Welcome to the esteemed party of people randomly accused of being CCP assets and blocked by Noah Smith. Also, “Funnily enough, I’ve become more upbeat about a peaceful solution to the Taiwan question since I started learning more about China. ” Agree! I think there is a more than 50% chance
This article really is entirely typical of China's infuriating shill-executed propaganda campaign, complete with a disingenuous, "some thoughtless man called me a shill!" faux outrage. It's a unconvincing as China's propaganda attempts to claim that Chinese culture has no real concept of conquest, ignoring, of course, all of Chinese history. The narrow focus on the idea that the Chinese economy is booming, with no mention of the impoverishment of the average citizen— this alleged boom being the result of the same CCP that was founded by Mao and famously starved its own citizens, sending the product of conscripted farm work overseas leading to millions in mass famine death. "But that was the past!" you'll say, but then if anybody points out the fact that China uses slave labor today, you'll predictably say that the US used slave labor before, if you acknowledge China uses it at all (think uyghurs, and the "re-education" camps). And then I see comments such as, "you are welcome to visit China" while also claiming not to speak for the interests of the CCP. The most infuriating part though is the attempt to compare current activities and claim that China's oppressive surveillance campaign, that does not allow criticism of the CCP, does not allow pro-democratic gestures, that heavily censors content at home and coming in from abroad, is somehow just the same as US NSA programs, even though social media news media are completely state-run in China, and the CCP apparently feels the need to run a massive propaganda campaign through low-level laughable hacks like yourself. Of course, this isn't a conspiracy theory based just on groveling, it's well-documented in books like "Beijing’s Global Media Offensive" by Joshua Kurlantzick. If one cared about Chinese people, one would resist the CCP. China is an oppressive autocracy, and while the US is regressing under Trump, China is not a model of an alternative to aspire to, but exactly the kind of lousy one-party dictatorship we do not want to slip closer into being. The kind that use cheap computer-generated images to add a muscle-bound look to their petty and unworthy leaders. But the economy is doing good!
Bravo! Your "shift" is an intelligent and informed one, and it confirms that you have an open mind. Well done, keep on! Your categories of commentators are very apt.
Thank you François. It’s been a difficult transition. What feels like pragmatism and intellectual honesty on my end has been perceived as betrayal and grifting by others.
I appreciate your kind words and yes, in a rapidly changing world if you can’t keep an open mind you are not going to make it.
Always great to hear your perspective, Angelica. I followed you on Twitter for years and I always see you engaging in good faith to learn another person’s perspective, even when you disagreed with them.
As someone from the mainland who grew up in the US, it’s wild to see the changes. Like you, I remember when people from Taiwan called themselves Chinese, until they didn’t.
Recently, when 馆长came back from the mainland to Taiwan, I remember him saying: I believe both sides of the strait are compatriots. The most beautiful part of Taiwan is the people. In the mainland, the most beautiful part is also the people. Truly, the people are great.
If someone like him can have a positive view of the mainland then the winds really are shifting…
With the combination of the DPP’s failures, the jailing of 柯文哲, the US extortion of Taiwan, and the rise of the mainland, I am seeing more “pro-reconciliation” sentiment in Taiwan.
The vibe shift is real Viktor and we feel it on the ground.
The truth is, even though there’s so much talk about helping Taiwan, Americans care more about their Geopolitical goals of countering China than Taiwanese well-being. It’s up to the Taiwanese to see the wisdom in safeguarding our own self-interest.
It’s gonna be awkward for sure. But I’m sure there’s enough wisdom on both sides of the straits to find a way to peace that is agreeable to both sides and prevent war.
With a bit of wisdom Taiwan can be a fortunate island indeed…imagine partnering with the world’s biggest superpower and then switching over to…the worlds rising superpower in waiting?
Ideally, instead of a battleground Taiwan should be bridge: friendly with China but not China. Such a relationship could be beneficial to China itself also.
Definitely agree there’s a lot of opportunity for Taiwan to focus on negotiating some great outcomes for itself. Hopefully the leaders can deliver.
