"whether there are any China experts left in the U.S. government"
There have never been China experts in the US. What is different now is that China pseudoexperts are more vocal than before.
"whether tariffs are designed to deliberately collapse China’s economy"
They are at least partially designed to do so.
"whether the United States may be deliberately goading China into launching a disastrous war over Taiwan"
This one is a rationalization of America's incoherent Taiwan policy. If the US wants to avoid war, it makes no sense to provoke China in ways that do not actually materially enhance Taiwan's defense (e.g. Pelosi visit). China is attributing to malice what can actually be explained by stupidity.
Ryan, this is an excellent analysis of China and a very superficial analysis of the US. I would suggest that perhaps you have not traveled enough within the US to see happy Americans enjoying their freedoms and ability to debate politics intensely. May I suggest a Friday night football game at a high school in West Texas?
I do love freedom, the Southwest, and political debate! But I'll hop on this comment to clarify something, because the tone of my post seems to have left some readers confused:
I personally have confidence in the American system and would much rather continue living under Pax Americana — but it is obvious that a certain brand of declinism has swallowed the public narrative in DC and much of America today. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults now say the American dream doesn't hold true anymore or never did. Fewer than half of young people are optimistic about the future of the country, while two-thirds report being fearful about the future of democracy in America. Trust in government and virtually all of our social institutions has cratered to record lows. For the first time, nearly a third of people my age report being embarrassed to be American.
Much of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. America has always had problems, and has survived far worse. You can see the seeds of greatness and find inspiration among our builders and entrepreneurs. But, whatever its merits, our surge in national self-doubt is proving infectious both at home and abroad. It has empowered political factions with little regard for the ideals that have, for a century, defined what it means to be an American and provided the very source of our national power. And it has lent credence to Xi Jinping's personal mantra that "the East is rising while the West is in decline."
I wrote earlier this summer about the stakes of what seems to be a deeper, civilizational struggle between the dignity of the individual and the seduction of the machine. I am and forever will be a defender of the American Idea — that democratic governance, for all its inefficiencies and frustrations, produces better outcomes for human flourishing than technocratic authoritarianism: https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/what-are-the-united-states-and-china
For me, visiting China did not change this framing. But it did update my thinking on what it means to cultivate civic faith. Though our systems are obviously not the same, I think we deny China's ability to approximate some of the fruits of liberalism at our own peril. We should be clear-eyed about what many people around the world consider to be liberty's cost-benefit analysis, not reflexively dismissive of the question.
You are almost there, Ryan. I told you few weeks ago how China had already won, and this century is theirs for taken. But now you are tentatively dipping your toe to that larger sobering paradigm shift. Which is difficult for an American to make. But the rest of the world, who never had a dog in this contest of the century between USA and China, already knew the outcome of it. As much of the rest of the world knew that the US was heading for a quite win over Soviet Union by late 1970s when it became apparent that dysfunctional and economically backward Soviet system wasn’t going or destined to last in the marathon against the US’s dynamic economy. But now it’s US that is the dysfunctional one, a financially extractive and rent-seeking one, where industrial competitiveness is no longer their forte. Hence why we are at the cusp of Industrial-based pax-Sinica global economic order.
Interesting, but marred by Cold War tropes. Some niggles:
1. "Even as a skeptic predisposed to find problems in China’s economic model"?? China's economic model(s) have worked well for 75 years. Why be skeptical?
2. "For all its dysfunction, the United States remains a superpower”?? A self-anointed superpower that has never won a war and lost wars to both Russia and China? C'mon.
3. "The foreign population that left during the pandemic simply never came back, and you can feel their absence everywhere". Perhaps you can, but I and 1.4 billion Chinese cannot.
4. "With fewer foreigners and an ever-tighter information environment, even sophisticated Chinese elites are working from caricatures of the United States”?? Nonsense. The average Chinese has a much more accurate picture of the US than the reverse.
5. "The Party’s success in sealing out Western influence has also sealed in ignorance about the American policy process and political economy”?? Can anyone understand Trump's policy process and political economy? Anyone at all?
6. "Though China’s universities are technically world-class, their primary draw remains financial and logistical rather than cultural or aspirational”.?? No, their primary draw is the opportunity to do great science, as their publications demonstrate.
7. "China seems to have worked out many of the kinks of authoritarian capitalism”??Authoritarian Capitalism is clearly an American thing, to which China's market socialism bears little resemblance.
You are completely correct! The Great Leap Forward led directly to the Great Starvation where 30 million people died of starvation
The Cultural Revolution was an act of childish revenge conducted by Mao against those who were horrified by the Great Starvation. Mao destroyed Chinese civil society, closing colleges and destroying historic structures, like the Taliban did 40 years later.
The GLF resulted in the death by famine of millions of people; fewer died in the Cultural Revolution but it was a societal trauma. My family lived through both - just.
