has also narrowed the West’s capacity to understand alternative paths to modernity.
At the core of this distortion lies the persistent claim that innovation belongs exclusively to the West. History clearly contradicts this view. Breakthroughs in science, technology, administration, and production have emerged across civilizations, including China, the Islamic world, and others. What distinguished Western development was not an exclusive monopoly on creativity, but a particular historical configuration—capital accumulation, institutionalized science, state power, and global extraction—that first converged in Europe and later diffused outward. Treating this configuration as universal or civilizationally innate confuses contingency with destiny.
This same mindset underpins the repeated failure of “China collapse” theories. For decades, predictions of imminent Chinese breakdown have circulated in Western discourse, largely because China’s development defies liberal ideological expectations. When success is assumed to require Western political forms, any deviation is presumed unstable by definition. Yet China’s record—poverty reduction, infrastructure expansion, industrial upgrading, and sustained state capacity—remains empirically undeniable, regardless of political preference.
Common Western explanations for China’s rise acknowledge fragments of the truth but stop short of a full account. Latecomer advantage, learning from the West, access to global markets, technology transfer, authoritarian efficiency, or environmental exploitation each explain aspects of growth, but none adequately account for durability, coordination, or scale. Many countries shared these conditions and failed. The insistence on these partial explanations reflects a reluctance to confront factors that sit outside familiar Western categories.
A more complete understanding begins with recognizing China’s civilizational continuity. Modern Chinese governance did not emerge from institutional vacuum but from a long tradition of bureaucracy, merit-based administration, and social investment in education. This historical depth has contributed to unusually high state capacity—an element often underestimated or dismissed in Western analysis precisely because it challenges the notion that effective governance must mirror Western models.
Equally important is China’s adaptive developmental state. Rather than rigid ideology, the system emphasizes experimentation, selective openness, and long-term coordination among capital, labor, infrastructure, and technology. This pragmatism—combined with elite consensus around growth, stability, and technological upgrading—has enabled sustained development where fragmented elites and short-term politics have undermined progress elsewhere. Cultural factors such as tolerance for delayed gratification and long planning horizons further reinforce this trajectory, without invoking racial or biological determinism.
Western resistance to these explanations is not accidental. Acknowledging them would require unsettling conclusions: that liberal democracy is not the sole route to development, that markets alone do not generate national success, and that Western dominance was neither inevitable nor purely moral. Instead, discourse often retreats into moral condemnation, cultural dismissal, or accusations of illegitimacy—responses that function less as analysis than as psychological defense.
Understanding China’s development does not require endorsement of its policies or denial of its problems. It requires intellectual honesty. Genuine analysis begins not with asking why China fails to resemble the West, but with examining why a distinct system, shaped by its own history and constraints, produces the outcomes it does. Only by shedding racialized and exceptionalist assumptions can Western discourse move from polemic to understanding.
China as Political Mirror: Strategic Consensus and Domestic Contestation in U.S. Discourse
In contemporary American politics, a broad consensus has emerged across major factions that China constitutes a strategic competitor to the United States. This baseline agreement, however, has not produced a unified or stable understanding of what that competition entails. Instead, China has become a flexible symbol within domestic political struggle, with different actors emphasizing or minimizing particular aspects of China’s system to serve internal partisan and ideological objectives.
Rather than debating whether China poses a challenge, political factions increasingly debate what kind of challenge it represents. Liberal actors often foreground issues such as authoritarian governance, surveillance technologies, and censorship to criticize domestic political movements they associate with illiberalism. On the left, China’s industrial policy and state capacity are frequently invoked to highlight perceived shortcomings of U.S. capitalism and infrastructure investment. Conversely, elements of the right emphasize trade practices, labor repression, and economic nationalism to argue for protectionism or deglobalization, while fringe groups selectively admire aspects of cultural traditionalism or national cohesion.
This pattern reflects a familiar dynamic in democratic politics: opposition parties tend to amplify external examples that cast the governing party in an unfavorable light. China, given its size, complexity, and global prominence, offers an unusually adaptable reference point. Its political system, economic model, and social outcomes can be selectively framed to support competing narratives, often with little concern for internal consistency or empirical balance.
As a result, China functions less as a clearly defined external actor in public discourse and more as a political Rorschach test. Shared recognition of strategic rivalry coexists with sharply divergent portrayals shaped by domestic conflict. Understanding this dynamic is essential, not only for interpreting U.S.–China relations, but also for recognizing how foreign policy narratives are routinely instrumentalized to fight internal political battles rather than to clarify external realities.