On your second point, I know you caveated it with “ideally”, I don’t think the US will perceive any Chinese speaker who is friendly with China as “not China”. Case in point: any Chinese person who is a US citizen will be called a paid CPC shill for saying “the US should seek friendly relations with China.” Even you get called a paid shill, which is just ridiculous. I still remember you as a 蔡英文 fangirl…
But yes, ideally, we should be judged by our actions and the outcomes and not these weird ideological purity tests we’re all somehow beholden to.
Yeah…well I am the eternal optimist and truly wishes the best not just for Taiwan and China, but also America. So many possible win-win solutions on the table but we (Taiwan) keep getting pushed down the road of being a pawn in a great power game…
And after reading the following, I think you will enjoy watching Taiwan become a more popular tourist destination than Hawaii.
“I still live in Taiwan and love Taiwan. There will still be Taiwan content on Taipology. It’s just that I might not be spending my one wild and precious life giving you the blow-by-blow to the upcoming legislative recall elections. I’ve got bigger first to fry. “
Now this is what my journey across the Cities of China is revealing. China is going for everything BECAUSE it has the muscle and means to. China is not a centralised country its a decentralised Country where each of the 707 City administrations across 34 Provinces has a mandate to deliver a god life to its people. This makes cities competitive against each other and Provinces want to outsmart their compatriots. This is what drives China's growth not Beijing. Beijing only has one JOB to set the agenda and the 34 deliver.
I consider myself to be an Abundance style liberal American and have deeply enjoyed your perspective. Americans have a tendency of never making serious attempts to understand the world outside of the American cultural bubble. Especially now we are fixated on our own internal upheavals. It feels like most are either ignorant of the situation in East Asia or just apathetic to it. Its incredibly difficult to remain US aligned while the current US government is ran by people who fundamentally do not understand the world beyond their borders, policy is based on 80s nostalgia, and Trump's emotional flip-flopping. Just look at the difficulties faced by Japan and South Korea on trade negotiations with the US. The US is currently incapable of helping our traditional friends, regional experts are being purged from the government, the pivot to Asia is being semi abandoned, but also used as an excuse to disengage with the European theater. US hedgemony is self imploding essentially because American were too bored and apathetic to maintain it. All China has to do is not shoot itself in the foot while the US keeps shooting itself in the foot.
Maybe there is something to be learned from the slow failure of past hedgemonies like the British empire. China has been able to adjust to the economic realities of the 21st century while Americans get lost in nostalgic stagnation in a way that feels reminiscent of British politics. I'm still coming to terms with the reality that my country essentially got tired of the challenges of geopolitics and instead of rising to meet new challenges people decided to stop playing the game.
Thanks Diane. As an American citizen myself (dual with Taiwan) I too have been horribly disappointed. The Abundance liberals are on the right path and are at least open to learning although I found the book itself kind of simplistic. There’s a great book club readout post on substack by a woman named Afra that gave Abundance feedback from the Chinese POV I think you will enjoy.
I've never heard Pettis engage in the collapsitarian nonsense that Zeihan and others do. It's absolutely true that countries using China's growth model are vulnerable in demand shocks. China could end up with one or two decades of slowdown, a perfectly reasonable prediction, and still own the 21st century.
I think the problem is not so much with pettis but the people who over interpret him. Same today when I saw someone cite “why nations fail” as evidence that China will collapse. Of course, the actual authors of why nations fail said no such thing.
Wang Ying Yao and Ang Yuen Yuen are helpful. China found itself with an extremely fortunate and unlikely combination of attributes including a comprehensive state apparatus, a lack of basic market mechanisms, a long suffering but determined tradition of Liu Shao Qi and a gigantic and unified population. This fortunate situation is unlikely to happen again but it allowed china to forge ahead into a modern structure that can and must be learned and replicated elsewhere. A fundamental innovation has overcome the paradigm of 20th century industrial conflict which believed that workers and state economic sector would resolve difficulties of market system. On the contrary china demonstrated that state economic coordination of production and finance capital was a key to advance. The irony that the state structure developed by Stalin yielded the largest fastest advance in history says something about the human journey, not sure what perhaps don’t assume
Yes! China is happenstance but as I believe it’s unacceptable for the rest of the world to be left behind, we must learn from that happenstance and make it work for our society.
