“Over the last two and a half years,” then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in the December 2011 issue of Foreign Policy, “one of my top priorities has been to identify and expand areas of common interest, to work with China to build mutual trust, and to encourage China’s active efforts in global problem-solving.” Clinton’s essay, a major statement of the Obama Administration’s so-called pivot to Asia, should of course not be read in good faith. It’s vapid in the ways such documents are typically vapid (“our most potent asset as a nation is the power of our values”) and ominous in the ways they are typically ominous (“a more broadly distributed military presence across the region will provide vital advantages”). And still, a text like “America’s Pacific Century” marks an already bygone moment. The China described by Clinton was a rising but not yet threatening power, a challenger who might still be made a (junior) partner. A sense of regal entitlement could be felt even in the article’s headline, with its presumptuous possessive: as if American dominion over the 20th century could be carried into the 21st with only a change of scenery.
The breakdown began, as most consequential deformations of political life tend to do, inside the Republican Party. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to label China a “currency manipulator” on the first day of his administration. Donald Trump’s innovation, three years later, was to recast China from an economic miracle and wily competitor to a devouring menace. “They want our people to starve,” he told Fox News in August 2015. “They’re taking our business away. They’ve taken our jobs away.” Rival Republican politicians, critical of Obama’s climate negotiations with China, embraced the new belligerence, but none could match Trump’s escalatory jouissance. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he announced at a rally in May 2016 — conjuring, in a single phrase, both present anxieties of industrial decline and century-old white American paranoia about East Asian sexual predation. By “stealing” our jobs and undercutting our exports, Trump seethed, China had perpetrated “the greatest theft in the history of the world.”
During his first term, Trump seemed only half-heartedly committed to acting on his bluster. If he truly wanted to contain China, why pull the US out of Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations as soon as he entered office? All that slavering talk of trade war yielded nothing but years of grinding negotiations, and Chinese agricultural tariffs that necessitated tens of billions in bailout payments to American farmers. And in a sense, that was just how the president wanted it. For Trump, the China threat bore the same relation to reality as the “murderers” and “drug dealers” said to be pouring in over the Mexican border: a racist phantasm all the more useful for being insuperable.
Trump’s demagoguery nevertheless abetted a real change in geopolitical orientation. As the Quincy Institute scholar Jake Werner wrote recently, “China hawks under Trump [took] advantage of the president’s trade grievances and Covid-era recriminations to pursue an agenda of geopolitical dominance focused on military brinkmanship and a campaign to destroy China’s technologically advanced companies.” If the tools remained crude — the Department of Justice’s so-called China Initiative, meant to combat industrial espionage, snared hundreds of Chinese American researchers in a racial-profiling dragnet between 2018 and 2020, with no measurable effect — the goals had nevertheless been set.
Fear of American decline has shadowed our politics for half a century, but never before has our slow fall been so mirrored and mocked by another’s rapid rise.
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Far from a détente, Biden’s election brought China hawkery to a new, bipartisan baseline. China’s rise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in early 2022, represented “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order.” “We need to take on China’s abusive, unfair, and illegal practices,” Janet Yellen told the Senate during her confirmation hearings for Treasury secretary. Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Indo-Pacific coordinator on the National Security Council, called to “reckon with China’s predatory economic practices and protect American jobs.” While often couched in Clintonite euphemism, national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s domestic “industrial and innovation strategy” nested its affirmative vision of green manufacturing and middle-class renewal in an anti-China framework: Americans could have nice, American-made things, but only if pitched as a response to Chinese economic aggression. Biden duly retained all of Trump’s tariffs, blocked the export to China of advanced semiconductors and related equipment, and backed the ill-fated push to ban TikTok. “In the space of a few years,” Werner notes, common sense in Washington had inverted “from compulsory support for free trade to compulsory support for undermining and excluding China” — from “mutual trust” to mutual sabotage. “Official US policy is to make a nation of almost a billion and a half people poorer,” the sinister David Brooks wrote in early 2023, much more in awe than in anger.
