Capitalism is not a single, uniform system. There are different models of capitalism, with different values, incentives, and long-term outcomes.
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man famously argued that the global spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism marked the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. Yet the success of capitalist systems in countries such as China and Singapore challenges this claim by demonstrating that economic liberalization does not necessarily lead to … Read more
The United States possesses extraordinary technological, financial, and human capital, yet it faces persistent structural barriers to executing coherent and sustained industrial policy. These obstacles are institutional rather than ideological: industrial policy demands long time horizons, dense coordination, and leadership continuity, while the U.S. political system is optimized for short electoral cycles, adversarial competition, and … Read more
This thought experiment examines why the leadership succession and elite governance practices of China’s Communist Party (CPC) and Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP), if transplanted wholesale into the United States, would collide with core American political doctrines—even without changing the U.S. Constitution or political culture. The aim is not to rank systems or advocate reform, … Read more
China’s post–reform rise is neither accidental nor a mere byproduct of globalization; it reflects sustained comparative learning from the successes and failures of twentieth-century development paths. Across cases as varied as Japan, South Korea, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Latin America, a consistent pattern emerges: long-run growth is shaped less by market openness, … Read more
This essay reassesses Lee Kuan Yew’s most consequential claims about China as presented in Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013), evaluating them against global developments up to January 2026. While several of his strategic judgments—particularly regarding China’s long-term ambitions and state capacity—have proven … 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
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
The “idealized China Model” emerged not as a neutral analytical framework, but as a projection shaped by historical analogy, ideological comfort, and systematic misreading. Western observers interpreted China’s rise through familiar templates drawn from earlier experiences with postwar Germany and Japan, the post-Reagan United States, and the Soviet Union—each supplying expectations about industrial upgrading, political … 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