by Ron Unz and Mike Whitney
February 02, 2025
from UNZ Website








Mike Whitney

interview with Ron Unz...

Question 1: Western Media Bias?

Is the western media even-handed in its coverage of China? And how has this impacted public perception of China in America?
 

Ron Unz

I think the Western media has been overwhelmingly biased against China, a bias that stretches back for decades but has steadily grown worse during the 2010s and especially the last few years.

Coverage has recently become so extremely dishonest and distorted that it reminds me of how the old Soviet media portrayed the West even as the USSR went into severe decline and eventually collapsed, and I think that unfortunate analogy is a very relevant one.

Furthermore, much of our academic world has followed this same pattern of totally distorting the reality of China and its relationship with the U.S.

Some of the worst examples of these media falsehoods only came to my attention during the last decade.

For more than 35 years the American media has annually denounced the Chinese government for its supposed 1989 massacre of protesting students at Tiananmen Square, but there seems overwhelming evidence that incident never happened, and was just a Western propaganda-hoax, endlessly repeated by our media.

For example, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post personally covered those events at the time, and he later published a long article setting the record straight, but his account has always been ignored.

Articles published in the New York Times by its own Beijing bureau chief said much the same thing, but these also had no impact.

Numerous other sources, including secret American diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks have confirmed these facts, but our biased, lazy, or ignorant journalists have never paid any attention and for decades continued to promote the myth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Last year I published a long article summarizing all of this evidence.

Another egregious example was the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, an illegal attack that killed or wounded nearly two dozen Chinese.

Our government and media have always described this as a tragic accident, while denouncing and ridiculing China for claiming that the bombing was deliberate.

But once again, there is overwhelming evidence that the Chinese government was entirely correct and our own government was lying, with our dishonest media endorsing and amplifying those lies.

Indeed, a NATO officer was even quoted in a leading British newspaper as bragging that the guided bomb had struck exactly the intended room in the embassy. I discussed this in another section of that same article.

A few years after America's 2008 mortgage meltdown nearly brought down the world financial system, I published a long article contrasting China's growing success with America's recent record of failure. My piece emphasized that the Western media and much of the Western academic world often portrayed and contrasted the two countries in ways that were the exact opposite of the reality.

As a short sidebar to that long article, I compared the very different Western coverage of a pair of major public health scandals.

In China, dishonest businessmen had adulterated baby food and other products with a plastic compound called melamine, protecting themselves by paying bribes to government officials. As a result, hundreds of infants were hospitalized with kidney stone problems and six died, resulting in a huge wave of public outrage and a massive government investigation and severe crackdown.

Many of those involved received long prison sentences and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were executed. Western media outlets naturally had a field day describing how widespread Chinese corruption had resulted in dangerous food products.

Nearly 17 years later, I sometimes still find Americans mentioning China's food scandal and the dangers of Chinese imports.

However, around the same time, America was hit with the Vioxx scandal, in which Merck heavily marketed a lucrative pain relief medicine to the elderly as a replacement for simple aspirin.

But Vioxx sales were suddenly halted when a government study showed that the medication had apparently been responsible for tens of thousands of American deaths.

Internal documents soon revealed that Merck executives had known of those dangers for years but suppressed the evidence in order to reap billions of dollars of profit from their drug.

American media companies had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in Vioxx advertising, so they quickly dropped the story and almost no Americans still remember it today.

Although no one was ever punished, when I later examined the underlying mortality data, I discovered that the true Vioxx death toll may have actually reached into the hundreds of thousands.

Thus, the American media devoted huge attention to a Chinese health scandal resulting in six deaths while quickly flushing down the memory-hole an American health scandal whose body-count may have been as much as fifty thousand times larger.

Therefore, today probably many times more Americans are aware of the former than of the latter.

During the last few years, the media's anti-China propaganda has gone into complete overdrive, portraying that country as suffering under a horrible, oppressive dictatorship.

As an example, in January 2020, top officials of the outgoing Trump and the incoming Biden Administrations both declared that China was committing "genocide" against the Muslim Uighur population of Xinjiang province, and our media has regularly repeated and amplified those outrageous accusations.

Xinjiang province is freely open to both Western and Chinese tourists, with huge numbers flocking to that colorful region, and as I pointed out in a December article, none of those many visitors have ever noticed any such horrifying events.

Instead, many Westerners have who recently visited China or now live there have begun documenting their experiences in numerous YouTube videos, often very favorably comparing conditions in that country with those in America.

A common refrain of those YouTubers has often been,

"The Western media has been lying about China."

Question 2: The Han Chinese People

The Han Chinese are by far the largest ethnic group in China, comprising an estimated 92% of China's population. In your opinion, is race or ethnicity a factor in China's success?

Ron Unz

I do think that China's overwhelmingly Han Chinese majority population has been an important element in the country's national success in several different ways, but some of the key factors are not fully appreciated in the West.

First, because China's total population is over 90% Han, the country is far more ethnically homogenous and culturally unified than nearly any of today's Western countries.

Contrary to the West's dishonest anti-China propaganda, China's numerous ethnic national minorities are not harshly mistreated let alone the victims of cultural or physical "genocide."

But they are still only a very minor element in Chinese society, especially because they are mainly concentrated in outlying, often thinly populated provinces.

I think a reasonable analogy might have been the overwhelmingly white America of the 1950s but without blacks. Americans of that era certainly knew that various non-white minorities existed in their country, including Eskimos in Alaska, Hispanics in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, Asians in Hawaii, and some Hispanics and Asians in California.

