U.S. firms chased shareholder value, boosting profits and elite innovation while shedding factories—leaving supply chains efficient, fragile, and hollowed out.
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
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
Collective bargaining is often presented as a primary mechanism for raising wages, yet this view overlooks a basic economic reality: wages are prices determined largely by workers’ marginal productivity and by labor market supply and demand. When unions act as monopolistic agents that restrict labor supply or resist technological change, they can introduce rigidity into … Read more
In 2023, China’s express delivery system handled 178.6 billion parcels—more than half of global volume—equivalent to over 22 deliveries for every person on Earth. Remarkably, this vast, low-cost, and highly efficient network was built largely from scratch in just two decades. Its scale and speed are not merely matters of consumer convenience but reflect a … Read more
A persistent narrative in Western media attributes China’s manufacturing dominance to suppressed labor rights and artificially low wages, portraying its success as the product of a “sweatshop” model. Yet this explanation collapses under comparative scrutiny. India, where millions of young workers earn less than their Chinese counterparts, has failed to develop a comparable manufacturing base; … Read more
China’s strong and capable manufacturing ecosystem—particularly the toy manufacturing base, the counterfeit mobile phone industry, and the consumer electronics OEM system that emerged in Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta during the 2000s—provided a critical structural foundation for DJI’s rise. This ecosystem supplied far more than low-cost labor: it offered dense supplier networks, rapid prototyping capabilities, flexible … Read more
Mainstream Chinese analyses and mainstream Western political-economy interpretations diverge systematically across core analytical dimensions. In causal diagnosis, Chinese discourse attributes Western stagnation to excessive financialization, speculative capital dominance, deindustrialization via offshoring, and market fundamentalism that hollowed out state capacity; Western accounts more often frame these outcomes as endogenous tensions of capitalism—profit squeeze, technological change, global … Read more
Amid intensifying U.S.–China strategic competition, a fundamental asymmetry lies in the United States’ inability—and institutional reluctance—to replicate China’s coordinated, top-down execution of industrial, technological, and strategic initiatives. China’s centralized governance model enables rapid alignment of policy, capital, and enterprise around national priorities, conferring advantages in speed, scale, and strategic coherence. By contrast, the U.S. system … Read more