"With fewer foreigners and an ever-tighter information environment, even sophisticated Chinese elites are working from caricatures of the United States”
So fucking fake, so fucking pretentious, so fucking boring. 😂
Beautifully written opinion piece, even if i disagree with some of it. The comment section is pretty disastrous though, with pseudo analyses that are just ego narratives, proving most of your points. I guess it’s to be expected, but hopefully people with real insight will actually chip in due time. Subscribed!
Regarding China's youth unemployment problem, it can't be solved by simply "doing better" in some areas of the Chinese economy. China already does exceptionally well in almost every aspect of human existence, every commercially viable micro-economy.
Here's a perfect example: when you open your phone, you can check maps, order food, and satisfy all your consumer needs. There are ready-made apps, beautifully crafted, powerful, and easy to use. This is the current situation in China: every aspect of the national economy is filled.
Other countries might not have such concerns. Young people can find established jobs through active participation in society. But China is different. With a population of 1.4 billion, any business need is quickly maximized.
However, an opportunity to improve this predicament has arisen: the US-initiated trade war, which restricts China's access to specific goods.
China's government agencies are abandoning Windows for the open-source Linux, creating a shortage of millions of computer software and hardware professionals in specialized fields. To give a small example, rewriting the Linux driver for ATMs gave Deepin, originally a company of just a dozen people, a chance to grow, transforming it into a company with nearly 100 engineers.
Every time the United States restricts a high-tech product, it automatically withdraws from the Chinese market, delegating its entire supply chain, including R&D, manufacturing, sales, and logistics, to China.
Another well-known story: simply because Google's Android wasn't user-friendly enough, a retired engineer named Lei Jun assembled an eight-person team to rewrite MIUI, an Android-based user interface, and founded Xiaomi. Everyone knows what happened next. Xiaomi has grown steadily and is now a giant industrial company with a market capitalization of HK$1.2 trillion, over 43,000 employees, and a strong presence in new energy electric vehicles.
I think you understand that as long as there's even a small niche left for the Chinese in the global commodity economy's "ecosystem," with a massive consumer market of 1.4 billion and the enormous potential of 5 million STEM graduates entering Chinese society annually, the Chinese will surely seize the opportunity and maximize it. This is reality. Most Western elites who deny this are shackled to ideology, unable to discern how to maintain their advantages.
For example, Microsoft's stance in the trade war has deeply concerned the Chinese government, giving WPS's parent company, Kingsoft Office, a huge opportunity, currently valued at over 140 billion yuan.
With Nvidia, Intel, and other companies in sectors where the US believes they have a dominant position closing off to China, this will provide a good opportunity to improve current youth unemployment in China.
As for tariffs, they're actually not that important. In recent months, total Sino-US trade has fallen to 8% of China's total. Let the American people figure out how to buy their own necessities.
It's a good article even though I don't agree with most of it. You did touch on an issue that most China experts overlook. "Civic faith" is what you call when you saw in a park where grandmas and aunties dance and children play without fear. That's not something that came out of a 5 year plan. It's organic. No local CCP party official forced people to go dance at a park in the evenings. That's what happens when a country is ethnically homogeneous and becoming prosperous. They're living and not just surviving anymore.
America had that in the 1950s when it was the sole superpower in the world. But as American became less ethnically homogeneous due to immigration, there was a corresponding decline in civic engagement and social trust.
When you were on a Chinese train, did you have to worry about getting stabbed in the neck by an African sitting behind you? Probably not right? But if you're in the US, this is absolutely something that you worry about because you don't want to be "culturally enriched". The diversity that's happening in the US and Western Europe may ultimately be their downfall.
For every Jensen Huang that came to America and created 4T+ in wealth, there are millions of Decarlos Brown Jr. that kill, rape, and rob other Americans. Readers of this substack most likely will never deal with such people (I know I don't). I actively isolate myself with others of the same socioeconomic class. Ultimately, that is the reason why American will never have China's "civic faith".
question on youth unemployment, I read somewhere this is not as much of a problem because many of them have parents with a high savings rate and no siblings
Exchanges like this serves everyone well even though there are points of contention such as profitability instead of abundance being the gauge of a market's success. Given that China is openly Marxist, it's little things like this that shine a light on how well understood, or not, China is.
Furthermore, a diplomat should be well versed in the concept of cultural relativism. What is authoritarian in the West, is not in China; they have had a fundamentally different civilisational trajectory & hence possess a radically different cultural and philosophical outlook. A diplomat should not impose his/her native cultural understandings on any foreign peoples never mind one with a far older & richer history.
Given that American society will inevitably have to change to adapt to an ascendant China, it behoves people much like yourself to serve as bridges between civilisations. You have the means; do you have the will.
"whether there are any China experts left in the U.S. government"
There have never been China experts in the US. What is different now is that China pseudoexperts are more vocal than before.
