What Are the United States and China Competing For?

The Dignity of the Individual, and the American Idea

Ask any think tank fellow or cable news pundit about U.S.-China competition, and they’ll rattle off the familiar catechism: semiconductors, critical minerals, military bases in the South China Sea. The contest, we’re told, is about technological superiority, economic leverage, and regional spheres of influence — the traditional tools of great power rivalry.

But that’s not what we’re competing for. These are the instruments of power, not its purpose. And it should disturb us greatly that Washington has become so fixated on how to compete, it’s forgotten why.

The real contest is over meaning: What kind of life is worth building? What kind of society deserves to endure?

That question — what are we for — is no philosophical ornament. It is our strategic imperative. Because for all the talk about “great-power competition,” neither the United States nor China is competing for territory or even resources. They are competing to define the organizational logic of the future: the frameworks through which people live, work, believe, and obey.

Beijing’s promise is explicit. The Chinese Communist Party does not pretend to value individual freedom — it values order, continuity, and growth. Its vision is not Marxist in any meaningful sense, nor is it capitalist in the way we understand the term. It is techno-administrative: a vision of social harmony imposed by hierarchy, optimized by machine. A model where AI predicts behavior, loyalty unlocks mobility, and legitimacy flows not from consent, but from performance. This is what Beijing is offering the world. And increasingly, the world is buying.

Washington’s offer, by contrast, is disjointed. Its institutions are unsure whether to frame the competition as ideological, technological, economic, or moral. Biden talked about defending democracy; Trump is seized with restoring sovereignty. Both have avoided the harder conversation: that American influence no longer sells itself — and that without a renewed national theory of purpose, America is not offering a model so much as exporting entropy.

The United States cannot out-compete China without out-believing it. It is fantasy to think that, with high enough tariffs or strong enough alliances, we can win a contest of systems without ever declaring what kind of system we stand for.

But this isn’t a Cold War redux. The world isn’t deciding between capitalism and communism. This time, Sino-American rivalry is about something messier and more metaphysical:

It is the contest between the dignity of the individual and the seduction of the machine.

Beijing’s Endgame

Beijing has an answer to the future, and it is terrifying in its coherence.

The goal is not just national rejuvenation. It is global legitimacy — to reframe modernity itself as a Chinese-led enterprise.

China’s vision is one of collective prosperity through technocratic management. The Chinese Communist Party promises its people — and increasingly, the world — that expert administration, technological optimization, and social stability can deliver material abundance and national pride. It’s a seductive proposition: surrender the messy uncertainties of democratic deliberation in exchange for competent governance and rising living standards. Why endure the chaos of American-style democracy when the CCP can deliver high-speed rail, eliminate extreme poverty, and build gleaming megacities in record time?

But in Xi Jinping’s hands, “development” is not a neutral process. It’s a civilizational template, exported through fiber-optic cables, party-to-party trainings, and surveillance technologies bundled as infrastructure. The end state is what Singapore flirts with and what the Gulf monarchies have perfected: the efficient autocracy, turbocharged by automation. A regime that can suppress dissent not with guns, but with dashboards. Not by silencing the public, but by predicting and preempting what they will do.

If America’s founding impulse was liberty before order, China’s is order before everything — and it now has the tools to enforce that priority at scale.

And crucially, Beijing believes it will prevail in this contest of systems without firing a shot. In its eyes, American decadence is not a propaganda tool; it’s an empirical fact. Our Congress cannot pass a budget. American cities cannot keep the lights on. Trust in government is at historic lows, civil unrest is at record highs, and institutions rot under the weight of performative governance.

The longer the United States debates itself, the more China gets to define the baseline conditions of what it means to be a “modern” and “moderately prosperous” country — and what it means for a person to live in one. That is the competition: not for land, or even GDP, but for the authority to shape the compact between human beings, their technologies, and their governments.

America’s Strategic Confusion

For all its resources, America lacks a theory of the competition it’s in.

The Trump administration frames the China challenge as economic — a zero-sum race for jobs, factories, and trade balances. The Biden administration rebranded it as a contest between democracies and autocracies, then immediately undercut that premise by begging Riyadh for oil and giving Modi a standing ovation in Congress. Neither side has articulated what, exactly, the United States wants the world to look like when this is over — only that we should keep China from shaping it.

The American worldview is defined by the principles of individual agency and the right to self-determination. Even when our democracy fails — and it often does — we’ve maintained that there’s something valuable about the right to choose your own leaders, speak your mind, and pursue happiness as you define it.