But these were all very small groups, each amounting to only 1% or 2% of the total national population, so that most Americans never encountered them and considered their country's population as essentially white European.

Moreover, just as the overwhelmingly white America of the 1950s was divided into white regional groups, with New England whites different from Southern whites or Midwestern whites, the Han populations of the different Chinese provinces have traditionally spoken different regional dialects that actually amounted to different languages, while always using the same written form.

However, since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, younger Chinese have all learned the Mandarin dialect in the schools, an important step in strengthening national unity by ensuring that everyone could speak the same language.

Although Han Chinese think of themselves as a single people, to some extent they actually represent a fusion of different original groups who had existed prior to China's unification, with the example of the Roman Empire providing a reasonable analogy.

Around 2000 years ago, the Han Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire were roughly contemporaneous, but although Rome fell and its territories fragmented into numerous different states, the Chinese Empire survived and generally remained united during all the centuries that followed.

However, if Rome had never fallen, it's likely that all its different component peoples would have eventually come to regard themselves as "Romans," though with regional differences.

Thus, northern Romans might have generally been taller, with fairer skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, while the Romans of North African or the Levant would have been darker and shorter, with black hair and brown eyes. But all would have considered themselves Romans.

Similarly, northern Han tend to be taller than southern Han, and the different provinces - many of them as large as European countries - are often culturally different, traditionally spoke different dialects, and ate different foods, but they all regarded themselves as Han Chinese, though having differing regional characteristics.

But completely aside from China's Han ethnic unity, another very important reason for China's success has been its long and almost unbroken history as an organized, centralized state, which for thousands of years has been one of the most economically and technologically advanced parts of the world.

The resulting cultural and economic pressures have greatly shaped the Chinese people over those centuries, ultimately producing many of their current characteristics.

By contrast, much of today's Europe had never been a civilized part of the Roman Empire, and even those parts that were Roman later spent up to a thousand years living in the much more backward societies of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages prior to the Renaissance.

The impact of this long legacy of civilized life in China was always noted by Western scholars.

In my articles, I have pointed out that although most Westerners of the mid-twentieth century were very skeptical of future Chinese success, our leading public intellectuals of a century ago had held entirely different views, and would hardly have been surprised by China's rapid economic advance in recent decades:

Although these developments might have shocked Westerners of the mid-20th Century - when China was best known for its terrible poverty and Maoist revolutionary fanaticism - they would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world.

 

This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America's greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations.

 

Ross's views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China's probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.

The widespread devastation produced by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two, but except for such unforeseen events, their analysis of Chinese potential seems remarkably prescient.

 

For example, Stoddard approvingly quotes the late Victorian predictions of Professor Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries?

 

Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world's markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.[5]

Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures.

 

Racialism - the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories - was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.

 

With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia's own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.

 

On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China's exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people.

 

For example, Stoddard wrote:

Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress.

 

At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand's breadth of starvation.

 

Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.[6]

Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese.

 

Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading "The Struggle for Existence in China."[7]

 

During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people.

Thus, today's Han Chinese are the heirs to the shaping pressures of thousands of years of life in an organized, stable, but very economically challenging civilization.

Question 3: China's Competitive Economy

In your article, you say that China is a more competitive environment than the US which seems to indicate that China is more market-oriented than America. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Ron Unz

Given the severe distortions about China frequently found in the Western media, we were very pleased to recently add a Chinese columnist named Hua Bin, a retired business executive who had established his own Substack, and published numerous informative posts regarding his own country and its sometimes troubled relationship with America.

Hua had originally caught my attention when he'd left a favorable comment on our website:

...As a Chinese, I have already tuned out the dishonest western media when it comes to reporting on China (or any adversarial countries for that matter).

 

I used to read NYT, WSJ, FT, the Economist, etc almost on daily basis, especially their reports on China, for at least 2 decades.

 

But since 2017 or so, the bias in the reporting has become epidemic, even laughable. Now I receive most of my news from the so-called alternative media...

 

I myself certainly serve as a living proof of the vast changes that have happened in China - I was earning an income 6,000 times of my first job after college in 1993, when I retired 6 years ago.

 

And no, I wasn't a business owner either.

 

I'd love to share some insights from an authentic local Chinese perspective.

Given his business background, it was hardly surprising that many of his posts focused on economic matters, effectively debunking some of the misleading criticism of the Chinese economy.

For example, Hua noted that Western leaders often complain that many Chinese businesses are state-owned rather than private.

But he pointed out that this criticism seemed logically inconsistent.

America's reigning neoliberal dogma had always maintained that government-owned enterprises were inherently inefficient and uncompetitive, so denouncing China for having many such state-owned enterprises that were successfully outcompeting private Western corporations merely demonstrated the bankruptcy of that ideological framework.

Instead, he argued that the ultimate ownership structure of such companies mattered less than whether the marketplace in which they operated was sufficiently competitive, and in many sectors such heavy market competition was far more common in China than in America:

While there is a mix of different types of ownerships (including fully foreign-owned like Tesla) in China, major players in these industries in the US are entirely privately owned.

 

In all these fields, China is pulling ahead or improving faster than the US for a critical reason - the marketplaces are simply more competitive in China. Ownership simply has no effect on enterprise/industry competitiveness.

 

In the electric automative sector, the US has one big player Tesla while China has BYD, Cherry, Great Wall, Nio, Xpeng, Li, Huawei, Xiaomi, and dozens more as well as Tesla.

