China’s state sets goals, takes risks, and builds scale, while firms compete and innovate—an integrated system the market-driven U.S. struggles to match.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that China produced approximately 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, far exceeding India’s 2.6 million and the United States’ 568,000. This vast output of technical talent translates directly into industrial capability: by 2024, China had become the world’s largest market for industrial robotics, accounting for 54 percent of global … 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
In Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2007), Ha-Joon Chang offers both direct and indirect critiques of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, challenging not only Weber’s specific claims but also the broader tendency to treat cultural morality as the definitive explanation for capitalism’s … 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
In the United States, the tension between the “1776 narrative” and the “1619 narrative” reflects a fundamental contest over national identity. The traditional 1776 narrative locates the nation’s origin in the Declaration of Independence and emphasizes Enlightenment ideals of liberty, democracy, individualism, and American exceptionalism, historically centered on a WASP cultural core and a progressive, … Read more
Faced with China’s industrial ascent, Germany is undergoing not merely a reactive adjustment but a deeper process of structural reflection and strategic recalibration. China is not a “newly industrialized nation” in the conventional sense; it is the only country encompassing all industrial categories defined by the UN, accounts for nearly 30 percent of global manufacturing … Read more