A Proud Superpower Answers to No One

Notes from a Visit to China

Anyone who has practiced diplomacy will be familiar with the whiplash that comes from watching carefully prepared talking points get rendered obsolete in real time. I experienced it last week in China — my first visit since exiting government — when the hosts of our Track 2 discussion spent one evening pitching deeper cooperation with the United States, only to spend the next day processing the consequences of Beijing’s sweeping new export controls on rare earth magnets, tariffs on American shipping, and a national security investigation into Qualcomm.

Within 24 hours it became clear how badly Beijing had misread the moment. What Chinese officials at first framed as measured retaliation now looked like overreach — the kind that might galvanize hawks within the Trump administration and accelerate the decoupling both sides claim to want to avoid.

The United States and China are already trying to climb down from this latest escalation. But even a successful leaders’ summit at APEC is unlikely to reverse the deeper shift that has gone largely unnoticed in Washington: Beijing has crossed from reactive nationalism to confident independence — from “China is a big country, and won’t be subject to wanton U.S. policy,” to “China is a big country, and can do what it wants.”

Over seven days and more than twenty meetings across Shanghai, Hefei, and Nanjing with provincial officials, researchers, factory managers, and university administrators, you have to imagine what we saw was carefully curated and tightly choreographed. Still, I was fortunate to be in a position to ask direct questions of powerful people, and was struck by their relative candor.

What follows are a handful of observations — more impression than analysis — about the unique moment we are living through.

1. China No Longer Hides Its Strength

There can be no denying that China is becoming more self-sufficient and making good on its development objectives. Even as a skeptic predisposed to find problems in China’s economic model, I found that everywhere I looked, even subtle and difficult-to-falsify indicators pointed to the same conclusion.

Glance out the window of the high-speed train through Suzhou, and one can see where all the world’s concrete is being poured. Take a peek at a server rack at a mid-range university, and you’ll notice some of the chipsets are made by Huawei, rather than Intel or AMD. Take a look at the phones Party officials lay on the table during meetings, you’ll see a smattering of Xiaomi now litters the typical sea of iPhones. An explosion of Luckin Coffees has crept up where Starbucks and Dunkin once stood.

The road tells the story most clearly. The ubiquitous city bicycles have been upgraded to electric mopeds. Two-thirds of cars now sport green EV license plates. BYDs — once the aspirational face of China’s electric transition — are now so omnipresent they are the default economy-class vehicle when hailing a Didi in a second-tier city like Nanjing.

China’s manufacturing advantage also seems to be transitioning from cheap labor to lights-out production. At an EV factory in Hefei, industrial robots outnumbered their human coworkers at a ratio of 7:1. From piecing together hallway signage, the plant seemed to be meeting its production quotas, slow by an average of 2 percent.

Perhaps most telling is that technological achievements that would have once been classified as state secrets now stand on full display for foreigners to observe in the entry foyers of leading universities: ablative materials, holographic displays, counter-drone systems. Fancy tech demonstrations that once felt forced are now subtly and logically integrated into daily life.

A country once famous for hiding its strength seems to no longer see any value in doing so.

2. China’s Overconfidence Risks Digging Two Graves

Across each city we visited, Chinese policymakers and industrialists seemed to have convinced themselves of the same “skull chart math” that now grips elites in Washington and San Francisco: the idea that the United States and China have reached an inversion point in their relative power, and the arc of history is bending in Beijing’s favor.

You could hear it in how they spoke about American policy and President Trump — as punchlines betraying dysfunction, malice, or incoherence. Chinese scholars were direct in their assessments of U.S. shortcomings in everything from shipbuilding to social cohesion. When I asked whether there was anything China still hoped to learn from the United States, our interlocutors were polite but basically out of ideas. The subtext was unmistakable: China has absorbed what it needed and is now writing its own playbook.

This attitude was unlike any other I have encountered in ten years observing the U.S.-China relationship. After a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, the Chinese Communist Party seems incapable of resisting the temptation to twist the knife — to savor the sensation of its newfound power after so long being denied the same. The reflex is human, and it is not something that can be negotiated with. The danger is what happens when it collides with an American political culture constitutionally incapable of humility.

For all its dysfunction, the United States remains a superpower. It is not merely a prideful country, but an arrogant one — with no memory of life before primacy. Beijing’s self-assurance may be well-earned. But if this month’s trade escalation is any indication, future flexing at American expense will trigger a reaction in both capitals that is more emotional than strategic. And as markets saw last week, the collision of two egos masquerading as nations is not a contest of systems but a test of impulse control.

Beijing has not exactly adhered to “guardrails” laid down during the past twenty years of the U.S.-China relationship. American policymakers, for their part, feel burned by what they see as a decade of broken promises stretching from the Rose Garden to the Delfines Hotel. But without even the pretense of restraint, both sides risk sliding into a cycle of retaliation that neither fully intends nor can easily escape.

