East-West Diff

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.

China’s Production Discipline vs. U.S. Pressure-Group Capture

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Shenzhen’s rise as a shopping and consumer paradise reflects the effects of freer markets, open competition, and rapid supply expansion. By contrast, persistently high prices in Hong Kong—and similarly in the United States—stem from institutional constraints, including restrictive land-use policies, labor barriers, professional monopolies, and protectionist regulations. These mechanisms limit entry and suppress competition, driving … Read more

Finance, Infrastructure, and AI: The China–West Divergence

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Since the Asian Financial Crisis, China and Western economies have followed sharply diverging paths in the relationship between finance and the real economy. As Peter Nolan argues in Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), China has consistently deployed finance to support infrastructure, production, employment, and productivity, … Read more

U.S. Lacks Real-World AI Scenarios, Digital Finance Shows Why

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The United States currently leads in frontier AI research and innovation, yet it faces persistent challenges in system-level deployment and large-scale integration. These constraints stem not from technological limitations but from structural factors, including decades of manufacturing hollowing, fragmented governance, and weak coordination across public and private actors. As a result, the U.S. often lacks … Read more

Why China Scales STEM Graduates While the U.S. System Cannot

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In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that China produced approximately 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, far exceeding India’s 2.6 million and the United States’ 568,000. This vast output of technical talent translates directly into industrial capability: by 2024, China had become the world’s largest market for industrial robotics, accounting for 54 percent of global … Read more

AI Competition: China’s Resilience vs U.S. Innovation

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The hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing has reduced the availability of large-scale, real-world application scenarios, constraining the translation of technological advances into broad operational deployment. In contrast, China has pursued a “new type of whole-nation system” that concentrates resources on strategic bottlenecks—such as semiconductors, industrial software, and aero-engines—while advancing domestic substitution through tightly coordinated ecosystems. … Read more

Western vs China Views on U.S. Deindustrialization and Power

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In recent years, many Western countries, particularly the United States, have advanced two seemingly contradictory narratives about China. On the one hand, the “China collapse theory” portrays state intervention and industrial policy as inherently inefficient, predicting stagnation or systemic failure and dismissing China’s development achievements. On the other hand, the “China threat theory” depicts China … Read more

Founding Myths and Civilizational Continuity: China vs U.S.

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In the United States, the tension between the “1776 narrative” and the “1619 narrative” reflects a fundamental contest over national identity. The traditional 1776 narrative locates the nation’s origin in the Declaration of Independence and emphasizes Enlightenment ideals of liberty, democracy, individualism, and American exceptionalism, historically centered on a WASP cultural core and a progressive, … Read more

Consensus Labor Models and Competitiveness in Asia

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Collective bargaining is often presented as a primary mechanism for raising wages, yet this view overlooks a basic economic reality: wages are prices determined largely by workers’ marginal productivity and by labor market supply and demand. When unions act as monopolistic agents that restrict labor supply or resist technological change, they can introduce rigidity into … Read more

Three Game-Changers Behind China’s Express Delivery Rise

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In 2023, China’s express delivery system handled 178.6 billion parcels—more than half of global volume—equivalent to over 22 deliveries for every person on Earth. Remarkably, this vast, low-cost, and highly efficient network was built largely from scratch in just two decades. Its scale and speed are not merely matters of consumer convenience but reflect a … Read more

Divergent Chinese and Western Views on Power, Globalization

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Mainstream Chinese analyses and mainstream Western political-economy interpretations diverge systematically across core analytical dimensions. In causal diagnosis, Chinese discourse attributes Western stagnation to excessive financialization, speculative capital dominance, deindustrialization via offshoring, and market fundamentalism that hollowed out state capacity; Western accounts more often frame these outcomes as endogenous tensions of capitalism—profit squeeze, technological change, global … Read more