Western complacency frames China as merely catching up, causing persistent underestimation of its rise by assuming it must follow or fail by Western norms.
In The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life (2016), Anu Partanen argues that Nordic countries have preserved a model of freedom once practiced in the United States. Comparing the U.S. before and after the Reagan era—roughly the New Deal through the late 1970s versus the 1980s to the present—reveals how American … Read more
In The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life (2016), Anu Partanen challenges the common perception of Nordic countries as “socialist nanny states,” arguing that this label misunderstands both how their systems function and the type of freedom they foster. Her work highlights that the Nordic model offers a distinctive approach to … Read more
China’s rise to near-peer status with the West reflects deliberate strategic choices rather than chance. While the United States and much of Europe gradually abandoned industrial density—treating manufacturing as expendable, subordinating engineers to finance, and assuming globalization and symbolic dominance would secure permanent advantage—China embraced production as a civilizational foundation. It built dense industrial ecosystems, … Read more
Across sectors such as robotics, consumer drones, and electric vehicles, China has followed a highly consistent and deliberate industrial trajectory. The pattern begins with reliance on foreign technology, followed by rapid diffusion through copying and localization, then the achievement of scale-driven cost leadership. This process is reinforced by sustained state support that enables capability accumulation, … Read more
Ren Zhengfei has long regarded the military—both Chinese and Western—as a critical source of organizational and managerial insight, and this influence has deeply shaped Huawei’s development. While Western media often fixates on Ren’s past service in the People’s Liberation Army, Huawei is criticized less for being “military” in nature than for learning exceptionally well from … Read more
In their August 19, 2025 Foreign Affairs article, “The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power,” Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber challenge a set of simplified and reassuring beliefs that long shaped Western interpretations of China’s rise. What they call “The Real China Model” is not a new doctrine but a corrective: … Read more
China defies long-held Western assumptions about modernity by actively defining its own path rather than opposing the West with a universal alternative. Its experience demonstrates that modernity is not singular but plural: distinct historical, cultural, and institutional trajectories can also yield prosperity, stability, and technological advancement. The Western difficulty, therefore, extends beyond political disagreement to … Read more
Western media have spent the past decade portraying China’s social credit system as a uniquely coercive fusion of technology and state power, while positioning the United States on moral high ground. Yet this framing obscures a parallel reality: in the U.S., credit scores, legal records, and risk models function as a de facto cross-sector behavioral … Read more
For much of the post–Cold War era, the United States treated a set of interlocking doctrines—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, post-industrial optimism, asset-light corporate governance, financialization, limited-government absolutism, unfettered capital mobility, consumer-welfare reductionism, and the peace-through-trade assumption—not as historically contingent choices but as permanent economic truths. In combination, these ideas proved costly. They privileged short-term efficiency … Read more
In High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (2024), Angela Huyue Zhang examines China’s regulatory approach, comparing it with developments in the United States and the European Union. She argues that, despite differences in political and economic structures, China faces regulatory challenges similar to those confronting Western systems. Zhang frames this … Read more