After the Vibe Shift

A year ago came what, for lack of a better term, we dubbed the DeepSeek moment. That was followed fairly quickly by the curious migration of “TikTok refugees” to Xiaohongshu, and not long after that by the first conversations Jeremy Goldkorn and I had about what felt like a changing American — or even Western — mood toward China.

Today, freshly back from Switzerland after covering the World Economic Forum (where the chatter was, not surprisingly, fixated on Trump’s covetous pronouncements on Greenland and Mark Carney’s “rupture” speech), with Keir Starmer now in Beijing to continue talks about restoring some version of the UK–China “Golden Age,” it feels like a decent moment to look back and ask what, if anything, all of that amounted to.

Jeremy and I recorded a podcast episode in which we tried to describe something we were both sensing in the early months of 2025 but couldn’t quite pin down. It wasn’t a policy shift, or even a clear change in opinion. It was more atmospheric than that — a change in tone, in default assumptions, in the emotional register through which China was being discussed in Western discourse. We eventually settled, somewhat sheepishly, on calling it a “vibe shift.” (Less sheepishly, we reconvened in November to gloat about how we’d gotten that right!)

The phrase was imprecise and was intended to convey imprecision. But it did seem to capture something real. Multiple polls have since borne it out, and the feeling has only grown stronger. What’s become clearer to me, looking back, is how that shift relates to a larger argument I’ve been making for some time now — what I called the “Great Reckoning” in a piece I published in The Ideas Letter.

The two are not the same thing. The vibe shift is not the reckoning I’m looking for. But it may be making one more possible.

The change I’m describing is not a sudden outbreak of admiration for China, nor a reversal of long-standing concerns about human rights, political repression, or democracy (though admittedly I’ve seen some of that in some quarters). Those issues remain very much part of the picture. What’s changing is something more basic: the set of assumptions that have long structured how China is interpreted in Western public life.

For years, a relatively stable narrative did a lot of work. China’s successes were provisional; its failures were fundamental. Growth would eventually give way to crisis. Political liberalization was assumed to be inevitable, even if perpetually deferred. Moral condemnation often stood in for empirical assessment. China could be criticized without being fully understood, because history, it was assumed, would take care of the rest.

That narrative hasn’t exactly been replaced. One only has to look at how eagerly some commentators declared Party rule “brittle” following the purges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, or how quickly far-fetched rumors were embraced, to see that the old habits die hard.

But the narrative has lost much of its force, mainly because the U.S. — Gaza to Greenland — no longer commands the moral authority it once assumed. Increasingly, when I hear it, it sounds less like analysis and more like reassurance. I know I’m not alone in this.

You can see this erosion in small but telling ways: in the growing reluctance to predict imminent collapse; in the uneasy acknowledgment that China is capable of building complex systems at scale; in the fact that younger audiences, and people closer to technology, manufacturing, or logistics, are less willing to treat China as a purely derivative or temporary phenomenon.

None of this amounts to endorsement. But it does suggest a loosening of reflexes.

A year of small shocks

The past year offered no shortage of moments that helped crystallize this shift.

The emergence of DeepSeek was only one of them. The reaction it provoked wasn’t really about a single large language model. It was about the dawning realization that China was not merely following at the technological frontier, but participating in shaping it. That realization sat awkwardly with long-standing assumptions about where innovation could — and could not — come from.

Then there was the strange but revealing episode of Western “TikTok refugees” making their way onto Xiaohongshu. Tens of thousands of users encountered a Chinese social media environment directly, without mediation by think tanks, policy papers, or cable news. The result wasn’t mass admiration so much as something more disarming: familiarity. China appeared less opaque, less exotic, and therefore harder to keep at a safe analytical distance. (In a strange coda to that episode a year on — not something I’ve looked into too closely, but from what I’m hearing — people are once again abandoning TikTok for Chinese apps, TikTok being under new and apparently very censorship-happy American management).

Around the same time, a steady trickle of firsthand accounts — from executives, engineers, investors, and travelers — described a China that didn’t fit neatly into prevailing narratives. Infrastructure that worked. Manufacturing ecosystems that functioned smoothly. A sense of momentum that was hard to reconcile with predictions of stagnation or decay.

Some of this material was shallow. A fair amount of the so-called “China-pilled” content circulating online is overwrought, unserious, or plainly wrong. I don’t endorse it. But even that excess is revealing. It suggests that people are groping, sometimes awkwardly, for ways to make sense of realities that just don’t fit the narrative they’ve been sold.

One of the stranger — and more amusing — expressions of this moment was described in a recent Wired piece by Zeyi Yang, who is always worth reading. Yang wrote about the sudden popularity of memes in which Americans announce that they are in “a very Chinese time” of their lives: drinking hot water (which I do endorse), wearing slippers in the house, posting videos of themselves eating dim sum, sporting vaguely Chinese-coded streetwear, or joking about “Chinamaxxing.”

