China’s rise shows prosperity without Western liberalism, growth from state–market fusion, and tech modernity without alignment—proof modernity is plural.
China’s technological upgrading is good for ordinary Chinese people because income, dignity, and living standards are structurally determined by who controls high-end tools of production. By moving up the technological value chain, China enables surplus value that once leaked abroad to remain within the domestic economy, where it can be redistributed through higher wages, lower … Read more
While China’s emergence as a global power is often credited to the post-1978 Reform and Opening-up era, the first thirty years of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1979) established the critical structural, social, and strategic foundations that continue to shape its trajectory. This period of intense national mobilization, austerity, and long-term planning enabled China to … Read more
The China–United States Physics Examination and Application (CUSPEA) program, launched by Nobel laureate Tsung-Dao Lee in 1979 and concluded in 1989, offers a revealing lens through which to examine the relationship between human capital, international collaboration, and technological competition. Created to rebuild China’s scientific capacity after the Cultural Revolution, CUSPEA enabled nearly 1,000 of China’s … Read more
Xiaomi and Huawei differ fundamentally in their corporate positioning, value creation, and roles within the national and global technology ecosystem. Huawei is a technology-driven company, emphasizing strategic breakthroughs and the industrialization of cutting-edge technologies. In contrast, Xiaomi is a business-driven company, prioritizing supply chain integration, commercialization, and user-centric products. These distinctions extend across industrial cycles, … Read more
Yu Chengdong has played a decisive role in shaping Huawei’s intelligent vehicle industry chain, acting not only as a product leader but as a strategic architect of an emerging ecosystem. His influence extends well beyond the launch of individual vehicle models. Through clear strategic judgment, bold disruption of conventional automotive logic, and strong execution, he … Read more
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