For a reactive, visionless Democratic leadership perennially insecure about its bellicosity bona fides, China’s apparition as neo–cold war nemesis came just in time. But the shift in consensus can’t be put down to mere pandering. The peak years of China panic in US politics tracked a decade of Chinese technological triumph and new geopolitical confidence. While to American and European eyes China is forever “rising,” for China itself the ascent is now all but achieved. The historian Rebecca Karl notes that the phrase “‘China’s rise’ (zhongguo jueqi)” is notably less common in China than “the now-ubiquitous Chinese term for the contemporary moment: the ‘years of ascendancy and prosperity’ (sheng shi).” In the past decade China has come to lead the world in wide sectors of green technology, telecommunications, and robotics; bolstered by superior R&D and investment in STEM education, it is rapidly gaining ground in those few areas where the US retains an edge, like aerospace and artificial intelligence. The same years also saw the culmination of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a colossal infrastructure and energy lending scheme that since 2013 has channeled nearly a trillion dollars of Chinese governmental investment to smaller, poorer nations across the Global South, further binding much of the world to China with ties of development, diplomacy, and debt. While the country’s GDP per capita remains just a third of the US’s, China’s indispensable role in global industry — made all too tangible by pandemic-era supply squeezes — has no precedent in living memory, save the US’s own imperium in the decades after the Second World War.
In the face of this overwhelming ascent, the tone in brainier quarters of Silicon Valley and DC punditry has begun to change. China remains a force to be feared, yes, but also envied, even imitated. “I’ve begun to really notice this feeling in American politics that they can build and we can’t,” Ezra Klein mused recently, in a podcast conversation about China. Seen from the gated compounds of tech-industry founders determined to maximize “building” and minimize democracy, the country’s diktat developmentalism holds obvious appeal. “They’re very long-term thinkers,” enthused the CEO of Hadrian, a fascist-sounding aerospace start-up. So head-spinning is China’s advance that it recently had Marc Andreessen, the pointy-skulled VC nabob and MAGA courtier, gushing on another podcast about “the advantages of a command economy.” (“When their government decides that something’s a national priority, like, they just do it,” Andreessen sputtered. “China’s just, like, way ahead on everything involved in building physical things.”) Even Trump, trade war notwithstanding, has never hidden his admiration for his Chinese counterpart’s authority. Xi Jinping “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist,” he marveled in 2023. “Smart, brilliant, everything perfect.”
The turn from hostility to fascination can be felt beyond boardrooms and blog posts. A 2025 Pew poll found a positive shift in perceptions of China worldwide; even in the US, after years of souring public sentiment, nearly a third of young people now hold a favorable view of the country. A survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed a majority of Americans support engagement with China. Like any still-fragile structure of feeling, this one probably owes more to shallow vibes than deep reflection. Goofy memes about voluntarily “becoming Chinese” have lately multiplied on Anglophone social media (one of them shows a toggle switch labeled CHINESE turned on, and below it another switch, labeled FEELINGS, turned off). Professional influencers and ordinary tourists alike peddle Sinofuturist travelogues full of glassy high-rises, gliding robotaxis, and svelte bullet trains.
Miracles are in short supply everywhere, China included. But we don’t have to look abroad to know where the menace lives.
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Envious enchantment with Chinese life offers a tonic to weary disenchantment with American life. People feel, in a word, cooked. According to a Gallup poll from November 2025, Americans’ “satisfaction with the way things are going in the US” stands at 23 percent. Corporate con men walk free while day laborers are terrorized; stock valuations soar while wages stagnate; private jets spew carbon high above a country of crumbling bridges, shuttered hospitals, and unaffordable homes. The symptoms are morbid; the mood is futureless. If the imagined terms of competition with China have begun to soften, this must be due in part to the sense that in the United States, we have few tools left with which to compete. Fear of American decline has shadowed our politics for half a century, but never before has our slow fall been so mirrored and mocked by another’s rapid rise.