From Racial Exception to Civilizational Challenge: Why China’s Rise Is More Disruptive Than Japan’s
The rise of China has unsettled the Western world in ways that differ fundamentally from earlier encounters with non-Western powers. While comparisons with Japan are common, they obscure a crucial distinction. Japan’s emergence as a modern power challenged racial exclusivity within the existing global order; China’s ascent challenges the deeper assumption that modernity, development, and leadership must be Western in form. These are not equivalent shocks, and the latter is far more destabilizing.
Japan’s rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries struck at the heart of prevailing racial theories. Prior to Japan, a widely held belief in Europe and the United States maintained that industrialization and modern governance were biologically or culturally exclusive to white societies. Colonial ideologies depended heavily on this assumption. Japan’s industrialization—and especially its defeat of Russia in 1905—shattered this worldview. It demonstrated that a non-Western, non-white society could modernize, industrialize, and compete militarily at the highest level, forcing overt biological racism to retreat or adapt.
Yet Japan’s success, for all its psychological impact, remained bounded. Its population size, resource base, and geopolitical reach limited its ability to reshape the global system. Japan ultimately entered the Western-defined order as a participant rather than a rule-maker, adopting many of its institutional forms and norms. Racial exclusivity was weakened, but civilizational hierarchy—the assumption that the West defined modernity itself—remained largely intact.
China’s rise presents a qualitatively different challenge. Its sheer scale—demographic, industrial, and economic—combined with long civilizational continuity gives it the capacity not merely to disrupt the system, but to reshape parts of it. China is not only integrating into global markets; it is increasingly capable of setting standards, building parallel institutions, and sustaining development without cultural or political convergence with the West. This autonomy, rather than industrialization alone, lies at the core of contemporary Western unease.
What troubles many Western observers today is not that China has modernized—globalization long assumed that outcome—but that it has done so without accepting Western civilizational templates as universal. Japan disproved the idea that only white societies could modernize. China goes further, calling into question the belief that modernization must ultimately look Western. That shift—from racial exception to civilizational challenge—marks a deeper rupture, and explains why China’s rise provokes a far more profound sense of destabilization.
China as Contrast, Not Blueprint: How the American Right Interprets National Decline
In contemporary U.S. political discourse, the American right increasingly invokes China not as a system to emulate, but as a comparative reference point through which to diagnose perceived American decline. This framing does not reflect ideological sympathy for Chinese governance; rather, it functions as a critical mirror, highlighting what conservatives view as lost capacities within the United States. China’s role in this narrative is instrumental and diagnostic, not aspirational.
During the Trump era, this interpretive stance became more visible in both rhetoric and policy. Trump-era positions on trade, enforcement, and national strength implicitly treated China as a contrasting case that exposed American weaknesses—particularly inefficiency, fragmentation, and declining state capacity. References to China “handling things better” were not endorsements, but provocations aimed at criticizing domestic dysfunction rather than praising foreign systems.[1][2][3]
Immigration policy provides a clear example of this logic. While opposition to immigration within the right spans a wide range of motivations, a distinct faction interprets immigration primarily through a demographic and civilizational lens. For these actors, national decline is associated with population change, weakened social cohesion, and cultural fragmentation. Within this framework, China—and East Asian development more broadly—is often misread as evidence that homogeneity and cohesion generate strength. Immigration restriction thus becomes framed as a civilizational corrective rather than a narrow policy choice, even if this interpretation is far from universal within conservatism.
A similar comparative logic appears in debates over social order and morality. The American right’s opposition to drugs, pornography, and certain forms of identity politics is frequently tied to concerns about disorder and permissiveness. China is invoked as a contrasting society perceived to enforce discipline, suppress social pathologies, and maintain public order through strong state capacity. Issues such as fentanyl trafficking serve not only as policy disputes, but as symbols of a broader belief that the U.S. lacks the institutional authority and cultural discipline to control destructive behaviors.
Trump’s political style amplified this comparison through what might be called comparative realism. Unlike liberal moral universalism, his rhetoric openly acknowledged foreign strengths alongside American failures. Yet once in office, explicit references to China as a point of comparison receded, replaced by more conventional nationalist messaging. This shift reflected political calculation rather than conceptual change: China remained a reference point, but one increasingly implied rather than stated, as Trump aligned more closely with right-wing identity politics.
At a deeper level, this mode of comparison reveals an internal contradiction. Many on the American right desire outcomes associated—rightly or wrongly—with China: social order, cohesion, and long-term discipline. Yet the institutional foundations of the U.S. system—constitutional rights, federalism, judicial independence, and cultural pluralism—severely limit the state’s capacity to impose such outcomes through coercive means. The result is a politics that recognizes real constraints and failures, but lacks a viable path to overcome them within the existing constitutional order.
