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 High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (2024), Angela Zhang argues that interpreting China’s regulation of Big Tech primarily through the lens of state repression is a fundamental misreading. While repression is not absent, overemphasizing it obscures other explanatory forces that are central to understanding how China’s technology sector has … Read more
In Powerful, Different, Equal, Peter B. Walker argues that Western understandings of China are constrained by a binary, dualistic mindset that classifies political systems as either “good” (democratic and individualistic) or “bad” (authoritarian and collectivist), obscuring the complexity of China’s historical and institutional development. This intellectual framing, Walker suggests, is less an objective analysis than … Read more
A recent Bloomberg article, “Give Up on ‘Winning’ Against China” (16 Dec 2025), argues that the United States should acknowledge China’s growing influence rather than cling to the hope of its decline. Over the past three decades, Western misconceptions—rooted in orientalist thinking, Cold War binaries, and ideological assumptions—led many scholars to view China as a … Read more
China’s rise over the past several decades was neither accidental nor the result of conspiracy or simplistic authoritarian control, but rather the outcome of pragmatic governance, long-term state coordination, and sustained investment in human capital, industrial capacity, and applied technology. Western observers have often misunderstood this trajectory by interpreting China through rigid ideological binaries—free versus … Read more
Debates over whether China’s development path is historically aberrant often overlook a well-documented pattern of late industrialization. As Ha-Joon Chang argues in Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), China’s strategies—state intervention, selective protectionism, subsidies, and the copying or weak protection of foreign technologies—closely mirror those once employed … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang argues that the economic histories of today’s advanced nations follow a recurring and often obscured pattern. Countries such as Germany and Japan began with industries widely stigmatized for low quality, then relied on protectionist policies, state support, and … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang dismantles a set of long-standing Western claims that attributed the economic failures of countries such as Korea, Japan, and China to so-called “Confucian values.” These explanations portrayed Confucianism as inherently hostile to innovation, entrepreneurship, and modern economic organization, … Read more
The “Flying Geese Paradigm,” proposed by Japan, uses the metaphor of geese flying in formation to describe a hierarchical pattern of industrial development in East Asia. In this framework, Japan acted as the “leading goose,” completing industrial upgrading first and subsequently relocating mature or low–value-added industries to later-developing economies. These follower countries were expected to … Read more
China’s strong and capable manufacturing ecosystem—particularly the toy manufacturing base, the counterfeit mobile phone industry, and the consumer electronics OEM system that emerged in Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta during the 2000s—provided a critical structural foundation for DJI’s rise. This ecosystem supplied far more than low-cost labor: it offered dense supplier networks, rapid prototyping capabilities, flexible … Read more
The West’s current ambivalence toward China can be understood as a defensive posture—a set of intellectual defense mechanisms aimed at preserving established perceptions by denying or minimizing disruptive realities. China’s rise represents not merely a shift in the global balance of power, but a profound challenge to the foundations of Western thought, compelling the liberal … Read more