If you look at India. So many attributes similar but anyone who tried to build an OEM factory there will tell you it isn’t the same as China.
The other BRICS are way behind china but progressing. The competitive pressure to emulate china is constantly increasing and underneath the rhetoric every body is learning as fast as they can, which is consistent with historic response to societies that are pulling ahead. Akamatsu has addressed some of this.
I think it is useful to consider the possibility that there is something special about the Chinese culture, not because where PRC is now and where it may head, but considering China’s long history as the undisputed cultural and economic center of East Asia.
I don’t profess to know what the special something is, but acknowledging that the Chinese culture is special in some way forces us to pause before assuming the PRC (or any other Chinese-majority country) will follow trajectories of other nations.
I absolutely agree that you should evolve your thinking and not write the same essay over and over again. However, please do keep covering Taiwanese politics for those of us wanting an outside perspective by someone with an inside understanding.
Happy to see you on Substack and be a subscriber. I think you'd agree with my observation that China's rise essentially requires that everyone, no matter how ill informed, come up with a justification in their head for "why" (like in your diagram), but all of these fall short. Like you, I too am always learning and have had a long arc of different views on this question. My preferred system would probably be some mix of Taiwan-style civic liberalism and internationalism with China-style industrial policy, though perhaps that is impossible. Regardless, I'd say "maturity" as someone interested in China is when you no longer neatly fit into a quadrant in your chart but see China (and West-aligned countries) as complicated places that defy easy explanation.
China is really peculiar in socialism/capitalism debates because it doesn't collect a lot of taxes but also just collects smaller and smaller share of its GDP as taxes in the last 5 years and it's not really some economic invetability and it's just a deeply unusual situation. There is demand to fund a lot of social stuff and it's only growing. You can unload a lot of stuff into private sector via some schemes (like a recent move with restructuring pensions), but you can only do it to a some degree.
"Tankies" (MLs) more or less decided that the only relevant bit from the 20th century socialism is a party state, everything else is secondary at best. You can have 100 years of NEP. You can rant about anti-imperialism and state ownership, but the absence of it doesn't matter that much. Our market conservatives are most proletarian when they are cutting social spending, selling state enterprises, or introducing means testing.
Tankies are really ridiculous aren’t they? They mew for more social services at home but their precious China actually is lower tax and “smaller government” than the United States!
Having said that, I’ve also realized that I have a lot of blind spots myself that I can learn from them. Most ppl aren’t stupid, just have a different perspective.
It's a pathological situation bc people just don't have real policy preferences about anything.
My favorite bit, bc I do a lot of demography, is how people declare South Korea a hell due to low tfr, while one of the lowest tfr in the world in China is irrelevant and it's not really important.
Welcome to the esteemed party of people randomly accused of being CCP assets and blocked by Noah Smith. Also, “Funnily enough, I’ve become more upbeat about a peaceful solution to the Taiwan question since I started learning more about China. ” Agree! I think there is a more than 50% chance
Haha! Many such cases
This article really is entirely typical of China's infuriating shill-executed propaganda campaign, complete with a disingenuous, "some thoughtless man called me a shill!" faux outrage. It's a unconvincing as China's propaganda attempts to claim that Chinese culture has no real concept of conquest, ignoring, of course, all of Chinese history. The narrow focus on the idea that the Chinese economy is booming, with no mention of the impoverishment of the average citizen— this alleged boom being the result of the same CCP that was founded by Mao and famously starved its own citizens, sending the product of conscripted farm work overseas leading to millions in mass famine death. "But that was the past!" you'll say, but then if anybody points out the fact that China uses slave labor today, you'll predictably say that the US used slave labor before, if you acknowledge China uses it at all (think uyghurs, and the "re-education" camps). And then I see comments such as, "you are welcome to visit China" while also claiming not to speak for the interests of the CCP. The most infuriating part though is the attempt to compare current activities and claim that China's oppressive surveillance campaign, that does not allow criticism of the CCP, does not allow pro-democratic gestures, that heavily censors content at home and coming in from abroad, is somehow just the same as US NSA programs, even though social media news media are completely state-run in China, and the CCP apparently feels the need to run a massive propaganda campaign through low-level laughable hacks like yourself. Of course, this isn't a conspiracy theory based just on groveling, it's well-documented in books like "Beijing’s Global Media Offensive" by Joshua Kurlantzick. If one cared about Chinese people, one would resist the CCP. China is an oppressive autocracy, and while the US is regressing under Trump, China is not a model of an alternative to aspire to, but exactly the kind of lousy one-party dictatorship we do not want to slip closer into being. The kind that use cheap computer-generated images to add a muscle-bound look to their petty and unworthy leaders. But the economy is doing good!
