The electric transition, and how both are reshaping U.S.–China competition, especially around autonomous driving and AI-powered vehicles.
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
In Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), Peter Nolan argues that China’s post-2008 development trajectory was shaped by a distinctive framework of state-led finance, infrastructure-led growth, and long-term industrial strategy. In response to the global financial crisis, China launched a coordinated wave of investment in “new … Read more
Since the Asian Financial Crisis, China and Western economies have followed sharply diverging paths in the relationship between finance and the real economy. As Peter Nolan argues in Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), China has consistently deployed finance to support infrastructure, production, employment, and productivity, … Read more
In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that China produced approximately 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, compared with 2.6 million in India and about 568,000 in the United States. This scale of STEM output is not incidental; it underpins China’s strength in engineering-intensive sectors and helps explain outcomes such as its dominance in industrial robotics, … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang argues that the economic histories of today’s advanced nations follow a recurring and often obscured pattern. Countries such as Germany and Japan began with industries widely stigmatized for low quality, then relied on protectionist policies, state support, and … Read more
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang dismantles a set of long-standing Western claims that attributed the economic failures of countries such as Korea, Japan, and China to so-called “Confucian values.” These explanations portrayed Confucianism as inherently hostile to innovation, entrepreneurship, and modern economic organization, … Read more
The hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing has reduced the availability of large-scale, real-world application scenarios, constraining the translation of technological advances into broad operational deployment. In contrast, China has pursued a “new type of whole-nation system” that concentrates resources on strategic bottlenecks—such as semiconductors, industrial software, and aero-engines—while advancing domestic substitution through tightly coordinated ecosystems. … Read more
Milton Friedman and other neoliberal economists long admired Hong Kong as a rare empirical demonstration of laissez-faire principles in practice. Under Financial Secretary John James Cowperthwaite (1961–1971), Hong Kong pursued minimal government intervention, low and stable taxes, strict fiscal discipline, open trade as a free port, and a deliberate avoidance of subsidies or welfare programs. … Read more
In recent years, many Western countries, particularly the United States, have advanced two seemingly contradictory narratives about China. On the one hand, the “China collapse theory” portrays state intervention and industrial policy as inherently inefficient, predicting stagnation or systemic failure and dismissing China’s development achievements. On the other hand, the “China threat theory” depicts China … Read more