China’s rise shows prosperity without Western liberalism, growth from state–market fusion, and tech modernity without alignment—proof modernity is plural.
U.S. efforts to reshore manufacturing are unlikely to succeed because they confront structural, historical, and systemic constraints fundamentally different from those that enabled China’s industrial rise. China’s emergence as a global manufacturing powerhouse—the third fully industrialized nation after Britain and the United States—was not a market-led accident, but the result of a long foundational period … Read more
China’s academic system has achieved impressive scale and efficiency, producing vast numbers of publications, training large cohorts of STEM talent, and building world-class research infrastructure. Yet it continues to struggle to generate paradigm-shifting, original breakthroughs—the kind that redefine scientific frontiers or give rise to entirely new fields. This limitation does not stem from a lack … Read more
If China were to take full control of Taiwan, the consequences would extend far beyond a local territorial change, producing cascading strategic, military, economic, and diplomatic effects that disproportionately harm the United States and Japan while benefiting China. The effects would challenge U.S. and Japanese leadership while consolidating China’s strategic, economic, and symbolic ascendancy. Erosion … Read more
In the early 1990s, China’s consumer electronics industry lagged far behind its Western counterparts, lacking both purchasing power and advanced manufacturing capabilities. Faced with the high costs and technical barriers of dominant international standards such as VHS and LaserDisc, Chinese innovators pursued a pragmatic alternative. In 1993, Jiang Wanmeng and Sun Yansheng, working with C-Cube, … Read more
American technological accelerationism—particularly its right-wing or “effective accelerationist” (e/acc) variant championed by figures such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance—extends far beyond a Silicon Valley ideology or a domestic critique of U.S. governance. It operates as both a strategic self-conception of American power amid relative decline and a geopolitical doctrine that … Read more
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013) offers a sophisticated analysis of Lee Kuan Yew’s geopolitical legacy and the think tanks that shaped his strategic vision. By 2026, the distance between his mid-1990s and early-2010s perspectives and contemporary global realities provides a compelling “stress … Read more
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023) challenges the assumption that U.S. commitment to free-market fundamentalism is natural or inevitable, arguing instead that it is the product of a sustained, century-long ideological campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in … Read more
BOE Technology Group’s transformation from a marginal Chinese display maker in the early 2000s into the world’s leading LCD producer by the late 2010s exemplifies state-enabled latecomer industrial catch-up. Through a combination of long-term investment, scale expansion, engineering iteration, and patient state support, BOE systematically restructured the global display ecosystem, forcing Japanese and South Korean … Read more
Announced in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is a United States federal initiative aimed at accelerating scientific discovery through artificial intelligence, frequently described as an “AI Manhattan Project.” Its ambition is to fuse AI with scientific research at national scale, yet it attempts to do so without the dense physical and industrial substrate—advanced manufacturing, instrumentation, … Read more
General Electric’s trajectory can be best understood in comparative perspective, alongside other major conglomerates that confronted the same late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century economic environment marked by financialization, technological disruption, regulatory change, and intensified global competition. While some conglomerates collapsed under excessive leverage, opaque financial arms, or strategic overreach, others fragmented deliberately, dismantling diversified structures that had … Read more