China is like the thinking ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris: a vast entity that produces observations personalized for every observer. These visions may be a self-defense mechanism, allowing leftists to see socialism and investors to see capitalism. Or, as Lem’s ocean might be doing, China is vastly indifferent to foreign observers and generates visions to play with them.
Simple Picture
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving them to default triggered a collapse in homebuyer confidence. Big tech has too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs crushed sentiment. Official corruption needs reining in? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy paralyzed policymaking. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.
China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much. Beijing shows that it is utterly possible to fail when it succeeds — by bringing too much state capacity to bear on solutions like zero-Covid or a one-child policy. The state resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires they themselves ignited.
The Ceiling Keeps Getting Lower
China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower. To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.
People complain of being treated like chess pieces by Xi, who exhorts men to work for national greatness and women to bear children. Those with ambition and entrepreneurial energy go to Singapore. Those with money and means go to Japan. Those with none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — hang out in Thailand.
The essential bet of Xi Jinping is that there will always be a large stock of dynamism in the country, and the job of the party-state is to steer that energy in the right directions. That bet might work, but the push is also demonstrating the odium of never-ending restrictions on personal liberty. The party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in cultural products. China has superb entrepreneurs and artists who could bring the national glory Xi craves — only if they were allowed to do their creative work.
The party-state looks like the God of the Old Testament: a wrathful entity that demands harrowing displays of fealty to demonstrate commitment to a values-based faith. If Beijing were only brutal or only unpredictable, people would not be so on edge. But it is both. Compliance means not just material gifts but the realization of national greatness. Disobedience provokes storms. And nobody is sure how far the state will prosecute its values-based agenda.
Process Knowledge and the Ise Shrine
Process knowledge is hard to write down as instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but absent cooking experience, it is hard to make a great dish. Technological capabilities should be represented in the form of an experienced workforce, not manuals.
The example of the Ise Grand Shrine captures this: Japanese caretakers tear down and rebuild it anew every generation so that they do not lose its production knowledge. The pattern integrity is in the people, not the structure. The knowledge lives in the doing, not the documentation.
Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means they are capturing most of the knowledge that comes from the production process. China built half the world’s ships by gross tonnage in 2022, while the US had 0.2 percent of capacity — hundreds of ships per year versus three to five. Quantity has a quality all its own. The naming fallacy inverted: the US has the names (patents, IP, research papers) while China has the knowledge (process experience, workforce skills, production intuition).
The US is treating its deficiencies — inability to build things, no functional system for admitting high-skilled migrants — as mysteries to be endured rather than problems to be solved. Meanwhile, the internet companies in San Francisco and Beijing are highly skilled at business model innovation and network effects, not necessarily R&D and creation of new IP. Since no one has real, defensible IP, the only path to success is to brutally outwork the competition.
The Cultural Revolution as Girardian Nightmare
The Cultural Revolution is the greatest possible Girardian nightmare. Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist — people are not engaged in class struggle but reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. Mimetic contagion magnifies small fights by making people focus on each other, following their own logic until reaching conclusions that look extreme to the outside world.
If you were a sociopathic boss who wanted to create trouble, the guaranteed formula would be to tell two people to do the exact same thing. That creates mimetic conflict by design. Peter Thiel at PayPal tried to minimize this by allowing everyone to work on one thing only.
The Cultural Revolution was mimetic contagion at civilizational scale: neighbor turning on neighbor, student denouncing teacher, child reporting parent — all competing to demonstrate revolutionary purity, each escalation provoking the next. The scapegoating mechanism that Girard describes as the engine of sacrificial violence operated without any ritual container to limit it. The result was not revolution but auto-immune disorder — the social body attacking itself.
Melancholy and Genius
Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?
Melancholy, defined bluntly: deep thinking plus sadness. Melancholics are prominent precisely because they are too full of life — existence overflows itself. That explains their unappeasable sense of absence. Their strength is infinite because they have gained knowledge of the end, but they are unhappy, since having experienced the ephemeral nature of humans, they have lost their trust in existence.
They clashed with everything, which is why they were regarded as abnormal — others generally satisfied common expectations. What appears to outsiders as creativity is in fact internal rumination. True genius destroys itself — it is obliged to league with death. Society’s response: a desperate effort to transform this flame into ashes, to make sadness fit for polite society — to tame melancholia.
Kings are surrounded by people incredibly careful that the king should never be alone and able to think about himself, because they know that king though he is, he will be miserable if he does think about it. The optimization trap is the modern version of this taming — fill every moment with productivity so that the melancholic depth never has space to surface.
Dimwit / Midwit / Better Take
The dimwit take is “China is a totalitarian dystopia that will inevitably collapse.”
The midwit take is “China is a complex system with strengths and weaknesses — it’s not as bad as critics say or as good as boosters claim.”
The better take is that too many commentators are interested in the story of China’s collapse, and when the collapse does not come, they lose interest. It is a more important and more subtle skill to figure out how this country can succeed, because that is the exercise the Chinese leadership is engaged in. China is a place that both moves fast and breaks things and moves fast and breaks people. The governance capabilities have markedly improved — a trend apparent in daily life — while simultaneously the state has grown much more repressive. A focus on repression should not neglect the improvement; appreciation of the improvement must be tempered by the mania for control. The investment-led model has real consequences, but the reality resists simple narrative.
Main Payoff
The party-state really believes the rest of the world must love China because of its economic growth. The joke is on them: Americans and Europeans do not admire economic growth and have dreamed up a thousand reasons to avoid it for themselves. They care about cultural issues, which is why people have fond views of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — countries that combined economic growth with cultural creation. For all of Xi’s insistence to “tell China’s story well,” the Chinese regime seems congenitally incapable of allowing good stories about itself to be told, because of its obsession with total control. Nothing can be easier to destroy than trust. And each Chinese province has roughly the population of a large EU country — the differences between Sichuan and Guangdong are as vast as between European nations. The map is never the territory, but with China the gap between map and territory is large enough to swallow entire civilizations.
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