How to diagnose this contradictory condition, this Sinophobic Sinophilia? Orientalism remains endemic to Western self-imaging, but the tropes have mutated since the China panics of a century ago, when British diplomats and American journalists delivered thinly sourced screeds with titles like Is China Mad?, What’s Wrong with China, and China: The Pity of It. (Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, the Senate’s leading China hawk, is nevertheless helping to keep the genre alive with his recent Seven Things You Can’t Say About China.) Back then, race science and imperial hauteur joined to imagine the country as an ancient civilization fallen into decay and disarray, trapped by the past; today, the decay and disarray are our own, while China rockets humanity into the future.
True, the Orientalist reflex persists. In 2020, MAGA fever dreams — worsened by ivermectin — about a lab-bred “Wuhan virus” showed how easily the new Sinophobia molts into the old. But five years on, uncomprehending contempt has given way to an awe charged by fear, a wonder born of suspicion. “As a shorthand,” Andrew Liu has written in this magazine, “we can distinguish between the traditional ‘Oriental,’ fit for conquest by the West, and the hypermodern ‘Asiatic,’ feared for its conquest of the West.” Where the former “referred to a geographically contained culture,” the latter “points toward a transpacific, even global, flow of goods, capital, and people.” China is everywhere.
For a political center struggling to reconcile fear and envy, Dan Wang’s Breakneck may be a breakthrough. It’s the kind of book — cheerily liberal in worldview, by turns insightful and breezily wrong — that can be relied on to appear at moments when political ambiguity threatens. A former financial analyst who was born in China, raised in Canada, and educated in the US before returning to live in China from 2017 to 2023, Wang is a genial and informed guide to the country’s half-century of state-led transformation, proceeding through orderly chapters on infrastructure, technology, population control, and the Covid pandemic. In place of the menace–miracle binary, Wang substitutes his own heuristic dyad. “The competition that will define the 21st century,” he proposes, pits “an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction,” against “a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction.” Block versus build. Childishly simple, the thesis nevertheless marks an advance in an episteme that has been able to see China only as authoritarian terror or industrial juggernaut. “The sooner the United States treats China as a peer worth studying, the sooner it can develop a new playbook for success.”
In Wang’s picture, the US and China appear as mirror images. One builds too much, too fast; the other too little, too slowly. The rhetorical pattern of this odd-couple comparison has a seductive symmetry: for every function, an equal and opposite dysfunction. Nor, as apples-to-oranges maneuvers go, is the contrast unrevealing. In the contemporary Chinese context, the idea that crucial parts of the central government could simply cease to operate for more than a month, as part of a procedural standoff between rival governing factions, would beggar belief. And in turn, to an American observer, the thought that miles of new high-speed rail lines could simply materialize by bureaucratic fiat, unencumbered by years of legislative horse-trading, environmental review, suburban backlash, and budgetary overshoot, is no less astonishing.
Among the more insidious forms of American arrogance toward China is the idea that where we have politics, China has only government.
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This neat diagnosis entails an equally tidy prescription. China, Wang says, should embrace US-style start-up dynamism in its tech sector, juice consumer spending, and relinquish capital controls; it should, in a few words, deregulate, stimulate, and financialize. And the US should . . . well, it’s not quite clear. “I propose — very gently — to unwind the dominance of lawyers in the United States,” Wang writes in the book’s conclusion. (We think back to The Simpsons attorney Lionel Hutz’s vision of “a world without lawyers”: a sunny meadow where the world’s peoples hold hands, prancing in a circle of panethnic harmony. Hutz pictures this scene and shudders in horror.) Any utopian aspirations soon dim, however, as Wang ends with a call to non-arms so riskless and denuded of politics as to make the Searchlight Institute look like a Red Guard detachment. To transcend its “lawyerly society,” he writes, “the United States needs to elevate a greater diversity of voices among its elites.” The lawyers at the top, Wang suggests, “should be joined by engineers, economists, and” — a wild card — “other sorts of humanists.”
