On Kyle Chan's NYT Op-Ed

Kyle Chan, whose work I greatly admire, has written a powerful and provocative op-ed that was published today in the New York Times. Titled "In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant,” (though this title, in my experience, was probably not chosen by him, and possibly not even approved by the author), the piece is, as Chan described it on Twitter, a real wake-up call.

It’s perhaps the most cogent and forcefully argued piece I’ve read in some time on the shifting tectonics of global power and the deeply self-inflicted wounds America seems intent on aggravating. It should be required reading in Washington, on Wall Street, and in every university president’s office. With clarity and urgency, he lays out the case that the United States is not merely losing ground to China, but is actively undermining the very foundations that once secured its global preeminence. The piece doesn’t pull punches, but it isn’t alarmist in the irresponsible sense. It is alarmed, though, in the way any serious observer of international affairs ought to be when confronted with the current trajectory of the U.S..

I agree with much of what Chan writes. His assessment of the Trump administration’s economic and science policy — particularly its hostility to immigration, its indifference to research, and its crude overreliance on tariffs — is spot-on, and is exactly what many sensible voices have been arguing in the months since he took office. The dismantling of public institutions, the alienation of international talent, and the retreat from global cooperation are not only short-sighted; they’re strategic suicide in a world where technological capability and integration into global talent and supply chains go hand in hand.

Chan is also right to highlight the growing coherence and interconnectivity of China’s industrial strategy, a theme that his amazing must-read newsletter, High Capacity, has done much to explain and illustrate. Where many still imagine China as a low-cost manufacturing platform churning out cheap toys and textiles — Trump’s dolls quip was aptly cited — Chan sees what’s actually there: a highly coordinated techno-industrial machine, increasingly capable of impressive endogenous innovation, and shrewdly leveraging state capacity to leapfrog into commanding positions across electric vehicles, green energy, biotech, AI, and more. The metaphor of a “virtuous cycle” is especially apt — progress in one area of high-tech industry accelerates progress in others, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve often described China’s strengths in terms of “structural advantages” rooted in scale, infrastructure, state coordination, and a sometimes underappreciated but very real technocratic competence. Chan gives a granular picture of what that looks like in practice, citing data points from DeepSeek to BYD, from robotics to chip self-sufficiency. These are facts, not fantasies. Ignoring them — worse, sneering at them — is a luxury America can no longer afford.

Where I think I part ways, slightly, is more a matter of framing than of substance. Chan opens with the provocative suggestion that historians may look back at the early months of Trump’s second term as the moment the “Chinese century” began in earnest. That may well be true. But I’m instinctively wary of framing the unfolding geopolitical reality in such binary, epoch-defining terms. Not that I’m not tempted. He may well be right, and gun to my head, I would probably bet that 50 years from now people will still see the spring of 2025 as the moment where the balance shifted. But I generally refrain, if only because it risks obscuring the far more complex, overlapping, and interdependent nature of global power today.

I don’t dispute that China is poised to, or already does, dominate many critical areas of high-end manufacturing and emergent tech. But I would caution against overstating the coherence or inevitability of China’s rise — or the permanence of America’s apparent decline. I don’t say this out of patriotic sentiment or triumphalist nostalgia. Rather, I believe historical outcomes are rarely as clean as the “Chinese century” vs. “American century” framing might imply. Much will hinge on whether either country can summon the political will and institutional capacity to adapt to the scale of the challenge. China is formidable, but not infallible. The U.S. is reeling, but not terminal.

Another subtle difference is that while Chan offers a searing indictment of Trump-era policy, his piece retains a kind of implicit faith in America's capacity to course-correct—if only it chooses to act. Clearly, I share that hope: I said as much in the preceding paragraph. But I’ve become more focused on the deeper cultural, psychological, and epistemological hurdles we face. It's not just a matter of policy choices; it’s a matter of worldview. A nation that sees itself as the default leader of the world order may struggle to recognize a peer or even a rival without reflexively moralizing the encounter. The pathologies of American exceptionalism — especially the belief that U.S. leadership is natural, necessary, and normatively superior — are still major obstacles to any sober reckoning with China’s rise.

Chan’s op-ed is rightly policy-focused. My body of ideas, for better or worse, tends to ask what deeper stories we’re telling ourselves — about ourselves, about China, and about what constitutes “winning.” For some of us, the goal isn’t to “beat” China at its own game, nor to compel it to play by American rules, but to understand the terms on which China is succeeding, and to ask what lessons, if any, can be learned without surrendering democratic values or liberal institutions. That kind of strategic empathy, or cognitive empathy as I’ve often called it, need not preclude rivalry. But it does demand humility.

In that spirit, I found Chan’s op-ed not only incisive but complementary to my own work and perspective. We come at the problem from different angles — his approach is more data-driven and grounded in near-term policy consequences; mine more concerned with longer-term narrative and discursive frameworks. But we’re both trying to describe, with intellectual honesty, the perilous position in which America finds itself, and to imagine a way forward that is neither nostalgic nor nihilistic.

If nothing else, I hope pieces like this can elevate the quality of the conversation we’re having in the U.S. about China. Not in terms of how to contain China, punish it, or outpace it, but in terms of how to coexist with it in a world that’s big enough, and complex enough, for more than one center of gravity. That kind of conversation is overdue. Chan’s op-ed is a strong place to start.