America is trying to beat China while China is simply trying to be China. America views everything as a competition and #1 as something you can eat for dinner. China, on the other hand, doesn't think about America nearly as much, viewing international relations as cooperation and focusing on its own people. You can see this in the speeches of their respective leadership, and from their officials, which I will excerpt in this article.

Background

America and China are very different place with very different development models. Because America is a colonizer, it must take in order to have. Hence you get Donald Trump saying, “We will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before. I did it with China, and I did it with others.” Because China is a civilization, however, it is secure in its own land. Hence Xi Jinping says, “We should create a future of win-win cooperation, with every country making its contribution to the best of its ability.” These are vastly different visions of the world, one of world war, and the other of people just existing in the world, doing the best they can.

The trade war Trump started in 2018 merely formalized a hostile attitude with presidential precedents. Biden continued Trump's trade war and now it just is what it is. Hence you got Biden's Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns saying, “We don't want to live in a world where the Chinese are the dominant country” and incoming Ambassador David Perdue saying, “To protect ourselves, Americans first have to realize the CCP actually is at war with us.” Different administrations, same thing.

China has responded to this. In an unusually direct statement, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said, “The U.S. needs to realize that China is NOT a mirror image of the hegemonic U.S. The U.S. should stop viewing China-U.S. relations with an outdated Cold War mentality. The U.S. must no longer seek to contain or go after China in the name of strategic competition. Whatever kind of war it is, a tariff war or a trade war, a cold war or a hot war, they should not be fought and cannot be won.” This is the vital insight, that “China is NOT a mirror image of the hegemonic U.S.”

As a colonizer turned imperializer, America needs coercion to secure slaves and resources. As a temporary entity that floats on the stock market, it must always keep growing (ie colonizing and imperializing) or sink. Colonialism is a planetary Ponzi scheme, and there is no reverse Ponzi. There must always be a new war and a new 'frontier' or else the whole thing collapses. Endless growth is only necessary for cancers, and Trump just comes out and says it. In his inaugural address he said, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”  

This is the American model development model, they never stopped being a colony. Knowing neither the enemy nor themselves, they project their own desires onto everyone else, mistaking a mirror for a window. America's greatest fear is that other countries might be like them (use nukes, manipulate elections, kill, steal). Every accusation is a confession. So America accuses China of pursuing hegemony because that's what America does, it has fuck all to do with China. It should go without saying, but China is not America. China is China.

Being China

As a civilization turned communist China has 1.4 billion people and productive capacity of its own. China had bigger, better ships than the Europeans but didn't use them simply because they didn't need to. They had their own shit. China's watchword then and now is harmony, within and without, not market-driven growth which crashes every generation. China's preoccupation is order within China, not ordering people around without. Describing their task today, communist party leader Xi Jinping said,

Of all the jobs in front of us, the most important is to ensure a happy life for our people. Every family hopes that their children can have a good education, their seniors can enjoy good elderly services, and their youngsters can have more and better opportunities. These simple wishes are our people's aspirations for a better life. We should work together to steadily improve social undertakings and governance, build a harmonious and inclusive atmosphere, and settle real issues, big or small, for our people. We must bring more smiles to our people and greater warmth to their hearts.

Xi is not saying growth, he's not saying expansion, and he's not talking about planting the Chinese flag anywhere else. He's talking about food on the table and smiles on the faces of people in China. China's greatest aspiration is to be China. They are not a colonial empire addicted to beating other people into submission. China is a civilization trying to stand on its own feet, and succeeding.

Western writers act like China is inscrutable and that they have to psychoanalyze Xi and read tea leaves to understand the country. This is just lazy. China publishes five to 100 year plans, work reports, and speeches. You can just read them. We're now decades into this and you can also check if they did what they said. These, for example, are its two centenary goals (via LU Ding), which are widely published and mentioned constantly,

China's two stated (and oft-restated) centenary goals were “building a moderately prosperous society to the benefit of well over one billion people [by 2020],” and are “to develop China into a prosperous, powerful, democratic, civilised and harmonious socialist modernised country by the mid-21st century.” Note the watchword is harmony, balanced prosperity among its people and harmonious relations with the world. They accomplished the first goal and are working on the second. China has very different goals than America because they're in a very different situation to America, and have a very different civilization (ie, they're actually civilized). China does not have to conquer to prosper, they just have to not be conquered, which is a very different attitude.

Xi Jinping described the broader civilizational ambit of China in 2018, saying,

It is precisely the belief in reform and openness that makes Chinese civilization the only one in human history to have stretched on for more than 5,000 years without interruption. This belief is expressed in many traditional Chinese sayings. For example, “As Heaven maintains vigor through movement, a man of virtue should never cease to pursue self-improvement; as the Earth is vast and receptive, a man of virtue should continually cultivate the virtue to bear all things.” A review of the past several thousand years shows that reform and openness have been the norm throughout China’s history. Such a profound historical and cultural heritage indicates that the Chinese nation will continue to embrace the future in the same way: through reform and opening up.

