Piers Tang In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but voluntarily relinquished its role as a leading civilization by adopting American paradigms of power, economics, and culture. Rather than sustaining autonomous models of political economy or strategic authority, Europe internalized U.S. assumptions—particularly those … Read more
India’s manufacturing ambitions are unlikely to replicate China’s historic rise—not because of insufficient scale, talent, or intent, but because the structural conditions that enabled China’s success no longer exist. China’s emergence as the world’s manufacturing hub was the result of a long foundational phase between 1949 and 1979, during which the state systematically built industrial … Read more
U.S. efforts to reshore manufacturing are unlikely to succeed because they confront structural, historical, and systemic constraints fundamentally different from those that enabled China’s industrial rise. China’s emergence as a global manufacturing powerhouse—the third fully industrialized nation after Britain and the United States—was not a market-led accident, but the result of a long foundational period … Read more
China’s academic system has achieved impressive scale and efficiency, producing vast numbers of publications, training large cohorts of STEM talent, and building world-class research infrastructure. Yet it continues to struggle to generate paradigm-shifting, original breakthroughs—the kind that redefine scientific frontiers or give rise to entirely new fields. This limitation does not stem from a lack … Read more
The core weakness of the U.S. government’s China strategy is not a lack of power, resources, or intent, but systemic asymmetry—a structural mismatch in how the two countries generate knowledge, make decisions, communicate, and sustain strategy. This asymmetry spans epistemic, institutional, cultural, temporal, and informational dimensions, leaving the United States strategically transparent yet epistemically limited, … Read more
If China were to take full control of Taiwan, the consequences would extend far beyond a local territorial change, producing cascading strategic, military, economic, and diplomatic effects that disproportionately harm the United States and Japan while benefiting China. The effects would challenge U.S. and Japanese leadership while consolidating China’s strategic, economic, and symbolic ascendancy. Erosion … Read more
Although China and Singapore operate under markedly different political systems—China as a one-party socialist state led by the Communist Party of China, and Singapore as a multi-party parliamentary republic with a dominant ruling party—their approaches to governance reveal important similarities. Both emphasize political stability, rapid economic growth, and social harmony over expansive political pluralism, distinguishing … Read more
China’s Communist Party (CPC) and Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) stand among the most durable cases of one-party–dominant governance in the contemporary world. Operating in sharply different political, demographic, and geopolitical contexts, both reject Western-style cyclical party alternation as a necessary condition for effective governance. Instead, they prioritize meritocratic elite selection, institutional continuity, and long-term … Read more
In the early 1990s, China’s consumer electronics industry lagged far behind its Western counterparts, lacking both purchasing power and advanced manufacturing capabilities. Faced with the high costs and technical barriers of dominant international standards such as VHS and LaserDisc, Chinese innovators pursued a pragmatic alternative. In 1993, Jiang Wanmeng and Sun Yansheng, working with C-Cube, … Read more
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man famously argued that the global spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism marked the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. Yet the success of capitalist systems in countries such as China and Singapore challenges this claim by demonstrating that economic liberalization does not necessarily lead to … Read more