"Welcome to the esteemed party of people randomly accused of being CCP assets and blocked by Noah Smith."
That's funny... :-)
Bravo! Your "shift" is an intelligent and informed one, and it confirms that you have an open mind. Well done, keep on! Your categories of commentators are very apt.
Thank you François. It’s been a difficult transition. What feels like pragmatism and intellectual honesty on my end has been perceived as betrayal and grifting by others.
I appreciate your kind words and yes, in a rapidly changing world if you can’t keep an open mind you are not going to make it.
Angelica, this statement from Wang Yi makes me optimistic.
Wang Yi made these six points in an address to the UN in 2022. These six points define China’s character.
Wang Yi is Director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission
1. Choose peace instead of war
2. Choose development instead of poverty
3. Choose openness instead of closeness
4. Choose cooperation instead of confrontation
5. Choose unity instead of division
6. Choose equality instead of bullying
Always great to hear your perspective, Angelica. I followed you on Twitter for years and I always see you engaging in good faith to learn another person’s perspective, even when you disagreed with them.
As someone from the mainland who grew up in the US, it’s wild to see the changes. Like you, I remember when people from Taiwan called themselves Chinese, until they didn’t.
Recently, when 馆长came back from the mainland to Taiwan, I remember him saying: I believe both sides of the strait are compatriots. The most beautiful part of Taiwan is the people. In the mainland, the most beautiful part is also the people. Truly, the people are great.
If someone like him can have a positive view of the mainland then the winds really are shifting…
With the combination of the DPP’s failures, the jailing of 柯文哲, the US extortion of Taiwan, and the rise of the mainland, I am seeing more “pro-reconciliation” sentiment in Taiwan.
The vibe shift is real Viktor and we feel it on the ground.
The truth is, even though there’s so much talk about helping Taiwan, Americans care more about their Geopolitical goals of countering China than Taiwanese well-being. It’s up to the Taiwanese to see the wisdom in safeguarding our own self-interest.
It’s gonna be awkward for sure. But I’m sure there’s enough wisdom on both sides of the straits to find a way to peace that is agreeable to both sides and prevent war.
The US used to legitimately offer a better deal for Taiwan but at this point all I hear from the US is “give us TSMC and buy more weapons”
At this point, I also feel like some type of peaceful resolution across the strait is the most likely.
With a bit of wisdom Taiwan can be a fortunate island indeed…imagine partnering with the world’s biggest superpower and then switching over to…the worlds rising superpower in waiting?
Ideally, instead of a battleground Taiwan should be bridge: friendly with China but not China. Such a relationship could be beneficial to China itself also.
Definitely agree there’s a lot of opportunity for Taiwan to focus on negotiating some great outcomes for itself. Hopefully the leaders can deliver.
On your second point, I know you caveated it with “ideally”, I don’t think the US will perceive any Chinese speaker who is friendly with China as “not China”. Case in point: any Chinese person who is a US citizen will be called a paid CPC shill for saying “the US should seek friendly relations with China.” Even you get called a paid shill, which is just ridiculous. I still remember you as a 蔡英文 fangirl…
But yes, ideally, we should be judged by our actions and the outcomes and not these weird ideological purity tests we’re all somehow beholden to.