A kindred book like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, of which Wang is a fan, at least works within its own closed loop, by recasting every clash of class interests in the US as a problem of juridical and regulatory blockages. (Per Klein, Abundance “was fundamentally motivated . . . by competition with China.”) By comparison, Breakneck’s load-bearing shibboleths finally collide and crumble. “If it does not recover manufacturing capacity,” Wang warns, the US “will continue to be forcibly deindustrialized by China.” Yet the same economists whom Wang wants to “elevate” — who have formed, incidentally, the single most influential class of unelected policy professionals of the past century — almost universally regard wholesale American reindustrialization as a folly. Pronouncements like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s that the US can break its reliance on China for rare-earth metals within two years are revealing only in their delusion.
More deeply, the domestic ambition to reshore jobs and supply chains has always clashed with the planetary need for rapid progress on renewable energy. In a Times interview with Klein, Heatmap editor Robinson Meyer noted that the green-transition goals of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act would have been “much, much, much easier” to achieve “if China were like Germany, if China were like Japan, and we could say, ‘Oh, this is great. China’s just going to make all these things. Our friend, China, is just going to make all these technologies’” — solar panels, EVs, wind turbines — “and we’re going to import them.” (Trump’s gutting of the IRA at least spared us the pain of pondering that particular counterfactual.) But the idea that the United States might come to accept economic dependence on China — as so many nations have been made, by money, strategy, and force, to depend on the US — remains an impermissible thought. “US global power will be reduced,” Wang cautions, “if people around the world find it more attractive to drive Chinese cars, deploy Chinese robots, and” — God forbid! — “fly Chinese planes.” The only prospect gloomier than learning from China is that China might have nothing to learn (or buy) from us.
The discursive fog around China extends to US diplomacy. By some indices — Trump’s pomped-up meetings with Xi and cold shoulder toward Taiwan, the partial easing of US chip controls and cybersecurity sanctions, mutual retreat from the direst trade-war threats — relations are the warmest in a decade. Yet even after these climbdowns, which owe more to Trump’s whims than to his hawkish advisers, the average US tariff on Chinese imports still stands at almost 50 percent. Washington’s foreign policy consiglieri are no less adrift. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Brookings scholar Jonathan Czin sees a “China policy [that] has seesawed between hostility and engagement.” Trump’s “year of theatrics,” he notes, “has produced no tangible gain for the United States,” and Xi “has conceded little while steering Trump back to the status quo ante.” In Congress, meanwhile, China-bashing remains a ready rhetorical prop for both parties. The 2025 annual report by the congressionally appointed US–China Economic and Security Review Commission clings to old-line menace-mongering, depicting China as a “predatory,” “coercive,” and “malicious” actor weaponizing its industrial advantage, terrorizing regional neighbors, and smothering developing economies with cheap exports.1 Yet the report’s keystone proposal — the creation of a new federal agency for US–China relations to coordinate the work of existing federal agencies — seems almost scripted to confirm Wang’s diagnosis of a terminally lawyerized society.
“We must never deindustrialize,” Xi has often told CCP audiences, and all current signs bear out this vow. Meanwhile, with the IRA’s brief candle snuffed, reindustrialization in the US is on offer only in a parodic, posthuman form: the rapid metastasis of hyperscale data centers across a two-thousand-mile belt of rural and suburban America. There, in place of assembly lines, acres of supercomputers roar into the void, employing few and producing nothing, save the imminent elimination of whole classes of existing jobs. To “win” the AI race with China, the Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has said, the US must imitate China, where AI development enjoys lavish energy subsidies and lax regulation. But here, too, elite China envy buckles under its own antinomies. The kind of comparatively cheap, nimble, open-source AI models that predominate in China, which allow anyone to tinker with a system’s architecture, would make the current jet stream of US investment into far costlier, proprietary “closed” models — not to mention Nvidia’s own record-breaking $4.5 trillion valuation — all but impossible. In the Breakneck parable, American infrastructure and industry are suffocated by the “lawyerly society”; but “bankerly society” is more like it. Even at the bleeding edge of innovation, financial logics commit the most China-envious US techno-capitalists to build their projects more expensively, riskily, and, often, shittily than their East Asian rivals. The pundits who pan China’s macroeconomic “imbalances” live in a country that now depends on AI spending for as much as half of its GDP growth. And guess whose share of the global AI market is rising faster.