"whether tariffs are designed to deliberately collapse China’s economy"
They are at least partially designed to do so.
"whether the United States may be deliberately goading China into launching a disastrous war over Taiwan"
This one is a rationalization of America's incoherent Taiwan policy. If the US wants to avoid war, it makes no sense to provoke China in ways that do not actually materially enhance Taiwan's defense (e.g. Pelosi visit). China is attributing to malice what can actually be explained by stupidity.
Ryan, this is an excellent analysis of China and a very superficial analysis of the US. I would suggest that perhaps you have not traveled enough within the US to see happy Americans enjoying their freedoms and ability to debate politics intensely. May I suggest a Friday night football game at a high school in West Texas?
I do love freedom, the Southwest, and political debate! But I'll hop on this comment to clarify something, because the tone of my post seems to have left some readers confused:
I personally have confidence in the American system and would much rather continue living under Pax Americana — but it is obvious that a certain brand of declinism has swallowed the public narrative in DC and much of America today. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults now say the American dream doesn't hold true anymore or never did. Fewer than half of young people are optimistic about the future of the country, while two-thirds report being fearful about the future of democracy in America. Trust in government and virtually all of our social institutions has cratered to record lows. For the first time, nearly a third of people my age report being embarrassed to be American.
Much of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. America has always had problems, and has survived far worse. You can see the seeds of greatness and find inspiration among our builders and entrepreneurs. But, whatever its merits, our surge in national self-doubt is proving infectious both at home and abroad. It has empowered political factions with little regard for the ideals that have, for a century, defined what it means to be an American and provided the very source of our national power. And it has lent credence to Xi Jinping's personal mantra that "the East is rising while the West is in decline."
I wrote earlier this summer about the stakes of what seems to be a deeper, civilizational struggle between the dignity of the individual and the seduction of the machine. I am and forever will be a defender of the American Idea — that democratic governance, for all its inefficiencies and frustrations, produces better outcomes for human flourishing than technocratic authoritarianism: https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/what-are-the-united-states-and-china
For me, visiting China did not change this framing. But it did update my thinking on what it means to cultivate civic faith. Though our systems are obviously not the same, I think we deny China's ability to approximate some of the fruits of liberalism at our own peril. We should be clear-eyed about what many people around the world consider to be liberty's cost-benefit analysis, not reflexively dismissive of the question.
You are almost there, Ryan. I told you few weeks ago how China had already won, and this century is theirs for taken. But now you are tentatively dipping your toe to that larger sobering paradigm shift. Which is difficult for an American to make. But the rest of the world, who never had a dog in this contest of the century between USA and China, already knew the outcome of it. As much of the rest of the world knew that the US was heading for a quite win over Soviet Union by late 1970s when it became apparent that dysfunctional and economically backward Soviet system wasn’t going or destined to last in the marathon against the US’s dynamic economy. But now it’s US that is the dysfunctional one, a financially extractive and rent-seeking one, where industrial competitiveness is no longer their forte. Hence why we are at the cusp of Industrial-based pax-Sinica global economic order.
Interesting, but marred by Cold War tropes. Some niggles:
1. "Even as a skeptic predisposed to find problems in China’s economic model"?? China's economic model(s) have worked well for 75 years. Why be skeptical?
2. "For all its dysfunction, the United States remains a superpower”?? A self-anointed superpower that has never won a war and lost wars to both Russia and China? C'mon.
3. "The foreign population that left during the pandemic simply never came back, and you can feel their absence everywhere". Perhaps you can, but I and 1.4 billion Chinese cannot.
4. "With fewer foreigners and an ever-tighter information environment, even sophisticated Chinese elites are working from caricatures of the United States”?? Nonsense. The average Chinese has a much more accurate picture of the US than the reverse.
5. "The Party’s success in sealing out Western influence has also sealed in ignorance about the American policy process and political economy”?? Can anyone understand Trump's policy process and political economy? Anyone at all?
6. "Though China’s universities are technically world-class, their primary draw remains financial and logistical rather than cultural or aspirational”.?? No, their primary draw is the opportunity to do great science, as their publications demonstrate.
7. "China seems to have worked out many of the kinks of authoritarian capitalism”??Authoritarian Capitalism is clearly an American thing, to which China's market socialism bears little resemblance.
A niggle on your comment. The last 40 years have been amazing. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were disastrous.
You are completely correct! The Great Leap Forward led directly to the Great Starvation where 30 million people died of starvation
The Cultural Revolution was an act of childish revenge conducted by Mao against those who were horrified by the Great Starvation. Mao destroyed Chinese civil society, closing colleges and destroying historic structures, like the Taliban did 40 years later.
In what ways were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution disastrous?
Do you know what the GLF actually accomplished?
Do you know what the CR actually accomplished?
I suspect no.
