A profoundly powerful and courageous essay. I realized while reading this that I who has been engaging with China for 25 years am just as susceptible to underestimating China’s accomplishments and it’s implications to the US and globally as those whose based of knowledge and lived experience is much shallower and short-lived. Tremendous kudos to you for synthesizing this argument and putting it out there in such a hostile environment.
Good luck with getting your message across Kaiser. I appreciate your attempt to explicitly base your view on hard facts; getting people to see and accept these is a fundamental challenge in itself before you even get to intepreting them.
Congratulations on a profound and eloquent essay. Western modernization was premised on increasing divergence between the West and the Rest. China is the avatar of a new era of convergence. In 2008 the GDP (PPP) of the developing world exceeded that of the developed world for the first time since the 1870s. China is a big part of the story, but without China the developing world reached parity in 2023. It is truly a new world.
Kuo’s Great Reckoning is real and an excellent read. However, the crisis isn’t only intellectual. It’s also geological. Levenson taught that a civilisation thrives when its mind and its world stay in tune; that harmony has broken in the West but has flourished in China, where thought and material capacity now move in civilizational concert. Mokyr saw progress as a culture of ideas, yet ideas alone never powered a factory. Pomeranz reminded us that the engines of Enlightenment ran on sugar, coal, iron, colonies and slaves. Judiciously creating law like terra nullius that justified extraction without compensation. The robber-baron age turned theft into economic theory, and then Bretton Woods failed, converting mineral wealth into credit. Liberal hegemony kept spending what empire had once stolen, mistaking fiat for fuel calling it globalization. Now the feedstock of Western thinking, the resources that made its viability possible, can no longer be taken for free. By 2025 the old centres of “civilisation” are hollowed out, in a reverse Wallerstein, where the periphery is becoming the core. Kuo names the reckoning well, but the cause runs deeper. The mind did not fail the West; the mine did.
Bibliography
Kuo, K. (2025) The Great Reckoning. Sinica Podcast / Substack Essays.
Levenson, J. R. (1958–1965) Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mokyr, J. (2016) The Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pomeranz, K. (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wallerstein, I. (1974–1989) The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press.
A profoundly powerful and courageous essay. I realized while reading this that I who has been engaging with China for 25 years am just as susceptible to underestimating China’s accomplishments and it’s implications to the US and globally as those whose based of knowledge and lived experience is much shallower and short-lived. Tremendous kudos to you for synthesizing this argument and putting it out there in such a hostile environment.
Good luck with getting your message across Kaiser. I appreciate your attempt to explicitly base your view on hard facts; getting people to see and accept these is a fundamental challenge in itself before you even get to intepreting them.
I just upgraded to a paid subscription after reading this essay. Bravo.
Congratulations on a profound and eloquent essay. Western modernization was premised on increasing divergence between the West and the Rest. China is the avatar of a new era of convergence. In 2008 the GDP (PPP) of the developing world exceeded that of the developed world for the first time since the 1870s. China is a big part of the story, but without China the developing world reached parity in 2023. It is truly a new world.
Kuo’s Great Reckoning is real and an excellent read. However, the crisis isn’t only intellectual. It’s also geological. Levenson taught that a civilisation thrives when its mind and its world stay in tune; that harmony has broken in the West but has flourished in China, where thought and material capacity now move in civilizational concert. Mokyr saw progress as a culture of ideas, yet ideas alone never powered a factory. Pomeranz reminded us that the engines of Enlightenment ran on sugar, coal, iron, colonies and slaves. Judiciously creating law like terra nullius that justified extraction without compensation. The robber-baron age turned theft into economic theory, and then Bretton Woods failed, converting mineral wealth into credit. Liberal hegemony kept spending what empire had once stolen, mistaking fiat for fuel calling it globalization. Now the feedstock of Western thinking, the resources that made its viability possible, can no longer be taken for free. By 2025 the old centres of “civilisation” are hollowed out, in a reverse Wallerstein, where the periphery is becoming the core. Kuo names the reckoning well, but the cause runs deeper. The mind did not fail the West; the mine did.
Bibliography
Kuo, K. (2025) The Great Reckoning. Sinica Podcast / Substack Essays.
Levenson, J. R. (1958–1965) Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mokyr, J. (2016) The Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pomeranz, K. (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wallerstein, I. (1974–1989) The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press.