 

In mobile phones, the US has one single player Apple while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, Vivo, Oppo, and also Apple and Samsung.

 

In ecommerce, the US has Amazon (with eBay at a distant No 2 with a fraction of Amazon's market share) while China has Alibaba, JD, PDD, Douyin/TikTok Shopping and also Amazon and eBay (before they pulled out after losing the competition).

 

Same is true for almost all other critical industries.

 

The secret of economic success is NOT ownership but rather the presence of competition (i.e. market). Competition leads to intense pressure to innovate, improve quality, and reduce costs.

 

It leads to an expansion of capacity and scale as businesses try to compete and win. It leads to true meritocracy - i.e. may the best player win.

 

On the other hand, lack of competition leads to monopoly and stagnation as the players underinvest, pursue barriers against competition, and raise margins/prices.

 

You can do an industry by industry analysis for US businesses and find out the level of concentration (thus lack of competition) very easily.

 

I would argue China is a far more market-oriented economy than the US in most industries. This is the underlying reason for China's competitiveness and the so-called "overcapacity".

 

The US attempts to undermine China's competitiveness will get nowhere because the Chinese do not buy into its self-serving "neoliberal" economic policies.

Hua argued that the severe consequences of such lack of market competition in America were most obvious in the military sector.

Thus, despite our gargantuan military spending, we have been completely unable to match Russia's far smaller economy in producing the munitions being expended in the Ukraine war:

One interesting manifestation of the US problem with its monopolistic private sector is its inability to keep up weapons production to support the Ukraine war.

 

Its military industrial complex is plagued with undercapacity, high cost, and low efficiency despite having the world's largest military budget (by an enormous margin).

 

The consolidation of the vaulted military-industrial complex into 5 giants has led to a lack of competition and accountability in most parts of the defence acquisition system. It has led to undercapacity and extreme high costs (of course high margins).

 

Today while these private defence contractors boast the highest revenue and market cap globally, the US cannot even produce sufficient basic ammunitions such as 155′ artillery shells let alone missiles, warships, fighters and other sophisticated weapons at scale.

 

If the US cannot outcompete production against Russia, what is its chance against China, the world's largest industrial powerhouse?

 

China's "overcapacity" issue is indeed a nightmare for the US.

Question 4: War Between the U.S. and China

Who would prevail in a war between the United States and China?

Ron Unz

It obviously depends.

If China sent an expeditionary force to attack the West Coast of the U.S. or tried to occupy Canada or Mexico, our very short supply lines and our enormous numbers of land-based aircraft would doom the Chinese to a swift and certain defeat.

However, China has never been a militarily aggressive power and is extremely unlikely to launch such an attack.

Instead, any war fought between China and America would almost certainly occur under exactly the opposite conditions, taking place in the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, locations that are very close to China but thousands of miles distant from the United States.

For that reason the outcome is likely to be very different.

In fact, China's entire weapons procurement policy and military strategy has been based upon the goal of deterring or if necessary defeating American armed forces operating in its own close vicinity.

I personally hope that such a disastrous military conflict can be avoided.

But over the last decade, the mainstream American media has regularly emphasized the likelihood of a war with China in the near future. A recent example was a lengthy late October article in the New York Times carrying the headline "The U.S. Army Prepares for War with China."

Therefore, quite a number of Hua's detailed posts focused upon the military implications of China's technological development and the weapons systems that China was creating.

He considered the recent record of America's aggressive wars as very threatening to his country, and he reasonably regarded a war as likely to occur:

A war is coming, if you spend a minute listening to US politicians, generals and media who seem to want it with all their hearts.

 

For China, Russia, Iran or any other countries who want to remain sovereign, it is a choice between living on your knees or fighting with a stiff spine. The choice taken by the US vassal states in Europe, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere is neither desirable nor practical.

 

So, whether we want it or not, things are coming down to a life-or-death fight, most likely in less than a decade.

Given these serious concerns, he summarized some of China's major advances in military technology in very detailed and precise terms.

• China test launched its DF31AG ICBM successfully last month, making it the only country with a successful recent test performance in long-range (12,000 kilometer) nuclear attack capability. China also has DF41 in its arsenal, a Mach 25 18,000 km hypersonic ballistic missile that carries 6 times more nuclear warheads than DF31. These, together with submarine-launched JL-3, serve as a strong deterrent to US nuclear blackmail

   

• China 5th-gen stealth heavy fighter J20 has upgraded its engine with WS15. It now outperforms F22 (let alone the smaller F35) in speed, manoeuvrability, and longer beyond-visual-range air to air missile (PL17). Its stealth, avionics, radar, EW capability, speed, range, and firepower far exceeds F35, a medium-size jack-of-all-trades cheaper fighter which is now the main aerial combat platform for the US. China produces 100 J20s a year and the US has stopped producing F22 due to its high cost. There is also a two-seat version of J20 - the J20S - which has unmanned loyal wingman swarming capability. China has started production of its own medium-size stealth fighter J35 as a cheaper, high volume 5-th gen figher.

   

• China has fielded multiple hypersonic missile systems such as DF17, DF26, DF100, YJ21, while US has yet to field any, falling behind not just China and Russia but also Iran in this critical future military technology. Russia shocked the west with its hypersonic HGV missile Oreshnik in Ukraine just the other week. While the Oreshnik is still an experimental weapon, China's DF17 or DF26 are mature systems tested many times over the years and have been deployed in the Rocket Force for half a decade. According to the US DoD, China has conducted twice more hypersonic missile tests in the past decade than all other countries combined.