Xi is consciously connecting ancient Chinese culture to the modern communist party here. Mao, of course, made this possible by smashing what came before, but now the priority is stability. Because of Mao, his successor Deng had something to work with, and Xi is continuing that work today. Another phrase Xi constantly refers to is ‘reform and opening up,’ the process started under Deng. Uncle Deng described the process in 1978, saying,

The more Party members and other people there are who use their heads and think things through, the more our cause will benefit. To make revolution and build socialism we need large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas. Otherwise, we won’t be able to rid our country of poverty and backwardness or to catch up with — still less surpass — the advanced countries. We hope every Party committee and every Party branch will encourage and support people both inside and outside the Party to dare to think, explore new paths and put forward new ideas, and that they will urge the masses to emancipate their minds and use their heads.

Deng pithily called this ‘crossing the river by feeling for stones,’ ie experimenting with communism and innovating in order to reach communist goals. The result is what they call ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ a socialism that avoids the pitfalls of centralized Soviet bureaucracy without being thrown to the capitalist wolves. Westerners constantly say that China ‘isn't communist’ while making no attempt to understand anything outside of the western political framework.

I call the overall goal of the CPC harmony, and what they're trying to avoid is chaos, ie the peasant revolts and periods of warlordism (“the autumn of chasing the deer”) that have marked Chinese civilization forever. Harmony may be the desire, but chaos is what every Chinese administration fears. China has a regular history of peasant rebellions—Yellow Turbans, Red Turbans, Boxers, etc—usually superseded by decades of violent warlordism. As the peasant rebellion that finally succeeded and established a dictatorship of the proletariat, the CPC is consciously trying to avoid these schisms.

That's one reason they give such a deep shit about poverty and eliminating it. As Chen Yun said in 1978, “It has been almost 30 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, but there are still beggars, how can this be the case? … If this problem [of having enough to eat] is not solved, the peasants might rise in rebellion and be led to the cities by local party leaders demanding food.” Uncle Deng thus set out a timeline for avoiding a ‘socialism of poverty’ in 1989 and they did it, eliminating extreme poverty by 2020. As Deng said in the 80s,

Poverty is not socialism. We must support socialism, but we must move ahead in building a socialism which is truly superior to capitalism. We must first rid ourselves of the socialism of poverty (pinkun shehuizhuyi); although everyone now says we are creating socialism, it is only in the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately-developed countries, that we will be able to say with assurance that socialism is really superior to capitalism and that we are really building socialism.

China has now demonstrated the superiority of socialism ahead of schedule. Deng was saying China would be moderately developed by 2050 but it's 2025 and they already look sci-fi compared to the degenerate west. Capitalism, meanwhile, is just yelling ‘no fair!’ while bombing children in petulance.

Beating China

America today is the land of homeless encampments at home and bombing refugee camps abroad. Any vestige of civilization is burning in the sands of Gaza. America—as a colonial power that genocided its stolen land—has no civilization to speak of. They started with genocide and they end with genocide, every accusation of savagery was a confession. I say ‘not a civilization’ because colonialism was always a business, ships floated on the oceans and companies floated on the stock market. It is thus fitting that the last (inshallah) colonial empire is run by a businessman and a fraud, because that's what it was all along. America can only function as a hierarchy of extraction and waste, for them to be up, someone else must be down. This is how they approach relations with China because that's how they approach relations with everyone (as Canada and Denmark are finding out).

Every accusation they make against China is a confession, as I'll repeat over and over, because you need to remember this. Incoming ambassador David Perdue says, for example, “The PRC wants to become the global hegemon by 2049, its centenary, and displace the U.S.-led world order that has existed since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.” But you can read China's centenary goals yourself and this is not what they say. He's talking about America.

Describing that selfsame ‘world order’ Trump said, “This system is not fair to the United States and never was.” But you built the fucking thing! This is America's ‘rules-based order’ and they're crying ‘no fair’ like petulant princes outplayed at their own game. The only real rule of the rules-based order was that America ordered people around, everything else was just a ruse. This is why China establishing its own order in China and simply engaging with other countries in civilized ways is so threatening. They beat America at their own game, and America can never forgive them for it.

Trump, like Hitler, is at least an honest liar, a fitting death mask for empire. The Trump administration says the quiet parts out loud. His (ceremonial) Vice President JD Vance described the actual intent of the system saying, “the idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries made the simpler things.” So just colonialism rebranded, with typically exorbitant American marketing. China breaks this system, and for this they must be broken. It's not because China is evil but precisely because they're good that they must be punished.