This vision powered our soft power for decades, inspiring dissidents from Beijing to Havana, and propelling our status as a shining city upon a hill. But there is an uncomfortable truth that few in Washington want to acknowledge: the American Idea is losing its appeal, even among Americans themselves.

The Populist Cry for Meaning

The rise of the Tech Right — the loose coalition of venture capitalists and Silicon Valley refugees who helped elect President Trump — is often misunderstood as a simple embrace of accelerationism. Look closer, and you’ll see something more complex: a desperate search for purpose in an age of technological displacement.

When Marc Andreessen rails against the existential threat of Chinese AI supremacy, he’s not just worried about market share or military capabilities. He's articulating a fear that America is losing the plot — that we’ve become so obsessed with managing decline that we’ve forgotten how to dream big. When Elon Musk promises to make life “multiplanetary,” he’s offering something the Chinese system cannot: a vision of human agency that transcends earthly limitations.

The populism of the Tech Right is not necessarily grounded in optimism about technology. It is rooted in a hunger for dignity — the dignity that comes from believing your civilization stands for something that matters. The Tech Right looks at China’s relentless efficiency and feels not admiration but existential terror: What if they’re right? What if democratic chaos really is inferior to technocratic competence?

The irony is that this anxiety has driven many in Washington and San Francisco toward an essentially Chinese response: the belief that America can and must “win” through superior technology and industrial policy. Many are today embracing a kind of techno-nationalism that mirrors Beijing’s own approach, complete with massive state subsidies, non-tariff barriers to trade, and five-year plans dressed up as industrial strategy.

For now, the DC-SF consensus is right: Some form of industrial policy is necessary to compete — and undoubtedly effective at amassing power in the industries that matter most. But in the grand scheme of protracted competition with China, even a reindustrialized and abundant America will struggle to answer the same question that haunts every venture capital pitch and product launch:

What is all of this innovation actually for?

The Retreat Into Ourselves

There is another faction that has gained ground as America lost its way. The so-called “Restrainers” — voices from Quincy, Cato, and beyond — who argue that America should accept the limits of its power and shed the burdens that come with global leadership.

The isolationist revival offers its own response to American anxiety: Stop trying to manage the world and focus on problems at home. Why spend billions on foreign adventurism when we can’t fix our own infrastructure? Why worry about Chinese influence when American families are struggling to make ends meet? The logic is seductive — America has overextended itself, and the solution is strategic withdrawal.

The Restrainers are right about one thing: the era of American primacy through military intervention is over. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan proved that democracy cannot be imposed by force. But their proposed solution — a wholesale retreat from global leadership, an insistence that our values are irrelevant to our foreign policy, and a seemingly gleeful embrace of naked realpolitik — doesn’t just misunderstand the nature of the current competition.

It risks the unmaking of America’s identity, and the very source of its power.

The Myth That Moves Mountains

For all their differences, each of the major factions on the rise in America today — China Hawks, Restrainers, Abundance Dems, and the Tech Right — share a common blind spot: they’ve forgotten what made this country powerful in the first place.

America’s greatest strategic asset has never been its technology or military hardware. It has been the myth of American exceptionalism itself.

I don’t mean “myth” as falsehood, but a story we choose to live by. The belief that America is good. That it represents something unique in human history, that we are a nation founded on an idea rather than blood and soil. It is an ethos born of great men who made hard sacrifices in defense of abstract values and faraway peoples — out of a desire to make their country, and the world, a better place.

The legions of those who subscribe to the myth of American exceptionalism — the diplomats posted to dangerous corners of the world, the soldiers who volunteer for multiple deployments, the scientists who choose public service over private wealth — have done more to advance American interests than any strategic investment, weapons platform, or technological breakthrough ever could.

The American Idea has powered everything from the Marshall Plan to the internet, from the space program to the civil rights movement. It convinced generations of immigrants to uproot their lives for the promise of American opportunity. It didn’t promise comfort or certainty — only the chance to live as authors of one’s own life. And for millions, that was enough.

But myths are fragile things. They require constant tending — and when they are abandoned by their own believers, they die.

What We're Really Fighting For

China is offering the world a different myth: prosperity without the burden of democratic responsibility. It’s a compelling story, especially for developing nations watching American democracy tear itself apart.

America’s counter-narrative has become defensive and reactive. We’ve defined ourselves primarily in opposition to China rather than in affirmation of our own values. Our “strategic competition” has devolved into a desperate attempt to maintain technological and military superiority, rather than demonstrating why individual liberty and democratic governance produce outcomes better for human flourishing.

