The U.S. optimized for efficiency, innovation, and globalization. China optimized for control, scale, and industrial learning.
“Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE) describes U.S. households that earn above the Federal Poverty Level yet lack the resources necessary for economic security. ALICE is neither a conspiracy nor a moral failure; it is a rational outcome of interacting systems optimized for self-protection in a society that has lost its stabilizers. U.S. over-financialization and … Read more
The United States persistently confuses moral conviction and procedural authority with substantive material strategy, a pattern evident in its unplanned decoupling from global dependencies—a deliberate echo of habits ingrained since the Cold War’s end. To effectively vie with China in the technological arena and avert recurring pitfalls, the U.S. must confront its fundamental errors and … Read more
The United States misread the lessons of the Cold War, while China accurately understood the dynamics of the post–Cold War world. Today, as the U.S. and China compete in technology, it is imperative to draw concrete lessons from this divergence. In strategic competition, reality does not bend to values; outcomes are determined by capacity, cost, … Read more
The fall of General Electric, as chronicled in Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric (Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, 2020), offers a sobering yet instructive case study for China’s manufacturing sector. Rather than a cautionary tale of inevitable decline, GE’s experience serves as an analytical framework for examining how structural weaknesses … Read more
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
Shenzhen’s rise as a shopping and consumer paradise reflects the effects of freer markets, open competition, and rapid supply expansion. By contrast, persistently high prices in Hong Kong—and similarly in the United States—stem from institutional constraints, including restrictive land-use policies, labor barriers, professional monopolies, and protectionist regulations. These mechanisms limit entry and suppress competition, driving … Read more
In Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever (2022), Nomi Prins advances a structural rather than a purely ideological explanation for the West’s retreat from the real economy. She does not argue that this shift was driven primarily by Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis or by the confidence of a Pax … 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