Piers Tang China’s leadership in automated container terminals is not the result of a single technological breakthrough or merely late entry; rather, it reflects a comprehensive, system-level industrial strategy that aligns infrastructure planning, domestic manufacturing, digital systems, institutional design, labor policy, and global logistics networks. While Singapore, Germany, Japan, and the United States pioneered port automation, China … Read more
American technological accelerationism—particularly its right-wing or “effective accelerationist” (e/acc) variant championed by figures such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance—extends far beyond a Silicon Valley ideology or a domestic critique of U.S. governance. It operates as both a strategic self-conception of American power amid relative decline and a geopolitical doctrine that … Read more
Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo systems are fully operational global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that serve important regional roles. Yet, in terms of deployment speed, adoption, industrial integration, geopolitical influence, and ecosystem maturity, China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has outpaced both. This advantage cannot be attributed solely to satellite count or positioning … Read more
The “idealized China Model” emerged not as a neutral analytical framework, but as a projection shaped by historical analogy, ideological comfort, and systematic misreading. Western observers interpreted China’s rise through familiar templates drawn from earlier experiences with postwar Germany and Japan, the post-Reagan United States, and the Soviet Union—each supplying expectations about industrial upgrading, political … Read more
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013) offers a sophisticated analysis of Lee Kuan Yew’s geopolitical legacy and the think tanks that shaped his strategic vision. By 2026, the distance between his mid-1990s and early-2010s perspectives and contemporary global realities provides a compelling “stress … Read more
The contemporary U.S.–China competition is driven less by China’s concrete actions than by deep-seated American anxieties rooted in ideology, projection, and domestic instability. China is perceived as an unacceptable competitor because it revives long-standing U.S. fears of socialism and state-led development, disrupts the post–Cold War assumption that liberal democracy is the sole path to legitimacy, … Read more
Since the Reagan era, American anti-welfarism has operated less as a fiscal doctrine than as a legitimating moral narrative that defines freedom through self-discipline and stigmatizes dependence as civic failure. Where Singapore’s survival narrative governs through fear of national collapse, the U.S. version governs through fear of moral decay, recasting poverty as personal deficiency and … Read more
Singapore’s political order is best understood not as repression retroactively excused by prosperity, but as a comprehensive governing narrative grounded in survival. It is a tightly integrated moral logic that weaves together historical trauma, racial fragility, economic dependence, geopolitical vulnerability, and individual discipline into a single explanatory framework. Within this story, authoritarian governance is not … Read more
Japan’s widely cited technology “missteps”—from CDs over MP3s and hydrogen fuel cells over battery electric vehicles, to ISDB over ATSC/DVB and Blu-ray over streaming—are better understood not as failures of innovation but as the outcome of once-successful strategic assumptions colliding with a changed world. Japan optimized for engineering excellence, incremental refinement, and tightly integrated hardware … Read more
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023) challenges the assumption that U.S. commitment to free-market fundamentalism is natural or inevitable, arguing instead that it is the product of a sustained, century-long ideological campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in … Read more