In this sense, China functions less as a model than as a diagnostic instrument. It symbolizes capacities the American right believes the United States has lost, while simultaneously underscoring the impossibility of restoring them through imitation alone. The politics that emerge from this comparison are therefore marked by clarity about decline, but ambiguity—and often contradiction—about renewal.
China’s Return to Power: Civilizational Continuity, State Capacity, and Historical Reversion
Contemporary explanations of China’s rise often reduce it to external assistance, opportunistic technology transfer, or temporary distortions created by globalization. Such accounts are intellectually thin. They deny historical agency, minimize internal capacity, and implicitly suggest that the large-scale industrialization of a population exceeding one billion people is an accident of Western error. Serious analysis begins by rejecting this premise. China’s resurgence is not a fluke, but a historically intelligible outcome rooted in civilizational continuity and state capability.
From a long historical perspective, China’s modern ascent is better understood as a reversion to the mean rather than a radical departure. For much of recorded history—particularly from the Han through the Song dynasties—China ranked among the world’s most advanced economic and administrative systems. It possessed large integrated markets, sophisticated agrarian productivity, and a meritocratic bureaucracy capable of governing vast populations. The notion that Western dominance represents a permanent global norm ignores the relatively recent and contingent nature of that dominance.
China’s decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was historically abnormal. It was not the product of civilizational exhaustion, but of external shocks colliding with institutional lag. Industrialized imperialism, coerced trade integration, and military defeat disrupted existing systems faster than they could adapt. Crucially, however, this collapse did not erase the foundations of Chinese civilization. Language, administrative practices, family structures, educational norms, and the idea of a unified state persisted despite repeated political breakdowns.
This continuity is central to understanding China’s recovery. Civilizational persistence lowers coordination costs and accelerates institutional rebuilding. It allows societies to mobilize labor, reconstruct governance, and pursue long-term collective projects once external constraints shift. When reform-era China re-entered the global economy after 1978, it did so with inherited mechanisms of coordination already in place. Growth was not passively received; it was actively engineered.
Globalization mattered, but it was not decisive on its own. China selectively integrated into the world economy, retained firm state control over capital allocation, sequenced liberalization, leveraged foreign investment for industrial upgrading, and accepted short-term social sacrifice in exchange for long-term productive capacity. Many developing states had access to Western markets and technology. Few possessed the institutional coherence, administrative depth, and political consensus required to exploit those opportunities at comparable scale.
China’s rise, therefore, cannot be credibly explained by “theft,” Western nurturing alone, or authoritarian efficiency in the abstract. Nor does it require recourse to racial or biological explanations, which are analytically unnecessary and historically discredited. Institutional inheritance, social organization, and adaptive governance provide a far more compelling account. China’s experience illustrates how long-standing state capacity, when reactivated under favorable conditions, can generate rapid and sustained development.
Seen in this light, China’s modern resurgence represents neither inevitability nor miracle. It is the reemergence of a historically central civilization after an unusually disruptive interlude. The past two centuries of relative weakness were not the endpoint of Chinese history, but a period shaped by extraordinary global disruptions. What we are witnessing today is not the creation of capacity from nothing, but the restoration and adaptation of capacities accumulated over centuries.
Summary & Implications
China’s development is best explained by the interaction of enduring institutions and strategic governance rather than by moral, racial, or ideological claims. A long civilizational tradition of bureaucracy reduces coordination costs; a strong, adaptive state enables experimentation and selective scaling; elite consensus sustains long-term priorities in growth and technological upgrading; social tolerance for delayed gratification supports high savings and planning horizons; and selective openness integrates globalization on sequenced, developmental-state terms. Together, these factors help account for China’s capacity to mobilize resources, recover quickly, and compound gains over time.
Western resistance to this analysis reflects the discomfort of its implications: that liberal democracy and unfettered markets are not the sole paths to development, that state capacity can be decisive, and that Western dominance was contingent rather than inevitable. Understanding China’s rise therefore requires a shift from polemics to analysis—from asking why China is not like the West to asking why this system, in this society, produces these outcomes. That analytical reframing is the basis of genuine understanding.
References
- [1] “President Trump Likes How China Treats Drug Dealers”. LiveNOW from FOX. February 26, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikP–hLkMLI
- [2] “China’s Victory Day Parade Outshines Trump’s US Army Celebration| Oneindia”. September 5, 2025 . https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AZH7XsgB994
- [3] “‘They were hoping that I was watching’: Trump comments on China’s ‘beautiful’ military parade”. September 4, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGVGrytU1F8