The Future Is Not Chinese
We have Apple, the NBA and Sydney Sweeney. What do they have?
President Trump’s visit to China has prompted Americans to reflect, as we periodically do, on the state of our superpower. Some say the future is Chinese. Don’t worry. It isn’t.
The U.S. is rich, powerful and attractive. We are perhaps the richest, most powerful and most attractive country that’s ever been. Had we been blessed with only one of those attributes, we’d still be a formidable player on the global stage. In the event, we’re 3-for-3. We are crushing it.
Run down the list. Almost all the world’s top companies are American. The reason is simple: Ours is an open economy governed by the rule of law. Anyone can start a company and grow it. You don’t need an uncle in the Politburo.
The U.S. has Nvidia. We have Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Tesla. We have the big, healthy and transparent financial institutions. We have Walmart. Our ability to project both hard and soft power is unrivaled. We have the NBA. We have the Northrop B-2 Spirit. We have Sydney Sweeney.
When you look at it that way, it’s laughable to say we are in a competition for the future with China. What do they have? What have they done? TikTok. That’s pretty much it.
Name a Chinese movie star with global box-office appeal. Name a top Chinese athlete playing in an elite sports league. Name a Chinese musician who could pack stadiums around the world like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. Name a Chinese writer or thinker whose ideas have infiltrated the intellectual discourse. Name a clothing brand or style originating in China that has conquered the world. Name a Chinese product that you can’t live without.
You got nothing. Be honest.
Now name a recent military engagement that the Chinese have fought and won. Their soldiers are untested. Their pilots have no combat experience. Their navy plays sharks and minnows with Filipino fishing boats. Their supply chains run on the principles of corruption and inefficiency that are the communist hallmark.
There is precedent for our fear of Chinese power. In the 1970s conventional wisdom held that the Soviet Union commanded a lethal modern military machine. They had the firepower and manpower to overwhelm us in a direct confrontation. Then Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan and the world saw how limp the threat was. The Russians hadn’t built a war machine. They’d centrally planned a paper tiger.
No one should want war between the U.S. and China. But if it comes to that, I know which side I’d rather be on. The team that took Fallujah—twice. The team that neutralized Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. The team that snatched Maduro.
Americans have a reputation as yokels and navel-gazers. That’s not reality. We are actually quite cosmopolitan. We can be open-minded and self-critical. We read our own reviews—even the bad ones. We know what people think of us. Most of it is motivated by envy.
The reality is, the world is with us. If they could, they would be us. Nobody wants to be China.
No one in Albania or Botswana dreams of living in a low-income, censorship-and-surveillance state. They want to live in a modern, prosperous society with free and fair elections. People risk everything to come here, to build new and hopeful lives in the unsexy parts of our country—midsize cities, inner-ring suburbs, rundown areas.
Everywhere you go in the U.S. you find immigrants from around the world, raising families, building businesses, investing in their futures. That is a vote of confidence, a revealed preference. It doesn’t happen in China.
Tune out the partisan noise and the communist propaganda. China’s per-capita GDP is in the neighborhood of Mexico’s. Its economy is dominated by state-owned enterprises—phony businesses, in other words. They don’t engage in real competition in open markets. They don’t report real numbers. Everything is a mirage intended to give the illusion of strength.
You can’t steal your way to greatness. And you can’t bluff your way to hegemony.
Communism is a self-defeating ideology—impoverished, weak and ugly. So don’t worry too much about the future. It’s got America written all over it.