For skeptics, there remain straws to be grasped. Gripes that China lags behind in “soft power” — one-party “autocracy” is a “hard sell globally,” notes Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, and where, Wang asks, are China’s blockbuster movies and viral boy bands? — ring flat at a time when the American president prefers to project dominance by kidnapping foreign heads of state and blowing up fishermen for sport. Nevertheless, China does face stubborn domestic problems. Its economy suffers, in Wang’s succinct list, from “high youth unemployment, shaky household confidence, and limp consumer demand.” Fertility is falling; growth is slowing; productivity is lagging. “The China boom has ended,” the sociologist Ho-fung Hung, perhaps the most learned and dogged of China pessimists, declared last year.
China shares these woes, mutatis mutandis, with every other mature capitalist economy. But — the big mutandis — it can also meet them with tools of state intervention at unrivaled scale and speed. For much of the past two decades, a debt-driven building frenzy did more to drive China’s GDP growth than any other sector, even manufacturing. When, starting in 2020, Xi’s government opted to forcibly deflate the real estate bubble rather than allow it to burst, the miracle economy looked set to shatter; the ever-irritating former Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith predicted that the damage could be worse than the US housing crash of 2008. Instead, thanks to a vast program of planning and subsidies, green technology has been made to replace real estate as the economy’s biggest engine. China now produces, sells, installs, and runs most of the world’s solar panels and wind turbines, at low and rapidly falling prices; meets or exceeds its emissions reduction targets; and supplies nearly all its new energy demand with renewable sources. While Trump bleats about the climate change “con job” and bombs Venezuela to steal oil reserves that the oil majors never even asked for, China, the Economist notes, “is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels.” China’s industrial R&D far outpaces that of the US, and even the country’s long-lagging stock market has seen a new rush of investor interest.
The only prospect gloomier than learning from China is that China might have nothing to learn (or buy) from us.
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The range and depth of sectors that China now dominates form an almost mind-defying totality. Hence the flourishing genre of what could be crudely called stat porn or, more loftily, the statistical sublime. We can’t see the truth of China whole, so we reach for figures to quantify and tabulate our dazzlement. Nine of the world’s ten highest bridges are in China, all but two of them built in the past decade. In just 2018 and 2019, the country produced almost as much cement — 4.4 billion tons — as the US did during the entire 20th century. China’s solar-power capacity is nearly double that of Europe and the US combined. It produces thirty-three Golden Gate Bridges’ worth of steel every day. By 2030, China will be home to close to half of the world’s entire manufacturing capacity.
The historian and Substack power user Adam Tooze has become our most prolific stat-porn star, heralding the dawn of Chinese hegemony with near-daily compilations of revealing data and off-the-dome analysis. A recent edition of Tooze’s Chartbook newsletter included a word cloud titled “The Great Wall of China Worries/Hopes/Fears.” Nothing better bespeaks both the conviction and the confusion of the wide-eyed left-liberal China watcher than this visual poem of floating phrases in clashing colors: “Bilateral surplus deficit” here, “repressed consumption” there, “dedollarization” dangling in a corner. How does it all fit together? What makes it go? Where does it end?
The questions feel as inescapable as they do unanswerable — so we must keep asking them. What political vocabulary can we use to understand this contradictory, globally unparalleled system of Leninist-inflected state capitalism: a repressive government that is also the main counterpower to US empire, an economy that has eradicated poverty by proletarianizing most of its population, a state that disciplines capital without democratizing it, a country that both builds more electric vehicles and burns more coal than any other? The worst flaws of its political system belong in the accounting: undemocratic governance, stifling censorship, mass incarceration. For a nominally socialist nation, China’s welfare state is singularly stingy; unemployment, pensions, and other benefits are minimal, and under the hukou system of household registration, hundreds of millions of migrant laborers are ineligible for aid altogether.2 And then there are vital nodes of the country’s political system that have no ready analogue anywhere else, such as the tens of thousands of dangzu (party-groups) — small teams of CCP members deputized to maintain party authority over state ministries, companies, and other institutions.
