Around 18 months ago, The Economist applied uncommon energy to advance the narrative that the US economy was in outstandingly good shape. Very recently, we have been instructed by the same influential British weekly that, “America’s economy is bigger and better than ever” [paywall]: Which makes one wonder, what primary anxieties are prompting these distinctive, recurrent expressions of avid admiration?
If the US economy was unquestionably doing exceptionally well in April last year, then this performance would speak for itself. Unfortunately, as The Economist [paywall]explained, Americans of all political stripes mistakenly agreed, at that time, that the “economy was broken.” As it happens, this bleak narrative obscured “a stunning success story”, which was then elucidated.
In fact, that alternative, good news story turned out to be rather controversial because of this claim:
“America remains the world’s richest, most productive and most innovative big economy. By an impressive number of measures, it is leaving its peers ever further in the dust.”
China is the next biggest economy after the US – and it is bigger based on a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) measure. The Economist story implied that America was beating China. Professor Graham Allison from Harvard University soon after, in The Barron’s Daily, sharply pointed out how:
“The inconvenient truth is that the Economist reaches this stunning conclusion by excluding the U.S.’s only true peer: China. Instead, it compares the U.S. with competitors in the G7: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K.”
Allison struck a raw nerve. Soon after, The Economist, responded crossly with a squad of fresh “Peak China” articles. Allison’s central critique remained sturdily valid, however.
Fast forward to October, this year and The Economist was back on the case with no less than seven persuading stories, including a 16 page special report, telling us that America’s economy is “the envy of the world”. [paywall]. This time the Allison-trap was evaded as it is “other rich countries” that the American economy “has left in the dust.” Although the writers did worry about America’s “toxic politics”, inequality and fossil fuel dependence, the overall tone was purposefully upbeat: The cover of this edition featured a roll of supremely confident, hundred-dollar bills rocketing into space.
This argued superb economic performance does look impressive, though it is fair to question how far it is propelled by massive American proxy-wars in Ukraine and the Middle East combined with an extraordinary growth in US public debt. That indebtedness presently stands at over 120% of GDP. Budget deficit financing was 6.3% of GDP in 2023. Total debt grew by over 14% between September 2022 and September 2024. The yearly cost of debt servicing now exceeds the colossal annual US military budget.
In any event, the Economist is arguably the most influential weekly journal in the world. It is a primary, articulate flag-bearer for the West-is-best narrative. And it feels it should recurrently remind the world that this is so and that the recognised leader of the Global West is doing outstandingly well. There is, it seems, a clear need to address the swelling number of serious, alternative narratives testing this exceptional Western worldview.
In fact, these systematic, high-level rejoinders arguably confirm the growing presence, today, of a Western, media-driven geopolitical counter reformation in response to America’s fading, full spectrum, global dominance. This waning has energised a formidable “reassertion of authority” of the sort cited by the Italian historian Massimo Firpo as one pivotal hallmark of the 16th century, European Counter Reformation marshalled in response to the earlier Protestant Reformation.
Western anxieties about ebbing global power and influence now pivot, above all, on deep concerns over how the rise of China poses an existential encounter unlike any seen before. China remains far more successful and independent than any previous challenge to Western global hegemony. And it just keeps working intelligently and very hard. And it just keeps growing. And, unlike your conventional rising superpower, it firmly avoids going to war.
Moreover, the rise of China is not just very good for China – it is also very good for the world. According to the IMF, 2024 World Economic Outlook, China’s economy first exceeded the size of the US economy, using a PPP measure, in 2016 and it has continued to pull ahead of the US in PPP terms ever since, such that its economy is now over 25% larger than the US economy applying this measure.
Taken together, this is all deeply alarming and disorienting. This surely must be happening because China is communist and authoritarian, the Global West regularly tells itself. Otherwise, what is really going on becomes an awkward question.
But, as the former Singaporean Foreign Minister, George Yeo recently confirmed, these anxieties also pivot on a fundamental, Western misunderstanding. China, viewed through highly educated Harvard, Oxbridge and other eyes, is firmly assumed to be bent on imposing its values globally, to the fullest extent possible. Just as the US and UK and others have done previously. Hence the visceral Western, zero-sum or win-lose fear. Hence the vital need to pushback and contain China and preserve US-led, Western hegemony.
Yeo recently explained, at the Cambridge Union, what is fundamentally wrong with this Western perspective. China, he declared, has developed a remarkable, high understanding polity on an exceptional scale – over a period of several thousand years – resulting in an “unusually homogeneous society”. Han Chinese comprise around 90% of the total population of 1.4 billion in the People’s Republic of China. Many different dialects are spoken but China has retained a single written language and the Chinese largely rely on a single spoken language (Mandarin) combined with a shared set of deeply embedded, essentially secular, civilisational values.
Yes, China wants to preserve and advance its own civilisation. But here is the key difference: it has no desire to impose its values on others in the manner typically seen during the European colonial era and embodied today in the intense American project to secure and maintain global hegemony.
Arnaud Bertrand drew these important conclusions from Yeo’s lucid Cambridge presentation.
“This is the best explanation I’ve ever listened to as to why the “Thucydides trap” doesn’t apply when it comes to China, and why China doesn’t have Western-like hegemonic aspirations. Yeo’s main argument is that it is foolish to apply a Western prism that is the legacy of the Greek Peloponnesian war to predict Chinese behaviour: you need to look at China’s own history and culture. And China has always shown that it wishes to remain a homogeneous society which means its very DNA prevents it from acting like the West by reshaping the world in its image, since that would necessarily imply that China transforms its own culture to be universally applicable. The world that China wants is a world where it and other countries are NOT forced to reshape themselves in the West’s image, not a world where China wants to reshape others.”
When this apt, substantial Chinese understanding is applied, it becomes plain why these intensifying, negative Western perceptions about China are severely misguided. However, these anxieties and insecurities are often wilfully embraced, because they mesh with the traditional West-is-best worldview. Ultimately, that zero-sum perspective is deeply grounded in the Global West’s extraordinary, millennium-spanning, warring states history. Foolish as they may be, we can, thus, expect these instinctive, historical trepidations to endure.
As it happens, another aspect the 16th century Counter Reformation stressed the principal importance of reflection and renewal (not just reasserting authority). Now there is a Western idea worth revisiting. By the Western world.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
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