The Thing We Still Can’t Say

SHAXI, 18 July 2025 — Adam Tooze came to visit me recently here in Shaxi, the little town in Yunnan where I spent the last month. We talked over meals and drinks, went mushroom picking in the hills, he met my bandmates and listened to us rehearse, and we taped an episode of the Sinica Podcast together.

Our conversations left me uneasy — not because I disagreed with him, but because I didn’t. I kept thinking about how rarely I’ve allowed myself to say, out loud, the thing he said. The thing I’ve thought privately for years. The thing that now feels almost undeniable.

In the interview, Adam put it plainly: China isn’t just an analytical problem. It’s the defining political reality of our time. He called it the “master key” to understanding modernity. The “biggest laboratory of organized modernization that has ever been or ever will be.” A place where the industrial histories of the West now read like prefaces to something larger.

He wasn’t saying any of this for effect. These weren’t hot takes or provocations. He was articulating something many of us who’ve spent years thinking about China have felt building for a while but still shy away from naming.

After the episode came out, I noticed a Twitter thread from David Wallace-Wells — best known for his writing on the climate crisis — highlighting long excerpts from the conversation, including the remarks above. His response didn’t feel performative. It felt like recognition. The kind that comes when someone who has tried for years to shake people out of climate complacency hears another slow-moving, system-level transformation being laid bare — and sees how few are metabolizing it.

That reaction stayed with me. It forced me to ask a harder question: Why haven’t I said the thing myself? Why have I hedged, deferred, watered down the implications, stayed in safer territory — even when the evidence has been pointing in this direction for some time?

I’ve been as susceptible to the usual hesitations as anyone. Part of it is temperamental: I try to avoid stridency. I don’t want to be misunderstood or misrepresented. I know how easily even a measured take on China can be distorted. I know how quickly any recognition of its accomplishments or capabilities can be spun into charges of apologism or naïveté. So I’ve held back.

But I wonder now whether the greater risk lies in saying too little.

Because Adam’s observations weren’t really about China alone. They were about how poorly we’ve come to terms with the world as it is. And that failure extends well beyond governments, media narratives, or expert consensus. It includes people who’ve spent years thinking about these issues — myself included.

Back when Sinica was still part of The China Project, I used to include in the intro to each episode a line of boilerplate, describing our coverage as being about “a nation that is reshaping the world.” I meant it, of course. But like any phrase repeated often enough, it lost some of its force for me. And meanwhile, China kept reshaping the world — through astonishing progress in infrastructure, manufacturing, digital platforms, and, as Adam emphasized, energy.

He pointed out that roughly three-quarters of all renewable energy projects currently underway are Chinese. That about a third of global emissions come from China. And that much of the growth in both emissions and decarbonization stems from one country’s development trajectory. Those are the sorts of figures I keep at the ready, can summon in debate. But I’ve been guilty, like many, of not really letting their full meaning sink in. That’s something I need to start doing more of.

This isn’t about celebration or condemnation. It’s about scale and structure. About recognizing when rapid change adds up to a shift in paradigm.

And yet most of the people I know — friends, colleagues, former classmates, fellow travelers in the China space — still speak about China with caution, or in some cases, with reflexive dismissal or deliberate deflatus. Yes, they’ll concede the infrastructure, the tech adoption, the industrial muscle. But something in the framing always pulls back. There’s always a “but.”

And it’s not only Western observers. Even some of my more patriotic and optimistic Chinese friends — people who take pride in the country’s accomplishments and see its system as resilient — seem unprepared to reckon with the full implications of what Adam laid out in the conversation. The idea that China is no longer just catching up, but redefining the arc of development itself, is hard to absorb — especially for those conditioned to see the West as a permanent reference point, even when viewed critically.

I don’t mean to sound holier-than-thou. I’ve been conditioned, like many, to temper big claims, to second-guess myself. Most of us came of age professionally during a time when certain assumptions were still foundational: that China was rising, yes, but still playing catch-up. That its system would hit structural limits. That liberal democratic capitalism, though battered, still set the normative horizon.

Letting go of those assumptions isn’t easy — not just intellectually, but emotionally. For some, it means rethinking the frameworks they’ve built careers on. For others, it means facing the prospect of a world in which liberal institutions are no longer the default engine of transformation. That’s a hard thing to sit with.

And maybe this isn’t just about ideas or career positioning. Maybe it’s something closer to denial. A reluctance to accept the implications of a world that no longer orbits the same cultural or institutional center.

We’ve seen this kind of reaction before. Climate change offers a familiar pattern: the science has been robust for decades, yet serious recognition came slowly, hesitantly, often wrapped in equivocation. It’s often not the facts we struggle with, but the scale of their implication.

With China, I sense a similar dissonance. We see the numbers, the breakthroughs, the pace, the policy coordination. And we reach for caveats: internal contradictions, looming crises, moral failings that will surely derail the trajectory. Some of that may be true. But it can also serve as a way to avoid admitting something harder — that the center of gravity has already shifted, and we haven’t yet found the language to reckon with it.

I don’t have a neat conclusion. Only a growing sense that clearer language is long overdue. Not to valorize or excuse, but to describe. To acknowledge the transformation underway. To stop waiting for someone else to say it first.

Adam Tooze said the thing. I’m trying to say it now too.