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.
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
The electric vehicle (EV) and EV battery industries offer a clear lens through which to compare the mixed-economy models of the United States and China. Although the United States pioneered many foundational EV technologies—ranging from early electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries to the commercialization breakthroughs of firms like Tesla—China has emerged as the dominant force … Read more
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) marks the most consequential shift in U.S. industrial policy in batteries and electric vehicles in half a century, while the CHIPS and Science Act performs an analogous role for semiconductors. Though publicly framed as climate, competitiveness, and national security legislation, the operational logic of both statutes closely mirrors core elements … Read more
In China’s industrial policy, overcapacity is not a failure but a deliberate feature, sharply distinguishing it from the experiences of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Whereas liberal market economies tend to view excess capacity as inefficiency and policy error—because firms cannot sustain prolonged losses, governments struggle to coordinate at scale, and political systems … Read more