   

• On the naval front, US Navy openly acknowledges China's ship building capacity is 230 times of that of the US. The US Navy is now resorting to outsourcing navy ship building and maintenance to Korea and India, against US own laws.

   

• China can produce conventional precision-guided rockets at the same unit cost (USD4-5000) as US builds dumb artillery ammos like the 155mm shells. The US DoD head of procurement warned in 2023 that China's defence budget has a 3 or 4 to 1 advantage against the US in procurement value for money. Given its industrial base, China can not only produce more cheaply but in much larger volume as well. As we can see in Ukraine and the Middle East, quantity has a quality of its own when it comes to high intensity modern warfare. In a hot war, the cost exchange and quantity exchange will heavily favor China.

   

• China is the only country in the world that can mass produce CL-20, the most destructive non-nuclear explosives. Imagine CL-20 explosive warhead on DF17 in an attack on US aircraft carrier - a hit translates into 5000+ KIAs and $14 billion capital asset excluding aircrafts on board. The much-acclaimed "mother of all bombs" that the US dropped on the hapless Afghanis will fale next to that meteorite strike.

   

• China's PHL16 multiple launcher rocket system is a high mobility high precision attack platform similar to HIMARS but it has a range of 500 KMs vs 300 km for HIMARS with higher payloads and higher precision (guided by the Beidou satellite system, which is itself far superior to the outdated GPS system the US military relies on). Unlike the HIMARS system which is treated as a scare miracle weapon by the west, China has deployed the PHL16 system to more than 40 army battalions in 4 provinces close to Taiwan. PHL16 alone can conduct blanket precision strikes on any point in Taiwan on road-mobile TELs. The Chinese call such cheap saturation strike weapon as "all-you-can-eat buffet" in a Taiwan pre-landing bombing campaign.

A few days later Hua followed this up with a lengthy post entitled "Comparing War Readiness Between China and the US," and I found his overall analysis quite persuasive.

Once again, he began by emphasizing that a war seemed very likely:

It is hardly an exaggeration to say a military conflict is a high probability event between China and the US in the coming decade. There are flash points in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the East China Sea.

 

Rhetoric from the American officialdom and media clearly signals the US plans to militarily confront China and stop its economic, trade, and technological developments.

 

Its fleets of ships and airplanes are constantly circling Chinese shore. It is mobilizing its lackeys in the region to fight on its side.

 

Mutual hostility is at the point for war to break out.

 

This won't be a WWI type of sleepwalking into a war. Everyone knows a showdown is coming.

He then focused upon the industrial factors that would be likely to dominate such a conflict, and China's strong superiority in that regard:

• The Ukraine war and the Middle Eastern conflicts have shown that modern wars between peer belligerents will be long, bloody, expensive, and above all, highly dependent on war production and logistics.

   

• China has a 3 to 1 advantage versus the US in overall industrial capacity and an unquantifiable advantage in surge capacity. China's share of global manufacturing output is 35% vs. 12% for the US. China has idle or mothballed capacity for almost all major industrial products from steel to electronics to vehicles to ship building to drones.

   

• Such capacity advantage applies to the defense industry.

   

• Much of Chinese industrial capacity is state-owned and can be easily mobilized for defense production. All major defense firms are state owned and produce for purpose, rather than profit.

   

• China's cost, speed, and scale advantages in industrial production are not in dispute while the US suffers from well-documented cost and production schedule issues in its military industrial complex.

   

• It's safe to say China enjoys the same pole position in its capacity to sustain a long war as the US enjoyed in WWII. China has an overwhelming industrial superiority that the US has never experienced with any adversaries in its history.

He also emphasized that the conflict would occur close to China but very far from the United States:

• The war will be fought in China's shores or near abroad - possibly Japan and the Philippines. Much of the action will happen in a radius that can be covered by Chinese intermediate range missiles and land-based bombers and fighters.

   

• The nearest US territory will be Guam, 4,800 kilometers away. The US does have military bases in Japan, Korea and the Philippines. But these countries will take the risk of being bombarded by China if they allow these bases to be used against China. It's unclear how they will choose despite the hawkish rhetoric expressed in their pledge of allegiance to the US. One can talk tough now but act quite differently when facing certain destruction.

   

• In essence, the war will be one between a landed fortress and an expeditionary air and maritime force. For most of the history of war, ships lose to fortress.

He noted that all of America's many wars since World War II have been fought against technically inferior opponents against which our military possessed enormous superiority and could operate with near total impunity.

However:

• None of these US military assumptions apply in a war with China and will be a liability rather than asset. The muscle memory of the US military will be deadly to itself in the coming war.

   

• Chinese military doctrines have been honed for the last 70+ years around territorial defense and Taiwan reunification. The explicit mission of the PLA is to ensure the success of a war in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

   

• The specific war doctrine for these scenarios is called Anti Access Area Denial (A2AD). The essence is to deny enemy access to the theater of war and inflict unacceptable losses for any intervention...

   

• These assets bear no resemblance of anything the US military has fought against before.

   

• China also brings to the battle no presumptions about the enemy and their capabilities since the Chinese military has been peaceful for over 40 years. Despite the lack of experience, the upside is such a military will adapt to changing war environment more rapidly and adjust its strategies and tactics under the circumstances. There is no bad habits or assumptions to unlearn.

