U.S. firms chased shareholder value, boosting profits and elite innovation while shedding factories—leaving supply chains efficient, fragile, and hollowed out.
Western analyses of China often remain trapped in Western-centric political assumptions and fail to appreciate the enduring indigenous logic of Chinese political development. It is tempting to interpret China’s actions and ambitions through American or broader Western paradigms, yet such projections distort reality rather than illuminate it. A more accurate understanding requires approaching China on … Read more
China’s internet ecosystem has evolved beyond a purely economic or commercial domain, increasingly expressing a distinct lifestyle and consumption philosophy grounded in deep user integration. Everyday scenarios—such as paying utility bills through Alipay or accessing ride-hailing services within WeChat—are not simply conveniences enabled by superior technology. Rather, they reflect a systemic logic in which digital … Read more
Western critiques of China’s hukou (household registration) system often frame it as a uniquely authoritarian mechanism that restricts permanent migration to major cities by tying access to public services—such as education, healthcare, and social housing—to one’s registered locality. This comparison, however, is strategically incomplete. It evaluates hukou against an idealized vision of Western mobility rather … Read more
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War in 1991 marked the zenith of American global dominance and gave rise to the belief that liberal capitalism and American-style democracy constituted the “end of history.” Emboldened by this perceived victory, the United States pursued a post–Cold War globalization strategy centered on exporting its … 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
In U.S. discourse, the end of the Cold War was often framed as a moral triumph of “right values” over authoritarianism, fostering a tendency to interpret global affairs through ideological certainty rather than material constraints. This narrative dulled strategic judgment by treating outcomes as ideologically inevitable, even as the Soviet collapse itself was driven less … Read more
Western misconceptions do more than distort how the United States interprets China’s economic system; they structurally constrain America’s ability to learn from China’s industrial policy experience. By framing China’s approach through ideological caricatures rather than analytical assessment, U.S. policymakers often dismiss outcomes that warrant serious study. This misperception is not merely rhetorical—it shapes the boundaries … 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
In Powerful, Different, Equal, Peter B. Walker argues that Western understandings of China are constrained by a binary, dualistic mindset that classifies political systems as either “good” (democratic and individualistic) or “bad” (authoritarian and collectivist), obscuring the complexity of China’s historical and institutional development. This intellectual framing, Walker suggests, is less an objective analysis than … Read more