Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber (“The Real China Model,” September/October 2025) convincingly detail the impressive industrial capacity China has built over the past few decades. But their analysis focuses on the results of China’s successful development while overlooking the political economy that made it possible: an authoritarian state based on unequal citizenship for migrants and the systematic extraction of surplus value created by workers. The “process knowledge” that Wang and Kroeber show China has relied on to grow and innovate wasn’t free. It came at an enormous social cost.

The authors’ prescription for how the United States can compete with China—that Washington should think in the same ways Beijing has—rests on a dangerous fallacy. The United States cannot replicate the outcomes of China’s development model without adopting its political system. China’s success is inseparable from the coercive power of its party-state. Emulating its strategy would require suppressing consumption, extending massive subsidies to businesses, accepting wasteful investments, and allowing the state to dictate how capital is used. The authors’ proposed reforms, such as expediting permitting, ignore how procedural safeguards can be essential tools to hold the state accountable and protect individual rights.

An effective strategy to establish an industrial ecosystem that works for the United States should leverage its foundational strengths: an open society, market competition, and universal citizenship. Rather than selectively copying China, U.S. policymakers should build on the American innovation ethos, its deep capital markets, and the manufacturing capacity of its allies. This approach is more likely to succeed because it aligns with core U.S. values of freedom, private property, and democracy.

"Let's just double down and do more of the same thing that hasn't worked and ignore the proven recipe for success."

The US has ideologically shackled itself to neoliberalism. Even as some in the US correctly identify how China has beaten them, the system is too entrenched to change in the ways that would be necessary for the US to course-correct and undo its mistakes.

They remain incapable of breaking out of a psychological prison of their own making, and there are too many capitalist interests invested in maintaining the system, even as this system has now turned counter-productive and is undermining the very basis of the power of American capital.

Global south countries who genuinely want to experience a rise similar to China's should take note because this part is correct:

China’s success is inseparable from the coercive power of its party-state. Emulating its strategy would require suppressing consumption, extending massive subsidies to businesses, accepting wasteful investments, and allowing the state to dictate how capital is used.

A state-led economy is the only way to break out of the neo-colonial underdevelopment trap. The liberal model is a dead end.