The U.S./West should respect China’s history and values, curb rhetoric, and seek common ground on global issues without expecting one side to conform.
1. A General Assessment of “We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse” The July 14, 2025 New York Times article, “We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse,” by David Autor and Gordon Hanson, presents a forceful intervention in the debate over U.S.–China economic … Read more
In Africa, China often accomplishes projects that American and European companies struggle to execute—a reality rooted not in abstract national superiority, but in structural, historical, and institutional differences in engagement. Drawing on the experiences of Chinese engineers and firms on the ground, this dynamic is particularly evident in large-scale infrastructure and development, where China’s approach, … Read more
At its core, the tension between China and the West is not primarily ideological, military, or economic—it is psychological. The underlying driver is fear, shaped by the West’s historical experience of rising to power through conquest, colonization, and external domination. Accustomed to interpreting global influence through this lens, Western powers often assume that any ascending … Read more
The vast, commanding landscape of the Guanzhong Plain, nestled between the Qinling Mountains, offers a striking contrast to the intimate, enclosed regions of southern China, shaped by rivers, hills, and coastlines. This geographic divide not only defines the diverse internal landscapes of China but also lays the foundation for fundamentally different ways of living and … Read more
Over the past several decades, the West—especially the United States—has drifted into what anthropologist David Graeber termed a “big idea famine,” marked by a decline in transformative innovation despite abundant capital and talent. Military and strategic technological progress has slowed as ethical hesitation, bureaucratic inertia, and weak prioritization constrain experimentation, while the civilian tech sector … Read more
In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025), Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska argue that Western technology ecosystems—most notably Silicon Valley—drifted away from strategically consequential “hard tech,” becoming instead preoccupied with convenience, lifestyle innovation, and short-term shareholder value. This shift, they contend, left critical domains of … Read more
In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025), Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska present China not only as a technological and commercial rival, but as the central catalyst for a profound moment of reckoning for the West. While the prevailing discourse in Silicon Valley often vacillates … Read more
Terence Lee’s The Media, Cultural Control and Government in Singapore (2010) provides a foundational analysis of how a “managed” media system can be used to preserve political stability through calibrated information control. Extending Lee’s framework to China’s more centralized and technologically sophisticated media regime illuminates a shared—but differently scaled—conception of political modernity that stands in … Read more
The sustained popularity of Donald Trump, despite his polarizing rhetoric and controversies, reflects profound social, economic, and community divisions within the United States. These fractures—shaped by uneven economic development, declining social mobility, and weakening local cohesion—have created fertile ground for political polarization and populist appeal. Examining this phenomenon alongside China’s experiences in poverty alleviation, social … Read more
In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but actively internalized American paradigms of power, political economy, and culture. According to Vogel, this process was largely voluntary: Europe abandoned the ambition to act as an autonomous civilizational pole and instead embraced American … Read more