This is backwards. China’s greatest vulnerability is not its dependence on imported semiconductors or its demographic decline — it’s the spiritual emptiness at the heart of its development model. For all its material successes, the CCP cannot offer its people a satisfying answer to the question: What is the point of all this efficiency?

The Chinese system can deliver prosperity, but it cannot deliver meaning. It can create wealth, but it cannot create the agency that allows people to find their own purpose. It can build cities, but it cannot build the kind of civic culture that makes those cities worth living in.

If America wants to “win” competition with China, we need to remember what we are competing for: the right to define what human dignity looks like in the modern world.

This means investing not just in strategic technologies, but in the institutions and ideas that make democratic self-governance possible. It means demonstrating through our actions — not just our rhetoric — that free societies can address collective challenges without sacrificing individual rights. It means showing the world that democratic chaos is not a bug to be optimized out of existence, but the irreducible condition of human freedom.

A Vision of Victory

But what does victory actually look like? How will we know if we’ve won?

The honest answer is that we probably can’t “win” in any definitive sense. China is not going away. The Chinese Communist Party is not going to liberalize itself out of existence. And any strategy premised on regime change in Beijing would be as unrealistic as it would be dangerous.

Instead, victory looks more like resilience — the ability to maintain our own model while preventing China’s from becoming the global default.

We will have succeeded if, in 2050, young people around the world still see democratic societies as places they want to live, work, and raise families. If developing nations still view American-style institutions as worth emulating, even when Chinese alternatives offer faster material gains and cheaper dopamine.

We will have succeeded if we can demonstrate that free societies can solve collective problems — technological disruption, natural disaster, and inequality — without sacrificing the individual liberty that makes those societies worth preserving in the first place.

We will have succeeded if we can offer Americans a reason to believe that their civilization is worth preserving and extending — and rekindle our vanishing source of national pride.

This competition is not about converting China to our way of thinking. It’s about proving that our way of thinking still works. That democratic governance, for all its inefficiencies and frustrations, produces better outcomes for human flourishing than technocratic authoritarianism.

This is both a more modest and more difficult goal than regime change. It requires us to actually solve our own problems rather than simply pointing to China’s. It means making democracy work well enough that people choose it freely, not because we’ve eliminated the alternatives.

The Path Forward

The United States is in the process of losing strategic competition with China. It is losing not because China’s system is more compelling, but because we’ve ceased making the case for our own.

Both recent administrations have misunderstood the nature of this competition. Biden framed it as a technical problem to be managed through export controls and economic alliances — a “small yard, high fence” strategy that suggests America’s best hope is slowing China down. Trump is mimicking parts of China’s own playbook: aligning politics with capital, erecting barriers to trade, and prioritizing government efficiency at the expense of democratic values.

Neither approach addresses the deeper challenge: we are not just in a competition for power, but for meaning.

If we want to lead, we have to inspire. That means moving from a strategy of denial to one of demonstration — not just blocking China’s model, but proving that ours still works.

That means:

• Competence at home. Global trust in the American system begins with domestic proof of concept. A democracy that can’t govern itself will not convince others to follow its lead. We must fix the basics: infrastructure that functions, agencies that execute with integrity, and a political process that rewards responsibility over spectacle.

• A bet on people, not just production. America’s edge has always come from human capital — individuals free to think, build, dissent, and dream. Investing in education, talent mobility, and open research ecosystems will do more to secure our future than any subsidy package ever could.

• Democracy that delivers. The Chinese model tempts with order and output. Ours must answer with innovation and agency. If ordinary Americans cannot feel democracy working in their lives — improving schools, lowering costs, making housing attainable — we should not be surprised when others choose authoritarian efficiency.

• Technology that liberates. Our tech industry’s greatest advantage isn’t its unrivaled access to computer chips or the depth of its capital markets. It is the freedom to build. While China designs systems to predict and control, we must develop technologies that empower individuals over institutions. From encryption that safeguards privacy to platforms that protect dissent, American technology should reflect the principle that people, not algorithms, control their own destinies.

Ultimately, the United States does not need to beat China at being China. We need to be visibly, unapologetically good at being ourselves.

This competition won’t be won with chip fabs or carrier strike groups alone. It will be decided by the people — in Manila and Nairobi, Delhi and São Paulo — who are choosing between two visions of how society can work and what a human life is for.

If we can offer a model that respects their dignity, expands their agency, and gives them something to believe in, we won’t need to fear China’s rise. We will have earned our role in shaping the future — not by dominating the world, but by inspiring it.