He also argued that China's national support for a war fought so close to its own homeland would be enormously greater than America's ideological commitment to its continued imperial adventure more than six thousand miles away in East Asia:

• One often overlooked aspect of war is the will to fight. It comes down to why the military is putting their lives on the line. In a peer to peer situation, the party that can endure the most pain for the longest will prevail.

   

• China is fighting for its territorial integrity and its national pride. It has the collective will of the population firmly behind it. The US is fighting to maintain its hegemonic rule in an imperialist adventure. The pain threshold of its society is much lower. Put it bluntly, China is much more casualty tolerant than the US will ever be in a war at China's door step.

   

• Cost of failure calculation differs completely. For the Chinese, losing a war is an existential threat. No government can hope to retain its legitimacy if it backs down from a war when the barbarians are at the gate. For the US, it's just a chess board move in the "great game". Losing a war in Taiwan or SCS is a setback but doesn't represent an existential problem.

   

• The late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew summarized the stakes well - "China will fight a second time, a third time until it wins when it comes to Taiwan and will never give up". Can the US say that about its commitment?

Finally, he pointed out that America's own military track record over the last three generations had hardly been impressive:

• The US has a very spotty track record in wars after WWII despite having a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world. It practically lost every war except the 1991 first gulf war against Iraq.

   

• Interestingly, China was the first country that broke the US string of military successes when China pushed the US back from the Yalu River to the 38^th Parallel and fought the US and its allies to a standstill in the Korean peninsular in the early 1950s...

   

• China did that when it had to send a poorly equipped peasant army after 4 years' bloody civil war. China's GDP in that time was less than 5% of the US, which was at the pinnacle of its military and economic power after WWII.

Therefore I found it very difficult to disagree with his ultimate conclusion:

When you consider the capacity for war, the geography, the will to fight, the military doctrines and the two countries' track record against each other, it is an easy bet who will prevail in the next war. 

Question 5: Comparing the Size of the Two Economies

Is GDP a reliable way of comparing the size of China's economy to America's?

Ron Unz

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) represents the total value of all the goods and services produced in a country, and is a useful means of comparing the size of two economies, but it must be treated carefully.

First, it's generally better to focus on GDPs that are adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). These are based upon local prices, rather than relying upon nominal exchange rates.

For example, if China and America each produced a ton of steel of similar quality, the contribution to their nominal GDPs might be very different, while under the PPP adjustment the impact would be similar.

The use of PPP is sometimes called using "world prices" or "real prices" with the resulting PPP-adjusted GDP called "Real GDP."

Another, somewhat less common approach is to focus on the "productive GDP," namely the portion of the GDP that excludes the service sector.

Obviously, many service industries are absolutely necessary in a modern economy, and are just as legitimate and real as manufacturing, agriculture, construction, or mining.

But unfortunately service sector economic statistics are also far more easily manipulated, especially those involving the non-tradeable service sector.

Here's an example of what I mean.

Suppose that John and Bill each set up a diversity-coaching business, with John hiring Bill as a diversity-coach for a salary of $1 million per year, and Bill reciprocating by hiring John as a diversity-coach for the same annual salary.

Except for possible tax payments, no net money has changed hands and no net wealth has been created. But the size of the service sector GDP will have been boosted by $2 million per year, falsely suggesting a large increase in national prosperity.

Or consider a less ridiculous example. Parents normally look after their own children.

But suppose families instead swapped their children with their neighbors and hired the latter for that purpose. This would produce a huge apparent increase in service sector GDP without anyone gaining any actual economic benefit.

In one of his posts, Hua also noted that a related sort of phantom economic activity called "imputations" are already included in the U.S. GDP, which is therefore inflated as a result:

1. Imputations: this refers to "economic output" that is NOT traded in the marketplace but assigned a value in GDP calculation.

 

One example is the imputed rental of owner-occupied housing, which estimate how much rent you would have to pay if your own house was rented to you.

 

This value is included in the reported GDP in the US. Another example is the treatment of employer-provided health insurance, which estimates how much health insurance you would pay yourself if it was not provided by employer.

 

Again, this imputation is included in GDP calculation in the US.

 

As of 2023, such imputations account for $4 trillion in US GDP (round 14% of total).

 

In China, imputation to GDP is ZERO because China doesn't recognize the concept of imputed/implied economic output in its statistics compilation.

 

Too bad your house is not assigned an arbitrary "productive value" once you buy it in China.

In addition, Hua pointed out that Western governments have sometimes even further inflated their GDPs by including criminal activity in their service economy:

A side note, I also ran across some less wholesome facts when doing research on the subject. I refer to a Financial Times report just for a laugh.

 

In 2014, UK started to include prostitution and illegal drugs in its GDP reporting to the tune of 10 billion pounds a year. This raised the reported UK GDP by 5% in an effort to help the government raise its debt ceiling.

 

To derive at this number, the statistics bureau had to make some assumptions:

"The ONS breakdown estimates that each of the UK's estimated 60,879 prostitutes took about 25 clients a week in 2009, at an average rate of £67.16.

 

It also estimates that the UK had 38,000 heroin users, while sales of the drug amounted to £754m with a street price of £37 a gram."

But the GDP is intended to provide a means of measuring national economic prosperity, so including crimes such as prostitution, drug-dealing, burglary, and armed robbery in the service sector economy defeats the entire purpose of that metric and distorts our understanding of a country's economic situation.

The benefit of focusing upon the productive GDP excluding services has been emphasized by some noted academics.

Jacques Sapir serves as director of studies at the EHESS, one of France's leading academic institutions, and in late 2022 he published a short article making the case that focusing on real productive GDP removes all these potential distortions.

