China is eating the world
and the West lost its appetite
The thing that surprised me most about traveling to China back in 2019 was how quiet it was. I expected chaos, noise, pollution—all the stuff you associate with a developing country. Instead, I found electric bikes gliding silently through tree-lined streets. We lived there for five months until COVID hit.
About a week ago, I went back to visit Yunnan. Walking through the ancient towns another reality hit me: China doesn't need us anymore. These towns were packed with only Chinese tourists, I counted maybe ten Westerners the whole week. No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all. Just tea shops selling pu'er, silver ornaments, wooden objects, ceramics, dried mushrooms, and flower cakes. China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.
Ask a foreigner about China
It's wild how many people still think of China as the place that makes cheap crap. This perception is frozen somewhere in the 2000s. Japan went through the same arc. "Made in Japan" meant low quality in the 50s, then it meant the best electronics in the world by the 70s. But China's transformation happened even faster. In roughly a decade, they went from knockoff smartphones to homegrown EVs that compete head-to-head with Tesla.
The numbers are insane. By purchasing-power parity (PPP), China has been the world’s largest economy since the mid-2010s, responsible for roughly a fifth of global output. Chinese labs and firms now lead in the majority of frontier technologies. And in manufacturing, China’s output is larger than the US and EU combined. Yet somehow we still talk about China like it’s “emerging.” Crazy.
The great leapfrog
In rural Yunnan, I saw this ancient tractor with no hood—engine completely exposed—passing by a swarm of electric motorcycles. That image captures the development curve here: steep and fast.
Take banking. The US went from cash to checks to credit cards to using Venmo a lot. China went straight from cash to mobile payments. They had limited credit card infrastructure, so when Alipay and WeChat showed up, boom—an instant cashless society. Now about a billion Chinese pay with a scan.
Or look at energy. The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally.
Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h.
Retail? The US built 23 million square feet of retail space per capita—ten times more than Europe—most of it in strip malls and big boxes surrounded by parking lots. Then Americans slowly moved online, with Amazon taking 20 years to capture 10% of retail. China skipped the strip mall phase entirely. They went straight from street markets to super-apps that livestream shopping, where one influencer can sell $15 million worth of lipstick in five minutes.
Three Chinas, one lifetime
I imagine a Chinese family and there’s three completely different Chinas. One was about survival, the second aspiration, and the final one about prosperity.
The grandmother, 75 years old (born 1950): She represents Mao's China, a world of scarcity and ideology. She was eight during the Great Leap Forward, when famines killed 30 million people. Her village had no electricity until she was twenty. Her entire childhood was about collective farms, struggle sessions, and Red Guards. The state controlled everything—where you lived, what you ate, who you married.
The father, 45 years old (born 1980): He represents Deng's China, when the country opened up and looked outward for models. He was born two years after Deng Xiaoping said "to get rich is glorious" and launched the reform era. His childhood coincided with China becoming the world's factory floor. Germany's exports to China surged from 52 billion euros in 2009 to 123 billion euros in 2021. This guy's first job in 1998 might have been at one of these German factories. His generation witnessed China join the WTO in 2001, Beijing hosting the Olympics in 2008, and becoming the world's second-largest economy in 2010.
The teenager, 15 years old (born 2010): She represents Xi's China, technologically advanced and confident. Born the year China overtook Japan economically. Has never known a China that wasn't a superpower. She boards high-speed trains with facial recognition, uses apps the West doesn’t have, and has never written a check. Her China isn’t catching up to anyone.
That's three completely different universes of experience in one family, sitting around the same dinner table: from famine to facial recognition in 75 years.
The beginning of China’s dominion
China now leads in renewable—without the discourse. Solar panels? 80% Chinese-made. Wind turbines and EV batteries? 60% and 75% Chinese-made. Heat pumps? China is the main manufacturer and exporter. We’re going to solve climate change with a lot of Chinese technology—or we’re not going to solve it at all. (Who tells Greta Thunberg?)
The Global South is voting with its money. The Belt and Road now counts roughly 150 partner countries. Developing nations want material infrastructure, and China delivers: ports, railways, power plants.
Tech is splitting. There’s a Chinese internet (WeChat, Alipay, Douyin, Baidu) serving 1.4 billion people—and there’s everyone else. They don’t need Google.
Supply chains can’t function without China. Every single attempt to "decouple" fails. China doesn't just assemble your iPhone. They mine the rare earths, refine the materials, make the components, build the machines that build the machines.
Democracy stopped being inevitable. Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism with good PR. Deliver growth, maintain order, forget the voting. It's spreading.
The uncomfortable questions
The government we call authoritarian is delivering what Western democracies struggle to: stuff that actually works. Their infrastructure works. Extreme poverty collapsed. Life expectancy increased by 10 years. They can plan 20 years ahead while Western politicians can't plan past the next election.
This breaks our Western discourse. We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."
But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties. And for the billions of people who remember being hungry, who want their kids to have better lives, who care more about rising wages than free speech—it's getting harder to argue they're wrong.
This worries me. I greatly value Western ideals—freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights. These things matter.
The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.
postscript 📮
22 essays published, 8 to go!
Have you been to China?
What country, region or city offers an optimistic vision of the future?
China faces the same issue as any other authoritarian nation. It's only as good as it's leadership. A benign dictator may well be the most effective form of governance, yet so few dictators are in fact benign. On a long enough timeline, all dictatorships degrade into graft and systemic human rights abuse.
It's taken precisely one nationalistic 'president for life' to strip China of it's emerging civil liberties, turn the nation inward, enormously increase xenophobia and create a prison camp from an entire region (Xinjiang). Where is the freedom of movement, let alone economic success for rural Chinese who cannot freely travel within the country, and need state approval to apply for a passport?
Perhaps China seems so appealing because the United States is so evidently failing as a state. But if there is hope for the future, it should be in systems which decrease power distance, not those that deify glorious leaders.
Works until you get one guy who is not so economically savvy, but now you can't remove him, then you become Russia.