But a ledger-like tallying won’t suffice for analysis, any more than will a mass of statistics or a word cloud. To be an adult about China requires — it shouldn’t need saying — the deeper scrutiny of political fractures and social contraflows that one would bring to any other state or society. Mao’s version of Marxism once fired (and sometimes fried) the imaginations of many young Western leftists; and the petty territorialities of the cold war — Marxists beefing with Marxist-Leninists beefing with Marxist-Leninist-Maoists — at least drew the lines clearly.3 Yet today, outside a small sectarian fringe, the political identity of the People’s Republic is an enigma — partly and ironically due to its success. To Western left movements accustomed to marginality and disunity, a party-state of the CCP’s power, size, and reach can only look, in all senses, foreign.4
Certainly the left doesn’t lack keen observers of modern China. The literary scholar Petrus Liu has creatively read Sinophone queer fiction and film from both the mainland and Taiwan as expressions of a heterodox Marxism; the intellectual historian and former Tiananmen protester Wang Hui has studied the recomposition of the Chinese working class in the reform era; the economist Isabella Weber has attended to the complex interactions of market and state power that demarcate China’s experience from the neoliberal norm. These accounts are rich, varied, and not always reconcilable. “Haunting” them all, as Liu writes, is the unsettled question of “whether China is still (or has ever been) socialist.”
To see China more clearly, then, requires a deprovincializing work of political translation. The country’s interfaces of state authority, political influence, private capital, and popular resistance are not our own, but neither do they compose a unitary miracle or menace; still less can they be reduced to cold war polarities of repression and dissent, omnipotent state and passive populace. Although unreported in Western media and uncounted in CCP statistics, tens of thousands of strikes, protests, and other labor disputes roil Chinese factories and workshops every year. And in turn these struggles, no less than ours, have their internal contradictions. The scope of labor activism has contracted under Xi, and the country’s only legal union, the state-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions, nationally does more to contain than to support worker organizing. Nevertheless, local units of the ACFTU have, in certain conditions and places — as in Guangzhou’s auto factories — been forced open to democratic elections and collective bargaining.
Even within the steeply hierarchical yet administratively decentralized system of CCP rule, competing personalities and programs can still grind against each other. What lessons can be drawn from the so-called Chongqing model, an experiment in social democracy in China’s largest municipality, which from 2007 to 2012 saw rapid economic growth paired with the shoring up of state-owned enterprises, massive investment in public housing, and a major expansion of the area’s welfare state, through a partial repeal of hukou limits on urban residency? It’s hard to know, because the project abruptly stalled after its mastermind, the provincial party secretary Bo Xilai, was removed from power in a corruption crackdown of the kind that has since become a signature of Xi’s premiership. Bo, as it happens, was one of Xi’s main rivals for CCP primacy — and in turn, aspects of Bo’s project, with its neo-Maoist rhetoric of “red culture,” have been embraced by Xi himself. Among the more insidious forms of American arrogance toward China is the idea that where we have politics, China has only government.
In early 1979, Deng Xiaoping arrived in the US for a weeklong official visit, the first such tour by a mainland Chinese leader in decades. The trip would take him from DC to Georgia, Texas, and Washington state, making stops at symbolic venues of a not-yet-postindustrial American capitalism: Coca-Cola headquarters, a Ford assembly plant, a drill-bit manufacturer, a supermarket. (It wasn’t all business: On the outskirts of Houston, Deng also attended what was presumably his first rodeo.) With Deng’s reform drive already underway and American power unthreatened, even red-hating Southern mayors could let down their guard to welcome the Chinese premier with handshakes, dinners, and gifts. Deng was reportedly amazed and humbled by America’s productive power and material bounty. It was salutary timing: The first of his party’s Special Economic Zones — liberalized cradles of China’s capitalist transformation — opened in Shenzhen the following year.