Therefore, he suggested that this probably produces a much more realistic estimate of the comparative economic strengths of different countries, including China and the U.S.

He argued that during periods of sharp international conflict, the productive sectors of GDP - industry, mining, agriculture, and construction - probably constitute a far better measure of relative economic power, and Russia was much stronger in that category.

So although Russia's nominal GDP was merely half that of France, its real productive economy was more than twice as large, representing nearly a five-fold shift in relative economic power.

This helped explain why Russia so easily surmounted the Western sanctions that had been expected to cripple it. Similarly, as far back as 2019, China's real productive economy was already three times larger than that of America.

These economic trends favoring Russia and China have continued over the last couple of years, and Russia's real productive economy has now surpassed that of both Japan and Germany to become the fourth largest in the world.

Meanwhile, China's lead over the nations of the West has steadily grown during that same period.

I recently noted that although the New York Times has run numerous wordy articles describing China's alleged economic stagnation, an actual chart it displayed suggested something extremely different:

As I explained:

But automobiles are the world's largest industrial sector, with manufacturing and sales together totaling nearly $10 trillion per year, almost twice that of any other.

 

And the following month the Times published a chart showing the actual trajectory of China's auto exports compared with that of other countries, and the former had now reached a level roughly six times greater than that of the U.S.

 

Coal mining is also one of the world's largest industries, and China's production is more than five times greater than our own, while Chinese steel production is almost thirteen times larger.

 

The American agricultural sector is one of our main national strengths, but Chinese farmers grow three times as much wheat as we do.

 

According to Pentagon estimates, China's current ship-building capacity is a staggering 232 times greater than our own.

 

Obviously America still dominates some other important sectors of production, with our innovative fracking technology allowing us to produce several times as much oil and natural gas as does China.

 

But if we consult the aggregate economic statistics provided by the CIA World Factbook or other international organizations, we find that the total size of China's real productive economy - perhaps the most reliable measure of global economic power - is already more than three times larger than that of the U.S. and also growing much more rapidly.

 

Indeed, according to that important economic metric, China now easily outweighs the combined total of the entire American-led bloc - the United States, the rest of the Anglosphere, the European Union, and Japan - an astonishing achievement, and something very different from what most casual readers of the Times might assume.

Therefore, a few months ago I produced a table listing the size of the world's largest two dozen economies, including their nominal, real, and real productive figures.

All this data is drawn from the CIA World Factbook, which conveniently provides estimates of the 2023 real PPP-adjusted GDP for the countries of the world, as well as the most recent figures for the nominal GDPs, the economic sector composition, and the national populations.

Since some of these estimates come from slightly different years, I've rounded the values to emphasize that these statistics are merely approximations.

If we focus on the interesting metric of Per Capita Real Productive Income, we see that although the population of the Western bloc - the U.S., the EU, and Japan - is still comfortably ahead of China, the difference is much smaller than most Westerners might assume.

This may provide an indication that the actual standard of living for ordinary citizens in those different countries is not so very different, and may be rapidly converging.

Meanwhile, although the Western media often pairs China with India, the figure for that latter country is only about one-third as large.

Question 6: The Technological Edge

Does the US still have a technological edge over China?

Ron Unz

Over the last couple of years American leaders have pointed to our huge lead in revolutionary AI systems as proof of our technological supremacy.

This AI boom has produced a multi-trillion-dollar rise in the stock market value of companies involved in this sector, with AI chip-maker Nvidia of Silicon Valley becoming the world's most valuable company, reaching a capitalization that topped $3.6 trillion.

The Biden Administration sought to protect America's apparent lead through measures of doubtful international legality, violating our free trade agreements by banning the sale of cutting-edge AI chips to China while also strong-arming our allies into similarly preventing China from buying their top-tier chip-making equipment.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of investment capital flowed into AI startups such as OpenAI or the AI projects of leading tech corporations such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft.

An unprecedented building-boom for new data centers began, as well as a scramble for the necessary sources of energy to power them.

Although all of these AI projects were still losing money, often totaling many billions of dollars per year, they were considered proof that America would dominate the most important technologies of the future.

This continued under the incoming Trump Administration, with Trump holding a January 21st press conference with OpenAI and its top allies, boasting of their plans to invest a gargantuan $500 billion in a new AI project, grandiosely named Stargate.

But almost simultaneously with those bold words, that AI propaganda-bubble suddenly burst.

A small, totally unknown Chinese AI company called DeepSeek released a new AI system that was very comparable to the best of America's AI models, but built at tiny fraction of their cost. Once DeepSeek's effectiveness was confirmed, it became the #1 app downloaded on the Apple store, and also inspired days of front-page stories all across the world

Thus, even as Trump was bragging of his plans for a half-trillion-dollar investment in AI, a small Chinese firm had delivered an excellent AI system that only cost $5.6 million, a figure 99.999% lower, with that system created using only second-tier AI chips and far fewer of those.

Indeed, some people pointed out that the entire development cost of the DeepSeek AI was much less than the annual salary of many individual American AI experts.

The financial implications were obvious and within the next day or so a trillion dollars of the stock market value of AI-related American corporations evaporated.

Moreover, DeepSeek released its AI product as an open source system, allowing everyone in the world to examine and incorporate that code into their own AI projects.

Dozens of companies have already done this, severely challenging the entirely proprietary systems of America's reigning AI leaders.

