How China compares with Singapore, the U.S., Japan, France, and other countries in culture, economics, and politics.
The contemporary U.S. affordability crisis—often described through the condition known as ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed)—is not simply the product of personal failure or isolated economic shocks. It reflects a systemic paradox in which millions of working Americans remain one disruption away from collapse. A medical emergency, rent increase, job loss, or legal dispute … Read more
This thought experiment assumes that by 2035 China has not surpassed the U.S.–Taiwan axis at the absolute semiconductor frontier. TSMC and its partners continue to dominate leading-edge logic at 2nm–1.4nm, along with high-end AI training and peak transistor density and efficiency. China’s strategic position is instead bounded by clear limits: at the upper end, near-complete … 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
Singapore and China exemplify a development model that prioritizes economic freedom over political liberalization, leveraging carefully calibrated welfare policies to promote growth, self-reliance, and social stability. While their political systems differ sharply from Western liberal democracies such as the United States, both countries share an economic logic that emphasizes market access, secure property rights, and … 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