Today such a scenario is unthinkable; you can buy a cowboy hat like the one given to Deng for $5 on Temu. But the reverse encounter is no less so. While craven photo-op junkets through Israel or Saudi Arabia are routine, no American politician of any prominence could afford to be seen touring an EV factory in Shenzhen, boarding a bullet train to Chongqing, or crossing a mountain bridge in Guizhou. Even as sections of elite opinion and popular imagination begin to warm toward China, too much ruling-class legitimacy still depends on refusing the miracle and reanimating the menace, whether as mortal enemy or mere rival.
The hypocrisy of US officials is not lost on their Chinese counterparts. In January 2026, the Chinese embassy to the US tweeted an AI animated music video in which a navy-suited humanoid eagle bewails, with startling soulfulness, China’s economic dominance. “When we lead, it’s ‘progress wow!’” he belts. “When China leads, it’s ‘overcapacity now.’” The American eagle’s song is intercut with scenes of a smiling, cherubic panda driving an EV, installing a solar array, and watching a rocket launch. By the time the fifty-six-second track reaches its climax (“China shock, please make it stop! / We panic every time they reach the top”), you’d have to be Tom Cotton himself not to be tapping your foot.
For all these humiliations, the US of course retains many kinds of primacy. A megasize American military patrols the planet; the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, and Wall Street its financial control center; US consumer and capital markets are vast and deep. These superlatives reassure no one, except those who stand to profit from them. With foreign aid gutted and all pretense of diplomatic goodwill torched, American hegemony today feels more threadbare, residual, and unearned than ever. US power at its softest is that of a high-tech huckster and monopoly financier; at its hardest, that of an arms trafficker and paramilitary thug. Miracles are in short supply everywhere, China included. But we don’t have to look abroad to know where the menace lives.
This century, which Clinton fifteen years ago presumed to be “America’s” by right, instead promises to be a long agony of de-Americanization. We should welcome the menace’s fall, not cushion it. “To cede the pretensions of global hegemony,” Jed Esty has written, “is not to regress or decline, except in the minds of those in thrall to superpower nostalgia.” If the new Sinophobic Sinophilia augurs anything positive, it might be to mark a first break with national nostalgia — the source of Biden’s stillborn industrialism as much as of Trump’s trade-war agita and gunboat villainy. The pervading feeling, in Esty’s description, is “one part melancholic attachment to lost power, one part blinding optimism about the possibility that power has not truly, or permanently, been lost.” For the US left, seeing China clearly is a duty not simply for its own sake, but to return us to the challenge of all politics, domestic and international. Do we find refuge in fantasies of a foreign superpower, or do we face the question of how a smaller, weaker American nation — because smaller and weaker — could finally begin to be made an equal and just one?
In many of the report’s indictments, the level of pot-sees-kettle transference is almost dizzying. “China attempts to cloak its actions beneath a thin veneer of plausible deniability or legal justification, enabling Beijing to present itself as a source of stability even as it undermines the very international order it claims to uphold,” the authors write, neatly summarizing the whole history of US foreign policy since the cold war. ↩
With the implementation of its fifteenth Five-Year Plan, the CCP under Xi has begun, cautiously but deliberately, to expand benefits — albeit more in the service of buoying consumer demand than any ideal of equity. ↩
Even now, scattered scenes of state-led class vengeance occur that might warm the radical American heart. Construction of new golf courses is banned in China; the government shuts down illegal links and redistributes the arable land to local farmers. (“I don’t mind,” Wang admits, in a winning moment.) ↩
China, of course, has its own strictly policed political margins and divergent left currents. In recent years young members of a renewed Maoist movement have been jailed for protesting on the wrong side of industrial labor disputes; meanwhile, former fervent critics of China’s post-Deng hybrid of authoritarianism and market liberalism now revel in what Kevin Rudd calls Xi’s “Marxist-Leninist nationalism.” ↩
