U.S. firms chased shareholder value, boosting profits and elite innovation while shedding factories—leaving supply chains efficient, fragile, and hollowed out.
The core weakness of the U.S. government’s China strategy is not a lack of power, resources, or intent, but systemic asymmetry—a structural mismatch in how the two countries generate knowledge, make decisions, communicate, and sustain strategy. This asymmetry spans epistemic, institutional, cultural, temporal, and informational dimensions, leaving the United States strategically transparent yet epistemically limited, … Read more
If China were to take full control of Taiwan, the consequences would extend far beyond a local territorial change, producing cascading strategic, military, economic, and diplomatic effects that disproportionately harm the United States and Japan while benefiting China. The effects would challenge U.S. and Japanese leadership while consolidating China’s strategic, economic, and symbolic ascendancy. Erosion … Read more
The United States possesses extraordinary technological, financial, and human capital, yet it faces persistent structural barriers to executing coherent and sustained industrial policy. These obstacles are institutional rather than ideological: industrial policy demands long time horizons, dense coordination, and leadership continuity, while the U.S. political system is optimized for short electoral cycles, adversarial competition, and … Read more
This thought experiment examines why the leadership succession and elite governance practices of China’s Communist Party (CPC) and Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP), if transplanted wholesale into the United States, would collide with core American political doctrines—even without changing the U.S. Constitution or political culture. The aim is not to rank systems or advocate reform, … Read more
Comparisons between the Communist Party of China (CPC), Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP), and the United States’ populist electoral system are best framed not as a binary opposition between authoritarianism and democracy, but as a contrast among distinct logics of political legitimacy and leadership selection. These systems differ fundamentally in how they identify, train, select, … Read more
China’s post–reform rise is neither accidental nor a mere byproduct of globalization; it reflects sustained comparative learning from the successes and failures of twentieth-century development paths. Across cases as varied as Japan, South Korea, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Latin America, a consistent pattern emerges: long-run growth is shaped less by market openness, … Read more
This essay reassesses Lee Kuan Yew’s most consequential claims about China as presented in Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013), evaluating them against global developments up to January 2026. While several of his strategic judgments—particularly regarding China’s long-term ambitions and state capacity—have proven … Read more
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
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
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013) offers a sophisticated analysis of Lee Kuan Yew’s geopolitical legacy and the think tanks that shaped his strategic vision. By 2026, the distance between his mid-1990s and early-2010s perspectives and contemporary global realities provides a compelling “stress … Read more