U.S. firms chased shareholder value, boosting profits and elite innovation while shedding factories—leaving supply chains efficient, fragile, and hollowed out.
The implications of Sino–U.S. technological competition and global hegemony cannot be understood through the narrow lens of trade policy or export-control mechanisms alone. Rather, they emerge from a deeper interaction between historical trauma, systematic technology denial, and China’s capacity for industrial-scale adaptation. Together, these forces have reshaped China’s national strategy and are now transforming the … Read more
China’s rise to near-peer status with the West reflects deliberate strategic choices rather than chance. While the United States and much of Europe gradually abandoned industrial density—treating manufacturing as expendable, subordinating engineers to finance, and assuming globalization and symbolic dominance would secure permanent advantage—China embraced production as a civilizational foundation. It built dense industrial ecosystems, … Read more
China’s resistance to financialization at the corporate level is not a moral stance but a systemic survival strategy. In sectors where technological competition has become a protracted war of attrition—such as semiconductors, 5G, and high-speed rail—short-term financialism equates to strategic suicide. The enduring strength of China’s manufacturing lies in its institutional resilience, which allows for … Read more
In The Man Who Broke Capitalism, David Gelles uses Welch-era General Electric to illustrate the consequences of severing corporate freedom from institutional discipline: short-term dynamism fueled by financial engineering ultimately hollowed out productive capacity, labor competence, and innovation. This trajectory stands in sharp contrast to German ordoliberalism, which holds that markets remain genuinely free and … Read more
Recent commentary—captured in the Wall Street Journal’s ironic phrase “state capitalism with American characteristics”—marks a telling shift in U.S. political economy. Ostensibly satirical, the formulation nonetheless signals a substantive break: the erosion of the neoliberal consensus, a forced recognition of state capacity as a core dimension of power, and an implicit admission that China’s model … Read more
If the United States attempted to implement the Genesis Mission by transplanting core mechanisms from China’s industrial policy, the effort would look markedly different in practice and expose deep structural tensions. Operationally, it would require strong top-down coordination: compulsory integration of federal laboratories, universities, and private firms into a unified national platform; mandated data sharing … Read more
Announced in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is a United States federal initiative aimed at accelerating scientific discovery through artificial intelligence, frequently described as an “AI Manhattan Project.” Its ambition is to fuse AI with scientific research at national scale, yet it attempts to do so without the dense physical and industrial substrate—advanced manufacturing, instrumentation, … Read more
Across sectors such as robotics, consumer drones, and electric vehicles, China has followed a highly consistent and deliberate industrial trajectory. The pattern begins with reliance on foreign technology, followed by rapid diffusion through copying and localization, then the achievement of scale-driven cost leadership. This process is reinforced by sustained state support that enables capability accumulation, … Read more
General Electric’s trajectory can be best understood in comparative perspective, alongside other major conglomerates that confronted the same late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century economic environment marked by financialization, technological disruption, regulatory change, and intensified global competition. While some conglomerates collapsed under excessive leverage, opaque financial arms, or strategic overreach, others fragmented deliberately, dismantling diversified structures that had … Read more
As Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric makes clear, GE’s decline cannot be understood in isolation from the economic environment and political landscape in which it operated. These external forces did not cause the company’s internal failures; rather, they amplified and exposed them, and once conditions shifted, they ensured that those … Read more