China is therefore positioned in the western press (privatized propaganda) as both A) about to fail and B) about to surpass them. Does this make sense, no, but got to keep the dollars flowing as long as possible. What passes for an idea in America is that beating China will restore their power, which they have always viewed as a zero-sum game. America took the land and nearly zeroed the Native Americans, they took labor from Africa for generations as subhumans, then they took the leftovers of European empire after World War II and continued. This is the actual western development model, and they can't imagine anything new.

All of their accusations about China (genocide, surveillance, oppression, expansionism) are just projections, what if they did to us what we did to other people? The only thing they're proving is their own guilty conscience. China is literally minding its own business and happy to work with America, but America simply cannot comprehend such a thing. For them to rise, someone else must fall, but now with Russia and China, they've picked on someone their own size and bigger. Trump is trying to put the genie back in the bottle with tariffs somehow, but China has far more engineers now. As Trump said at the World Economic Forum (the incoherence is in the original transcript),

And — and actually, you could look worldwide, we — we’re — we were beating everybody from China to everybody else.  So — and we think we really — now, with what we have learned and all of the other things that have taken place, we think we can even far surpass that — a- — actually, far, far surpass it.  But we do — one thing we’re going to be demanding is we’re going to — be demanding respect from other nations. 

Respect is earned, not given, but here's Trump trying to just take it. America has no clothes and must resort to naked extraction from the periphery, but that gives the gig away. The Emperor has no clothes! As he continued,

My message to every business in the world is very simple: Come make your product in America, and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth.  We’re bringing them down very substantially, even from the original Trump tax cuts.  But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff — differing amounts, but a tariff — which will direct hundreds of billions of dollars and even trillions of dollars into our Treasury to strengthen our economy and pay down debt. 

This is a strange development strategy, asking other people to develop you, but that's colonialism. Trump is expressing the idiotic id of America, as always. As he said in his inaugural address,

We will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families.  Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.  (Applause.)
 
For this purpose, we are establishing the External Revenue Service to collect all tariffs, duties, and revenues.  It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our Treasury, coming from foreign sources. 

Thus you can see how petulance is turned into policy. America which hid the fact that it was an Empire for decades (the greatest trick the devil ever pulled) is now quite openly trying to tax other countries. You can see their ambitions just as they're being unrealized. This, of course, isn't how things work, tariffs are paid by the US importer, not at the other end. And foreign exporters were buying US treasuries anyways. And China has diversified its trade with the global south, and Russia did better under sanctions than before.

Countries do need trade barriers to nurture native industry, but Trump isn't doing industrial policy, just the tariffing part. This is like trying to clap with one hand. You end up just slapping yourself silly.

Comparison

When you compare communiqués from China and America, the difference is striking. China almost never talks about America, they're focused on developing themselves. Meanwhile America always talks about China and other people, they're focused on undeveloping them. For example, Chamath Palihapitiya—an embarrassment to Sri Lanka turned American cyber coolie—said, “We need infinite power, infinite compute and simpler legislation if America is going to catch up to China and beat them.” WTF does this even mean? It's an Avengers plot line turned into revenge fantasy. If you need infinity, then you've run out of ideas. Meanwhile Xi says, “Our goal is both ambitious and simple. Ultimately, it is about delivering a better life for the people.”

The fact is that American people can't eat beating China. Marie Antoinette at least offered the people cake, moronic America just asks them to eat hate. I'm not saying the American people will wake up. I don't know and don't care, I don't think Americans should exist at all. And, to repeat Biden's ambassador, they don't really want to. Burns said, “We don't want to live in a world where the Chinese are the dominant country,” and, God willing, they wanted.

The USSR was apocryphally overwhelmed by American supermarkets and the USA is being overwhelmed by Chinese abundance, which they can only censor so much. Millions of Americans have fled to Red Note to see normal Chinese lives, where they own houses and live and eat well, and have much higher technology. Meanwhile American cars cost as much as a house used to, and they have to live in them. They only have one big EV company which is effectively state-owned, though in ass-backwards American fashion, that company owns the state. Markets within socialism worked as well as Deng predicted, while feeding society to markets went predictably wrong.

We're at the point where the American Empire obviously has no clothes, but no one wants to say it lest they fuck up their 401k. But at some point, inshallah soon, someone will call the tune, and then there's the devil to pay. The Greatest Depression is coming and you can't say they didn't have it coming. America focused so much on beating up other people that they stopped being America. China, meanwhile, just focused on being China. We can't copy China's homework, but we can take lessons from them. Work on your own home. Don't mess with everybody else's.