Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government.
I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore.
We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.
They'd need to find alternate consumer markets to alleviate this, and what are their options? Domestic is out, China hasn't managed to create a domestic consumer market with their current demographics, which are only getting worse as their baby bust deepens.
Europe? Similar demographic issues, simply not enough consumption to replace the US and greater economic protectionism.
The 3rd world? Maybe, but first you have to develop it, and even if you could manage that they have nationalist impulses of their own. You think India is going to willingly offshore their industry to China on the scale of the US?
The American system for all its many flaws is extremely dynamic. Trump and his policies are mostly bad adaptations, but they are attempts at adaptation, and the attempts aren't going to stop. The US has changed radically in the last 10 years; there's no reason it can't change just as radically in the next 10.
So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.
Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.
Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.
For a good review: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/05/chinas-authoritarian-m...
Shangahi went from a dusty fishing village to one of the largest, most populous metropolises in <50years.
> Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture
cmon, democracy as a word should tell you that is not be true. Earliest is probably Greek, about 500 BC. Notably, this is before Christian culture existed, unless you want to talk about the "borrowing" from older religions.
> China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy
Otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War :)
> China, a fairly insular culture
Modern China, 90% Han Chinese. Han were not always on top, notably China was ruled by outsiders (most famously the Qing imo), but also Liao, Jin, Yuan dynasties. Phrase is "conquest dynasty".
I am no fan of Kushner, but saying he runs US foreign policy is generously misleading at best.
Leaders of specific autocracies change, right (e.g. king got killed, but now we have new king), but governing structure persisted.
The "the trajectory of the US on a 'Chinese timescale'" barely even registers. While the CCP might not be that old, China considers itself an ancient society with a level of historical coherence that makes the United States rather insignificant as a lesson in political history.
You've offered a hugely reductive and rosy view of American history. Democracy is easy until it gets hard. America has fought a civil war before. The Congress basically does not function anymore ergo the "imperial presidency". The balance of powers the framers created when the country was a sparsely populated periphery of 3 million people has changed dramatically. George Washington rejected a partisan affiliation and regarded it as a societal disease. He was elected unanimously. Without his personal touch, the country probably would not have survived into the 19th century.
America has come into superpower status as the rest of the world destroyed itself. Post WWII, the quality of our politics have steeply and sharply declined, go back and watch debates from the 1960s. The same civil war cleavages are being debated today, with far less eloquence than a Buckley Jr or a James Baldwin.
People outside of the United States seem to imagine the rest of the world is naive about democracy. No. Rather when you are an old enough society, you experience more things and understand democracy has its own risks - just as any form of government. Democracy is not as easy or "self evident" as Americans think. The nature of American democracy has already changed radically since the founding. If you factor in "universal suffrage" to mean "democracy" then the United States hasn't even existed as a true democracy for 100 years.
Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now? Based on what? It seems obvious to me the next century will necessarily trend towards multipolarity. The chances of any American being born today having a better life than their parents have to approach the chances of techno-utopian fantasy. Which will only be attained if Americans learn to live with China as a partner not an adversary. Chinese scientists may cure cancer. They will innovate and solve other problems for the good of all mankind. Meanwhile in the United States your politicians can't even achieve universal healthcare. That is just one example where the United States has continually failed to make change at pace for decades. WWII recedes farther and farther into the background. So does the Pax Americana. China is not the enemy of the average American. It's just an obvious smoke screen for the homegrown problem - greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
Please consult your history. I don't even necessarily disagree with your view on China. But it's not made better by essentially setting up a straw man, by suggesting the United States "as a democracy" is somehow especially immune to the same sorts of vicissitudes of history that may inflict themselves on China.
The more I read about American history, the less I think "democracy" really had anything to do with America's success. It does make for nice mythology though. Perhaps it is an accompanying comfort that history is highly contingent, and that it really could have worked out in a myriad set of ways.
> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?
Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.
> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.
You point to universal healthcare, the modern European welfare states that other nations including China have modeled were not high-minded cultural endeavors. They only exist because the devastation of the great depression and WWII made them necessary, and a greater need to make peace with actual communists/leftists that were never a strong political force in the US precisely because we were spared the devastation of WWII.
As for corruption, China recently discovered that many of its nuclear missiles had their fuel stolen and replaced with water and the lids of many of their silos failed to open. Yes the US is having unprecedented problems with corruption at the moment, but the Chinese model is hardly superior in this regard.
I mean do you think any society does anything "high-minded" spontaneously? Or are we going to be adults here? You come up with some example that makes China bad. I come up with a counter. I'm not really interested in such a tit for tat. Because it obscures the central point:
The United States hasn't been around for very long. Again, as a "true democracy" not even 100 years. The overriding point I'm trying to make is to suggest that a common hubris found in American discourse should be measured. I'm not under any illusions about China or Europe. All societies have problems. The question is why is the United States any better? And why should I have confidence in that based on a track record of only a few centuries? Especially if the recent trend of the past few decades (closer to a century) has gone sharply down? No, it did not just start with Trump. And it will likely not just magically end with him either. Why does American political discourse constantly fall over itself to talk about Trump as a singular figure while ignoring the tens of millions of the electorate who keep voting for him and have kept him afloat as the dominant political force for a decade?
They will not just disappear. In my mind, the United States is just as likely to elect an even more odious figure in the near future as it is to "move on".
