China moves up the value chain, to advanced manufacturing and increasingly frontier technology. Why the U.S. still claims to favor free markets.
The United States misread the lessons of the Cold War, while China accurately understood the dynamics of the post–Cold War world. Today, as the U.S. and China compete in technology, it is imperative to draw concrete lessons from this divergence. In strategic competition, reality does not bend to values; outcomes are determined by capacity, cost, … Read more
In U.S. discourse, the end of the Cold War was often framed as a moral triumph of “right values” over authoritarianism, fostering a tendency to interpret global affairs through ideological certainty rather than material constraints. This narrative dulled strategic judgment by treating outcomes as ideologically inevitable, even as the Soviet collapse itself was driven less … Read more
Western misconceptions do more than distort how the United States interprets China’s economic system; they structurally constrain America’s ability to learn from China’s industrial policy experience. By framing China’s approach through ideological caricatures rather than analytical assessment, U.S. policymakers often dismiss outcomes that warrant serious study. This misperception is not merely rhetorical—it shapes the boundaries … Read more
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
The fall of General Electric, as chronicled in Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric (Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, 2020), offers a sobering yet instructive case study for China’s manufacturing sector. Rather than a cautionary tale of inevitable decline, GE’s experience serves as an analytical framework for examining how structural weaknesses … 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
Shenzhen’s rise as a shopping and consumer paradise reflects the effects of freer markets, open competition, and rapid supply expansion. By contrast, persistently high prices in Hong Kong—and similarly in the United States—stem from institutional constraints, including restrictive land-use policies, labor barriers, professional monopolies, and protectionist regulations. These mechanisms limit entry and suppress competition, driving … Read more
In Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever (2022), Nomi Prins advances a structural rather than a purely ideological explanation for the West’s retreat from the real economy. She does not argue that this shift was driven primarily by Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis or by the confidence of a Pax … Read more