3. China Has Sealed Itself Inside Its Own Narrative

China today feels more closed to the United States than perhaps any point since 1972. The explosion of domestic self-sufficiency and years of zero-COVID isolation have left even Shanghai — the mainland’s most cosmopolitan city — wary of outsiders. Members of our cohort found themselves waiguoren’d even in major cities: children staring wide-eyed, strangers asking for photos. The foreign population that left during the pandemic simply never came back, and you can feel their absence everywhere.

That physical isolation now mirrors an intellectual one. With fewer foreigners and an ever-tighter information environment, even sophisticated Chinese elites are working from caricatures of the United States. The questions I fielded from diplomats, scholars, journalists, and cab drivers — whether there are any China experts left in the U.S. government; whether tariffs are designed to deliberately collapse China’s economy; or whether the United States may be deliberately goading China into launching a disastrous war over Taiwan — revealed how distorted the picture of the United States has become. The Party’s success in sealing out Western influence has also sealed in ignorance about the American policy process and political economy.

Foreign students feel isolated, too. Of the dozen I met from the Global South, all said they would rather study in the United States, if offered equivalent scholarships and visa schemes. They complained that assimilating to life in China as a foreigner is incredibly difficult — steep Chinese language proficiency requirements enacted in 2018 have raised the barriers even higher. Though China’s universities are technically world-class, their primary draw remains financial and logistical rather than cultural or aspirational.

After decades spent demanding respect abroad, the irony is that China has engineered an environment so controlled and self-referential that it no longer understands the world it seeks to lead — or the superpower it aims to surpass.

4. China’s State-Led Model Is Consuming Itself

After a century of brutal experimentation, China seems to have worked out many of the kinks of authoritarian capitalism. What problems remain are structural, baked into its political and economic development model. The same isolation that once fueled its rise has now removed the feedback loops that make course correction possible.

Youth unemployment is through the roof. The problem is so bad that Party officials have ceased denying it. Try navigating a mall on a Thursday afternoon in Shanghai: The coffee shops are overflowing with unemployed young people, laptops open, nursing single drinks for hours. The default plan for most Chinese students we spoke with was to pursue perpetual higher education — staying in school as long as possible to delay entering a brutal job market — or to launch a startup and compete in an entrepreneurial ecosystem that puts the Hunger Games to shame.

The brutal burn-and-churn model is starting to take a visible toll. The Chinese system has long fused social harmony with relentless competition, producing strivers willing to work harder for longer than almost anyone else on earth. But when that intensity meets a shortage of opportunities for meaningful advancement, the result is exhaustion and quiet disillusionment. The Party Secretary of one innovation park explained that in such a hyper-competitive domestic environment, many Chinese tech enterprises start out by trying to gain a foothold abroad. Today, “going out” (出去) is best understood not as the product of a deliberate policy, but a lifeline for Chinese enterprises to weather the lawless competition at home, where rules are arbitrary and moats don’t exist.

Local governments are also running out of fuel. One local official admitted that tech parks are now offering firms free or heavily discounted office space because they are running out of cash. Meanwhile, there are so many startups that banks can’t vet them all, and almost none qualify for loans. This has led to an explosion of YC-like vetting and investment platforms in nearly every major tech hub, many underwritten by the state.

Elsewhere, statism has succeeded almost too well. We spoke with a multinational that has slow-walked its own multibillion-dollar lithium mining project, and may not even see it completed, because subsidies cratered the market price well below production value. China’s state-led innovation model remains unmatched at generating cheap and reliable technology — but it is that very efficiency that is now destroying the market viability of the industries it set out to dominate.

5. China Still Believes in Its Future

There’s a texture to a country that can’t be captured through policy documents or sardonic social media posts — unguarded glimpses of how a society actually feels about itself, which can only be witnessed with one’s own eyes and ears.

The most impactful part of my visit to China was not any particular factory tour or official briefing. It was a Monday night of no particular significance, when two thousand people had gathered in Hefei’s Swan Lake Park to dance under the street lights. Young couples, retirees, kids chasing each other through the crowd — there was laughter, the smell of warm chuan’r, and impromptu karaoke.

It struck me then that maybe there is more to China’s system worth studying than its subsidies or industrial policy. Maybe, in our quest to disprove communist competence, we have under-appreciated its machinery for cultivating civic faith.

I am a relentless advocate of the dignity of the individual and the American Idea. But it is clear that dismissing depictions of Chinese patriotism and happiness as mere propaganda misses an important source of its rising power.

If the pessimists are right about American decline, if we really are headed toward some kind of Pax Sinica, it won’t be because of how many EVs roll off the line at a BYD factory — it will be because China has rediscovered something we’ve lost: How to make people feel part of something larger than themselves; how to take pride in historical achievement; how to sustain the promise of a national project worth contributing to.

That was the most unsettling part of this visit. Not sophisticated technology demonstrations or the premature flexing of a rising power — but the feeling of a country that still believes in its own future, and the quiet realization of how long it’s been since we could say the same.