You can say "The Chinese model is hardly superior".
Someone else can say "The United States model is hardly superior".
It's not very interesting. The only point I'm making is maybe treat the other country with some basic respect, as a partner not an adversary. And don't allow your politicians at home to construct foreign scapegoats to distract from their internal responsibilities. The invocation of the Soviet Union along these lines is rather apt. If the Soviet Union's fall was so self evident based on its fundamental nature, one should probably be led to question how much blood and treasure America threw away because its elites convinced its people that it was an existential threat. This trend from Vietnam passed through to Iraq and now to Iran is not looking great. I mean really, what is the trend I'm supposed to see? Can you really blame some governments, especially those outside the "West" from looking for alternative global governance in China?
I refuse to believe this is a coincidence.
"we"
- We'll only move cheap plastic toys to asia
- We'll only move low-value clothing to asia
- We'll only move inexpensive electronics to asia
- We'll only move TVs to asia
- We'll only move computer assembly to asia
- We'll only move low-value semi-conductors to asia
- We'll only move CPU production to asia
Only thing really left is IP and frankly I expect asia to outperform the west in that soon enough (my understanding is that they already are in some areas, I am not an expert)
And if you’re worried that the US is about to be out competed by China in the IP sphere, surely the US would be in a much weaker position if say 50% of its economy was focused on the production of cheap generic goods?
the us has papered over it w/credit (no coincidence that the credit card came out right when productive capacity was being shifted to asia) but eventually every country sits down to a banquet of consequences
same story as ever (florence under the medici, england under the whigs, etc) first productivity then usury
Give them an extra 5% profit and theyll sell out the entire country and reduce its industrial base to ashes.
I think this has left its mark. A lot of people do not seem to be able understand that this is not true. Even if they accept it intellectually its such a fundamental assumption that its still influential.
I think there was, and is, an element of racism. It still persists in that a lot of westerners cannot comprehend that they can be overtaken technologically or threatened by non-western societies. This includes people who think they are not racist, or are anti-racist.
China was only shooting itself in the foot, it was argued, by not opening its markets fully and following export oriented industrialization.
profit margins dictated economist opinions though. This is why EOI was treated as quaint while TOCA was treated as gospel truth even though one was nonsense.
So what if they're technologically superior? What we can't steal, we can buy.
When the time comes to geld the Yankees an' hitch them to the plough, we'll cut
off their balls with a knife they competed to sell us
china gets massive advantage from western ideas that even benigh thing like 'lets not depend on china' is automatically considered hate speech and racism.
By many OECD economic metrics[1] around trade dependence, the US and China consistently rank as the least trade dependent. This reflects the scale of the countries, diversity of the economies, and an intentional strategy of minimizing trade dependence for GDP growth.
This last point is central to geopolitical leverage. Even if you treat the EU27 as a single trade entity, which operates at similar scales, there is little evidence of a coherent strategy to become functionally self-sufficient. A lot of geopolitical relevance is downstream of this.
[0] https://x.com/JonathonPSine/status/2082502536624287890
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/inter-country-input-ou...
Whatever its other weaknesses, China has the enormous advantage that the people really in power are focused on raising China to global dominance. Vs. those really in power in America are, at best, worried about their personal status and wealth at the end of the next fiscal quarter.
China is the master of the long-game. It's shortest cycles are 5 year tactical plans. Their strategic plans go far beyond.
I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job; only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead (religion does too).
If the US can't think that far ahead for the same reasons as China, maybe we need to find things we care about long term and tie economic development to that (family, religion, and even our potential extreme longevity).
One of the two parties spends most of their intellectual capital on acquiring and maintaining power. The other party spends theirs on policies which they rarely have power to enact.
Eliminate share buybacks. Raise the top tax bracket to 95% on earnings over $10m. Executive shares cannot be exercised until retirement if you really want to get aggressive.
The nuclear option would be stocks cannot be used as collateral for loans, it would shore up 90% of the nonsense overnight and have 0 negative impact on 99.99% of the general public.
It's already too easy for those in power to control popular opinion, and only getting easier, so you're not going to get mass protests or revolutions that upset the status quo.
Unlike trickle down economics, it’s not just a failed theory. It’s something we’ve seen in action and it works as expected.
Not saying I was paying close attention to America from 1850 to 1950, but a variety of cultural and social factors - especially less hyper-individualism, and people's futures being far more closely tied to the success of their families, neighborhoods, towns, etc. - lead to very priorities.
Also, a leadership that is so enormously autocratic simply has to juggle fewer balls at the same time.
Yes, but I don't see that realization as noteworthy. Does history record a nation which never found its own advancement hobbled by the scheming of its petty local officials?
> ...has to juggle fewer balls...
When things aren't going so well, trying to stay in power adds more balls (to juggle) than being an autocracy takes away. And "things aren't going so well" usually indicates that less-competent autocrats are in power - meaning that they are less able to juggle any number of balls.
America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this.
China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale.
Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth.
Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.
While Trump might be an outlier in how obvious the grift is, that doesn't make China suddenly the good guys who only care about their country or the people when they are not busy bulldozing them into drains like they did in 1995.
When did we go from bad guy to good guy?
> China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.
> This is one of the safest places in the world, if you’re not a dissident
> In March, authorities abruptly barred the two founders of an A.I. startup called Manus from leaving the country.
Did you even read the article?
Or was that your point?