Yeah…well I am the eternal optimist and truly wishes the best not just for Taiwan and China, but also America. So many possible win-win solutions on the table but we (Taiwan) keep getting pushed down the road of being a pawn in a great power game…
You truly are and you truly do. It’s really easy to get cynical these days, but you approach everyone in good faith every single day.
It reminds me to be a kinder, more open-minded person.
You are an inspiration.
Good Lord, there are some petty people out there! Just keep doing what you're doing, and calling it like you see it.
Thank! And will do!
China IS a true economic wonder, if we look past the:
- CPI slipping into negative territory, hovering around 0%
- Youth unemployment at 14.5% as of June 2025
- An estimated 65 million empty homes in ghost‑city developments
- Local government debt exceeding 60% of GDP by end‑2023, much of it hidden off‑balance‑sheet.
- Private fixed‑asset investment growth of only 3.0% in 2023
- Household consumption accounting for just 56.6% of GDP in 2024
- Capital‑account outflows of 1.33 trillion yuan in 2024
- Electric‑vehicle makers posting collective losses of 18.3 billion yuan from 2021–2023
Why do Chinese statistics always seem to diverge *so* sharply from the IMF, the OECD, and everyone else with a calculator?
Yep! The economy is definitely not doing well right now!
Man that Tooze interview with Kaiser really shook something loose in the commentariat. Feels like a sea change across the China watching community.
It felt like permission to notice things with our own eyeballs.
Yea I agree. Weird how a fairly banal, fact-based observation can be so paradigm shifting but hey that’s ideology I guess.
I really enjoy your writing.
And after reading the following, I think you will enjoy watching Taiwan become a more popular tourist destination than Hawaii.
“I still live in Taiwan and love Taiwan. There will still be Taiwan content on Taipology. It’s just that I might not be spending my one wild and precious life giving you the blow-by-blow to the upcoming legislative recall elections. I’ve got bigger first to fry. “
Now this is what my journey across the Cities of China is revealing. China is going for everything BECAUSE it has the muscle and means to. China is not a centralised country its a decentralised Country where each of the 707 City administrations across 34 Provinces has a mandate to deliver a god life to its people. This makes cities competitive against each other and Provinces want to outsmart their compatriots. This is what drives China's growth not Beijing. Beijing only has one JOB to set the agenda and the 34 deliver.
I consider myself to be an Abundance style liberal American and have deeply enjoyed your perspective. Americans have a tendency of never making serious attempts to understand the world outside of the American cultural bubble. Especially now we are fixated on our own internal upheavals. It feels like most are either ignorant of the situation in East Asia or just apathetic to it. Its incredibly difficult to remain US aligned while the current US government is ran by people who fundamentally do not understand the world beyond their borders, policy is based on 80s nostalgia, and Trump's emotional flip-flopping. Just look at the difficulties faced by Japan and South Korea on trade negotiations with the US. The US is currently incapable of helping our traditional friends, regional experts are being purged from the government, the pivot to Asia is being semi abandoned, but also used as an excuse to disengage with the European theater. US hedgemony is self imploding essentially because American were too bored and apathetic to maintain it. All China has to do is not shoot itself in the foot while the US keeps shooting itself in the foot.
Maybe there is something to be learned from the slow failure of past hedgemonies like the British empire. China has been able to adjust to the economic realities of the 21st century while Americans get lost in nostalgic stagnation in a way that feels reminiscent of British politics. I'm still coming to terms with the reality that my country essentially got tired of the challenges of geopolitics and instead of rising to meet new challenges people decided to stop playing the game.
Thanks Diane. As an American citizen myself (dual with Taiwan) I too have been horribly disappointed. The Abundance liberals are on the right path and are at least open to learning although I found the book itself kind of simplistic. There’s a great book club readout post on substack by a woman named Afra that gave Abundance feedback from the Chinese POV I think you will enjoy.
I've never heard Pettis engage in the collapsitarian nonsense that Zeihan and others do. It's absolutely true that countries using China's growth model are vulnerable in demand shocks. China could end up with one or two decades of slowdown, a perfectly reasonable prediction, and still own the 21st century.
