China’s Industrial Ascent

China moves up the value chain, to advanced manufacturing and increasingly frontier technology. Why the U.S. still claims to favor free markets.

China CPC vs Singapore PAP: Comparing Leadership Succession

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China’s Communist Party (CPC) and Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) stand among the most durable cases of one-party–dominant governance in the contemporary world. Operating in sharply different political, demographic, and geopolitical contexts, both reject Western-style cyclical party alternation as a necessary condition for effective governance. Instead, they prioritize meritocratic elite selection, institutional continuity, and long-term … Read more

Why China’s VCD Era Still Matters in the U.S. Tech War

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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

Why Singapore Looks Democratic but Isn’t a Liberal Democracy

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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

Why China Out-Executes the U.S. on Industrial Policy

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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

Thought Experiment: How CPC and PAP Clash with U.S. Ideals

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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

Why Elite-Groomed Leaders Excel Over Populist Electoral Picks

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Comparisons between the Communist Party of China (CPC), Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP), and the United States’ populist electoral system are best framed not as a binary opposition between authoritarianism and democracy, but as a contrast among distinct logics of political legitimacy and leadership selection. These systems differ fundamentally in how they identify, train, select, … Read more

Why China Grew While Others Stagnated: Key Growth Lessons

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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

China’s Governing Narrative Compared With Singapore’s

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The China governing narrative, compared with Singapore’s, rests on absolute performance legitimacy rather than electoral democracy, framing centralized authority as indispensable for national survival. While Singapore presents its one-party dominance as a pragmatic “unfree democracy,” China advances a more sweeping claim: the Communist Party safeguards civilization itself through competence, stability, and economic success, rendering political … Read more

Lee Kuan Yew’s China Forecasts: 2026 Reality Check

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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

Why China Leads Global Automated Container Terminals

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China’s leadership in automated container terminals is not the result of a single technological breakthrough or merely late entry; rather, it reflects a comprehensive, system-level industrial strategy that aligns infrastructure planning, domestic manufacturing, digital systems, institutional design, labor policy, and global logistics networks. While Singapore, Germany, Japan, and the United States pioneered port automation, China … Read more