The joke, as Yang notes, is not really about China, and certainly not about Chinese people. It’s a projection — a way of gesturing at something Americans feel they’ve lost.

The meme works precisely because it’s unserious. No one is actually becoming Chinese. But the impulse behind it is telling. China, in this memified version, functions less as a real place than as a symbolic contrast: a stand-in for competence, momentum, coherence, or simply “things getting done,” set against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, normalized dysfunction, and institutional paralysis at home.

That selectivity is the point. The meme is disposable, ironic, and easily reversed. It allows people to flirt with an alternative without committing to understanding it. In that sense, it’s less a sign of admiration than of dissatisfaction — a sideways commentary on American malaise, filtered through a half-ironic orientalist lens.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. But I wouldn’t dismiss it either. Cultural detritus often reflects shifts in mood before more formal discourse catches up.

The reckoning beneath the surface

This is where the connection to the “Great Reckoning” comes in — and where it’s easy to sound more portentous than necessary.

The reckoning I have in mind isn’t really about China. It’s about us. More specifically, it’s about a long-standing Western habit of assuming that modern outcomes — wealth, tech sophistication, state capacity — are inseparable from Western political forms. When things don’t line up that way, the tendency has been to assume something must be temporary, distorted, or unsustainable.

China’s rise has been awkward for that story. Not because it offers the West some appealing alternative model — I don’t think it does — but because it keeps producing results that are hard to dismiss without contortions. Over time, this has encouraged a set of coping strategies: predictions of imminent collapse, confident talk of inevitable convergence, and a habit of substituting moral judgment for careful description.

For a while, that worked. Or at least it postponed the need for a harder conversation.

What seems to be changing now is that these habits are getting harder to sustain. Gordon Chang’s quarter-century run of coming-collapse predictions has slipped from wrong into parody and punchline. And while the old narratives still circulate, they don’t land quite the way they used to.

That’s what I mean by the vibe shift. Not that people have settled on a new story, but that the old one is starting to creak loudly enough to be noticed.

In that sense, the shift is preparatory. It doesn’t tell us what to think next. It just makes it harder to keep thinking the same way.

From vibes to something more concrete

This matters because policy tends to lag behind perception. Governments are slow to act on changes in mood, but slower still when the public isn’t ready to acknowledge what’s changed.

Seen this way, some recent developments feel less coincidental.

Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing — the first by a UK prime minister in eight years — was framed as an effort to reopen channels after a long freeze. There were no grand declarations, just an implicit recognition that not talking carries costs of its own.

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos struck a similar note. Rather than defending the old order or railing against its challengers, he talked about adjustment and limits, about operating in a world that no longer fits familiar hierarchies. He may have pronounced that “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” but the speech didn’t strike me as especially radical. It was, however, noticeably free of nostalgia: indeed, he declared that “nostalgia is not a strategy.”

In the U.S., the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and just-released National Defense Strategy point in roughly the same direction. The language is more restrained, more inward-looking. There’s a lot of nonsense in both, of course, but there is less talk of reshaping the world and more emphasis on resilience, deterrence, and allies pulling their weight.

None of this adds up to a dramatic shift in strategy. But taken together, it suggests that official thinking may be inching closer to what the vibe shift has already registered: the old assumptions aren’t doing the work they once did.

What’s still up in the air

There’s no guarantee this leads anywhere especially constructive. Cynicism may well still win out, or maybe this stops at shallow fascination, or simply coexists with unchanged habits of thought — particularly when the next crisis arrives and demands instant moral clarity. Watching liberal interventionist instincts stir again around Iran (even within me, I’ll own) has been a reminder of how quickly old reflexes return.

Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the moment entirely. For a long time, Western discourse about China was held together less by confidence than by avoidance — by stories that postponed uncomfortable questions about capability, performance, and comparison.

Those stories aren’t working as well anymore.

What replaces them is unclear. But the erosion itself matters. It creates room — not necessarily for admiration or emulation, but at least for clearer thinking. For asking whether moral assertion can indefinitely substitute for results. For wondering, without panic or nostalgia, what actually works and why.

Seeing China more clearly doesn’t require approving of its system. It does require letting go of stories that no longer line up with what’s plainly visible.

The vibe shift doesn’t suddenly mark the arrival of a post-American era — a phrase you’ll see tossed around in half a dozen columns every time someone wants to declare American decline or global multipolarity. What has shifted is that the old certainties aren’t sticking like they used to.

That isn’t a reckoning, but it may be what finally makes one unavoidable.