A couple of your own articles from last week did an excellent job of describing this global technological earthquake:

• China's DeepSeek Bombshell Rocks Trump's $500B AI Boondoggle
  Mike Whitney The Unz Review January 22, 2025 2,700 Words

   

• China's DeepSeek AI Moves the Capital of Tech from Palo Alto to Hangzhou
  Mike Whitney The Unz Review January 24, 2025 1,200 Words

This sudden, striking new development certainly reinforced the conclusions that Hua had reached in a number of his posts that I had heavily cited and excerpted in my own long analysis of the China/America competition.

Just as Hua believed that China was outperforming America economically, he felt that trends also favored China in the technological competition between the two countries and discussed these issues in a December post.

He analyzed the findings of ASPI, an Australian-based thinktank generally quite hostile to China, which had recently published its 2024 Critical Technology Tracker, an annual comparative analysis covering 64 different technologies in 8 meta categories, with the latter including:

• Advanced Information and Communication Technologies

• Advanced Materials and Manufacturing

• AI Technologies

• Biotech, Gene Technologies and Vaccines

• Defence, Space, Robotics and Transportation

• Energy and Environment

• Quantum Technologies

• Sensing, Timing and Navigation

Because this ASPI report tracked these same data categories back to 2003, it allowed the trends to be shown over time, and over the last twenty years these had shifted dramatically in China's favor.

China currently leads in 57 of the 64 technologies in the 5 year period between 2019 and 2023. US leads in 7.

 

There has been a stunning shift of research leadership over the past two decades from the US to China.

• China led 52 of the 64 technologies in the 5 year period between 2018 and 2022 in the 2023 report; it took the lead in 5 more technologies one year later

• US led in 60 of the 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007

• China led in only 3 of the 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007

The leadership competition for these critical technologies is basically between China and the US.

 

Europe and rest of Asia (Korea, Japan, India, Singapore) play a secondary role.

 

In most fields, the lead China and US have over the rest of the world is massive.

The report also focused upon the potential monopolies in major technologies:

ASPI also attempts to measure the risk of countries holding a monopoly in research...

• China is the lead country in everyone one of the technologies classified as "high risk" - meaning China is the only country globally with a "monopoly" in high impact research of any technologies; US may have a lead in certain technologies but does not pose a monopoly risk

   

• 24 of the 64 technologies are at high risk of Chinese monopoly - meaning Chinese scientists and Chinese institutions are doing an overwhelming share (over 75%) of high impact research in these fields.

   

• Such high monopoly risk fields include many with defence applications such as radar, advanced aircraft engines, drones/swarming/collaborative robots and satellite positioning and navigation.

ASPI also identifies the institutions that are leading such research work in each country. Here is the result –

• The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is by far the world's largest and highest performing institution in high impact research with a global lead in 31 of 64 technologies
   

• Other strong Chinese research institutions include Peking University, Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic, Beihang, Northwestern Polytechnical University, National University of Defence Technology, Zhejiang University, etc.

   

• In the US, technology companies, including Google, IBM, Meta, and Microsoft has strong positions in AI, quantum and computing technologies. Other strong performers include NASA, MIT, GeorgiaTech, Carnegie Mellon, Standford University, etc.

His post closed by noting that these technological advantages had direct commercial and military consequences:

China now leads the world in many of the most important future technologies.

 

The success of its commercial companies in telecommunications (Huawei, Zongxin), EV (BYD, Geely, Great Wall, etc.), battery (CATL, BYD) and Photovoltaics (Tongwei Solar, JA, Aiko, etc.) are directly built on such R&D prowess.

 

Similarly, the Chinese military's modernization is built on the massive technological development of the country's scientific community and its industrial base.

 

With its lead in science and technology research, China is positioned to outcompete the US in both economic and military arenas in the coming years.

In my November article on the underlying factors behind China's rise, I had sharply criticized Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, the 2024 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, for their past claims that China had no hope of becoming a major technological innovator and would be permanently relegated to merely copying Western products.

Although I briefly noted a couple of the crucial technologies in which China now led the world, I had no idea that its lead had become so widespread across so many important categories, and I would have certainly cited this very comprehensive assessment if I'd had it available at the time.

Question 7: Is China a Communist Country?

People in the West typically disparage China as a "communist" country, but is that an accurate description?

In your article, you allude to the Confucian influence on Chinese society that emphasizes personal virtue and moral character aimed at ‘creating a harmonious society.'

Isn't Confucianism - which permeates the entire culture - more responsible for China's meteoric rise than communism?

Ron Unz

Today's China is still ruled by a political organization that calls itself a "Communist Party," with its government paying lip service to that ideology and its past historic figures such as Marx, Engels, and Mao.

But the actual reality of China's economic and social system has evolved in a very different direction, and today's China bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the classic Communist system of the Soviet Union or similar states.

Free enterprise of a very dynamic type is almost universal in China from top to bottom, ranging from the ubiquitous local village markets up to gigantic multi-billion-dollar private corporations listed on the different stock markets, including some of the world's largest real estate development conglomerates.

Although there is central government control of business activity, in some respects that control is less heavy-handed or intrusive than what is found in the United States or other Western countries that no one would ever call "Communist."

And aside from the U.S., China has the world's largest number of billionaires.

Obviously, a "Communist country" based upon widespread free enterprise and stock markets that contains huge numbers of billionaires is hardly a "Communist country" in the usual meaning of the term.

Thus, today's Chinese government fails to fit within the simple ideological framework of the old Cold War Era, and last year I happened to read an interesting book analyzing China's political system.

