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.
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
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
Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo systems are fully operational global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that serve important regional roles. Yet, in terms of deployment speed, adoption, industrial integration, geopolitical influence, and ecosystem maturity, China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has outpaced both. This advantage cannot be attributed solely to satellite count or positioning … 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
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
Japan’s widely cited technology “missteps”—from CDs over MP3s and hydrogen fuel cells over battery electric vehicles, to ISDB over ATSC/DVB and Blu-ray over streaming—are better understood not as failures of innovation but as the outcome of once-successful strategic assumptions colliding with a changed world. Japan optimized for engineering excellence, incremental refinement, and tightly integrated hardware … Read more
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023) challenges the assumption that U.S. commitment to free-market fundamentalism is natural or inevitable, arguing instead that it is the product of a sustained, century-long ideological campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in … Read more
Building on Garry Wills’ A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (2013), East Asian societies often accept policies that Americans might consider heavy-handed, such as industrial planning, high-stakes exams like China’s Gaokao, or strict anti-drug measures. This difference reflects contrasting social contracts: in much of East Asia, the government is empowered to … Read more
Drawing on the arguments of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2023), the contrast between China and the United States in implementing industrial policy reflects deeply divergent historical, political, and cultural foundations. In the United States, decades of ideological … Read more
The United States and China both operate mixed economic systems that combine market mechanisms with government intervention, yet they represent contrasting ends of the mixed-economy spectrum. The U.S. model is predominantly market-led, privileging private enterprise, price signals, and decentralized decision-making, with the state acting largely as a regulator and stabilizer. China, by contrast, follows a … Read more