The GLF resulted in the death by famine of millions of people; fewer died in the Cultural Revolution but it was a societal trauma. My family lived through both - just.
"With fewer foreigners and an ever-tighter information environment, even sophisticated Chinese elites are working from caricatures of the United States”
So fucking fake, so fucking pretentious, so fucking boring. 😂
Beautifully written opinion piece, even if i disagree with some of it. The comment section is pretty disastrous though, with pseudo analyses that are just ego narratives, proving most of your points. I guess it’s to be expected, but hopefully people with real insight will actually chip in due time. Subscribed!
Regarding China's youth unemployment problem, it can't be solved by simply "doing better" in some areas of the Chinese economy. China already does exceptionally well in almost every aspect of human existence, every commercially viable micro-economy.
Here's a perfect example: when you open your phone, you can check maps, order food, and satisfy all your consumer needs. There are ready-made apps, beautifully crafted, powerful, and easy to use. This is the current situation in China: every aspect of the national economy is filled.
Other countries might not have such concerns. Young people can find established jobs through active participation in society. But China is different. With a population of 1.4 billion, any business need is quickly maximized.
However, an opportunity to improve this predicament has arisen: the US-initiated trade war, which restricts China's access to specific goods.
China's government agencies are abandoning Windows for the open-source Linux, creating a shortage of millions of computer software and hardware professionals in specialized fields. To give a small example, rewriting the Linux driver for ATMs gave Deepin, originally a company of just a dozen people, a chance to grow, transforming it into a company with nearly 100 engineers.
Every time the United States restricts a high-tech product, it automatically withdraws from the Chinese market, delegating its entire supply chain, including R&D, manufacturing, sales, and logistics, to China.
Another well-known story: simply because Google's Android wasn't user-friendly enough, a retired engineer named Lei Jun assembled an eight-person team to rewrite MIUI, an Android-based user interface, and founded Xiaomi. Everyone knows what happened next. Xiaomi has grown steadily and is now a giant industrial company with a market capitalization of HK$1.2 trillion, over 43,000 employees, and a strong presence in new energy electric vehicles.
I think you understand that as long as there's even a small niche left for the Chinese in the global commodity economy's "ecosystem," with a massive consumer market of 1.4 billion and the enormous potential of 5 million STEM graduates entering Chinese society annually, the Chinese will surely seize the opportunity and maximize it. This is reality. Most Western elites who deny this are shackled to ideology, unable to discern how to maintain their advantages.
For example, Microsoft's stance in the trade war has deeply concerned the Chinese government, giving WPS's parent company, Kingsoft Office, a huge opportunity, currently valued at over 140 billion yuan.
With Nvidia, Intel, and other companies in sectors where the US believes they have a dominant position closing off to China, this will provide a good opportunity to improve current youth unemployment in China.
As for tariffs, they're actually not that important. In recent months, total Sino-US trade has fallen to 8% of China's total. Let the American people figure out how to buy their own necessities.
It's a good article even though I don't agree with most of it. You did touch on an issue that most China experts overlook. "Civic faith" is what you call when you saw in a park where grandmas and aunties dance and children play without fear. That's not something that came out of a 5 year plan. It's organic. No local CCP party official forced people to go dance at a park in the evenings. That's what happens when a country is ethnically homogeneous and becoming prosperous. They're living and not just surviving anymore.
America had that in the 1950s when it was the sole superpower in the world. But as American became less ethnically homogeneous due to immigration, there was a corresponding decline in civic engagement and social trust.
When you were on a Chinese train, did you have to worry about getting stabbed in the neck by an African sitting behind you? Probably not right? But if you're in the US, this is absolutely something that you worry about because you don't want to be "culturally enriched". The diversity that's happening in the US and Western Europe may ultimately be their downfall.
For every Jensen Huang that came to America and created 4T+ in wealth, there are millions of Decarlos Brown Jr. that kill, rape, and rob other Americans. Readers of this substack most likely will never deal with such people (I know I don't). I actively isolate myself with others of the same socioeconomic class. Ultimately, that is the reason why American will never have China's "civic faith".
question on youth unemployment, I read somewhere this is not as much of a problem because many of them have parents with a high savings rate and no siblings
Exchanges like this serves everyone well even though there are points of contention such as profitability instead of abundance being the gauge of a market's success. Given that China is openly Marxist, it's little things like this that shine a light on how well understood, or not, China is.
Furthermore, a diplomat should be well versed in the concept of cultural relativism. What is authoritarian in the West, is not in China; they have had a fundamentally different civilisational trajectory & hence possess a radically different cultural and philosophical outlook. A diplomat should not impose his/her native cultural understandings on any foreign peoples never mind one with a far older & richer history.
Given that American society will inevitably have to change to adapt to an ascendant China, it behoves people much like yourself to serve as bridges between civilisations. You have the means; do you have the will.