The author of The China Model was Daniel A. Bell, an American academic holding a Western-funded professorship at prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, and his subtitle "Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy" explained the issues he discussed.

His book had originally appeared in 2015 with the paperback edition published the following year.

Although back then our countries were still on relatively friendly terms, the DC political elites were already beginning to view the growing economic power of China as a looming threat on the horizon.

This was indicated by the author's preface to the 2016 paperback edition, in which he expressed his surprise that his very restrained discussion of the Chinese political system had attracted such an unexpected outpouring of attention, much of it hostile and filled with claims that he had whitewashed a dictatorial regime.

Despite such angry reactions, Bell's main points seemed quite innocuous and even rather obvious to me.

He argued that in recent decades, the Chinese political system, certainly including its ruling Communist Party, had gradually shifted back to that country's old Confucianist traditions, with a strong emphasis on meritocracy as the major factor in advancement, including the important role of education and examinations.

Although patronage networks certainly played a role, especially at the very top, officials generally rose only if they had performed well at lower levels of government, with performance usually judged by economic growth.

As a result, Bell argued that the top leaders in China were unusually competent compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the world, notably including those in democratically-run countries.

He summarized the post-Mao system in China as tending towards "Democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy at the top," a straightforward summary of his overall thesis.

China is certainly a one-party state ruled by the CCP - the Chinese Communist Party - but as a commenter recently suggested, a better description of those same initials might be "the Chinese Civilization Party" or even "the Chinese Confucianist Party."

In one of his earliest comments on our website, Hua Bin had suggested something very similar, emphasizing the role of the positive traits inculcated by the Confucianist thought that had traditionally played such a central role in Chinese culture:

... One critical thing to know about China is the importance the country and its population attach to the concept of meritocracy and virtue in personal behavior, economic life, and governance. This is the ideal to aspire as taught by Confucius since 500BCE.

 

Just like the Bible, Confucius thoughts is a guide to the Chinese nation for the last 2500 years.

 

Unlike the Bible, it is still a required part of the curriculum for every school child (except during the turbulent times of Cultural Revolution).

 

The revival of Confucius teaching is a big part of the country's success.

Another fairly accurate if perhaps more controversial way of describing China's current system of government is that it amounts to national socialism, but without the extremely negative connotations implied by that term in today's West.

This ideological approach has become much stronger since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

For example, as Hua explained:

• Xi announced a nation wide drive for Common Prosperity and poverty reduction initiative.

   

  3 million grassroot officials were dispatched to rural areas to live and work on site for "targeted poverty allevation" in the countryside from 1 to 3 years.

   

  1 trillion RMB ($150 billion) was invested. As a result, over 100 million people were brought out of extreme poverty.

   

• meanwhile, the government has enforced pay reduction in various bureaucracies and the financial service industry in particular.

   

  China is probably the only country in the world where bankers are being paid less today than 5 years ago. A side benefit is to reduce the attractiveness of financial industry compared with other productive sectors of the economy.

   

  After all, actual engineers are far more important for the society and economy than "financial" engineers.

Leading Western analysts have described President Xi's policies in very similar terms, though often with strongly negative implications.

For example, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd speaks fluent Mandarin and as a leading diplomat had followed China closely for decades, first encountering Xi more than 35 years ago, when both were very junior figures and privately meeting and speaking with him on numerous occasions since then.

A few years ago, he earned a Ph.D. at Oxford University with his doctoral dissertation being on the policies and world view of President Xi, and he recently published a very lengthy book entitled On Xi Jinping, incorporating much of that material.

In that work, Rudd argued that Xi has been moving China towards what the author calls "Marxist Nationalism," including,

"taking Chinese politics to the Leninist left, Chinese economics to the Marxist left, and Chinese foreign policy to the nationalist right."

Although this is probably somewhat exaggerated and the implications of such phrases are far too negative in the Western context, Rudd seems to be describing the same basic facts as those that Hua presents in a far more positive sense.

As I'd mentioned earlier, the tremendous and totally unexpected sudden success of China's DeepSeek AI system has hugely dominated the Western headlines over the last week or two, and some of the background to that technological triumph is quite intriguing.

For example, DeepSeek is actually a project of High-Flyer, a highly-successful Chinese hedge-fund that was founded in 2016 and manages some $8 billion of assets using AI systems.

But over the last several years, President Xi's Chinese government has exerted political pressure against companies focused on financial engineering, and this led CEO Liang Wenfeng to shift some of his effort away from the use of AI systems for trading towards the development of more advanced AI systems in general, with DeepSeek being the result.

As the New York Times explained:

High-Flyer had thrived by capitalizing on a market dominated by China's retail investors, who are known for jumping in and out of stocks impulsively.

 

In 2021, High-Flyer found itself pressured by regulatory crackdowns in China on speculative trading, which the authorities in Beijing felt was at odds with their attempts to keep markets calm.

 

So High-Flyer pursued a new opportunity that it said aligned better with Chinese government priorities: advanced A.I.

"We want to do things with greater value and things that go beyond the investment industry, but it has been misinterpreted as A.I. stock speculation," High-Flyer's chief executive, Lu Zhengzhe, told Chinese state media in 2023.

 

"We have set up a new team independent of investment, which is equivalent to a second start-up."

DeepSeek was born.

 

As with many other Chinese start-ups, DeepSeek came at an established market with a different business approach.

Thus, according to the Western media, DeepSeek's huge global success seems directly attributable to the recent government policies emphasized by President Xi.