This is the same magazine that had created the now infamous COVID handling resilience country ranking to put the US at the top; it's also the same magazine that gushed that the US economy would outgrow the Chinese economy in the next nine quarters or whatever number of quarters they came up with extrapolating a one quarter growth number dubiously-defined.
You have to understand that the US elites and pundits are on edge these day, so scared of the prospect of being overtaken by China. They're pretty powerless to reverse the trend given all the sh*ts that have been going on, so they resort to the only thing that they know best: inventing narratives backing up by questionable arguments and dubious numbers.
That is, change the perception, if you can't alter the reality.