Yes. Making predictions as to inevitable slowdowns (and subsequent renewals) and China still owning the 21st century is a reasonably solid bet.
I think the problem is not so much with pettis but the people who over interpret him. Same today when I saw someone cite “why nations fail” as evidence that China will collapse. Of course, the actual authors of why nations fail said no such thing.
Right. Pettis is just one more rhetorician, and it radiates out from there into the folks spouting nonsense.
Wang Ying Yao and Ang Yuen Yuen are helpful. China found itself with an extremely fortunate and unlikely combination of attributes including a comprehensive state apparatus, a lack of basic market mechanisms, a long suffering but determined tradition of Liu Shao Qi and a gigantic and unified population. This fortunate situation is unlikely to happen again but it allowed china to forge ahead into a modern structure that can and must be learned and replicated elsewhere. A fundamental innovation has overcome the paradigm of 20th century industrial conflict which believed that workers and state economic sector would resolve difficulties of market system. On the contrary china demonstrated that state economic coordination of production and finance capital was a key to advance. The irony that the state structure developed by Stalin yielded the largest fastest advance in history says something about the human journey, not sure what perhaps don’t assume
Yes! China is happenstance but as I believe it’s unacceptable for the rest of the world to be left behind, we must learn from that happenstance and make it work for our society.
If you look at India. So many attributes similar but anyone who tried to build an OEM factory there will tell you it isn’t the same as China.
The other BRICS are way behind china but progressing. The competitive pressure to emulate china is constantly increasing and underneath the rhetoric every body is learning as fast as they can, which is consistent with historic response to societies that are pulling ahead. Akamatsu has addressed some of this.
I think it is useful to consider the possibility that there is something special about the Chinese culture, not because where PRC is now and where it may head, but considering China’s long history as the undisputed cultural and economic center of East Asia.
I don’t profess to know what the special something is, but acknowledging that the Chinese culture is special in some way forces us to pause before assuming the PRC (or any other Chinese-majority country) will follow trajectories of other nations.
I absolutely agree that you should evolve your thinking and not write the same essay over and over again. However, please do keep covering Taiwanese politics for those of us wanting an outside perspective by someone with an inside understanding.
Happy to see you on Substack and be a subscriber. I think you'd agree with my observation that China's rise essentially requires that everyone, no matter how ill informed, come up with a justification in their head for "why" (like in your diagram), but all of these fall short. Like you, I too am always learning and have had a long arc of different views on this question. My preferred system would probably be some mix of Taiwan-style civic liberalism and internationalism with China-style industrial policy, though perhaps that is impossible. Regardless, I'd say "maturity" as someone interested in China is when you no longer neatly fit into a quadrant in your chart but see China (and West-aligned countries) as complicated places that defy easy explanation.
China is really peculiar in socialism/capitalism debates because it doesn't collect a lot of taxes but also just collects smaller and smaller share of its GDP as taxes in the last 5 years and it's not really some economic invetability and it's just a deeply unusual situation. There is demand to fund a lot of social stuff and it's only growing. You can unload a lot of stuff into private sector via some schemes (like a recent move with restructuring pensions), but you can only do it to a some degree.
"Tankies" (MLs) more or less decided that the only relevant bit from the 20th century socialism is a party state, everything else is secondary at best. You can have 100 years of NEP. You can rant about anti-imperialism and state ownership, but the absence of it doesn't matter that much. Our market conservatives are most proletarian when they are cutting social spending, selling state enterprises, or introducing means testing.
Tankies are really ridiculous aren’t they? They mew for more social services at home but their precious China actually is lower tax and “smaller government” than the United States!
Having said that, I’ve also realized that I have a lot of blind spots myself that I can learn from them. Most ppl aren’t stupid, just have a different perspective.
It's a pathological situation bc people just don't have real policy preferences about anything.
My favorite bit, bc I do a lot of demography, is how people declare South Korea a hell due to low tfr, while one of the lowest tfr in the world in China is irrelevant and it's not really important.
Lol!
This is on point and hilarious! Great piece! Loved the Peter Zeihan swipe... :-) (American living in Wuhan for about 15 years.)