How can the United States possibly compete with China?

China’s rulers invest tremendous resources into cultivating the ‘resistance is futile’ narrative among foreign elites and influentials

Yes, China certainly seems daunting.

Go there and take a look at massive modern factories operating 24/7, millions of industrial and domestic service robots, along with what look like never-ending shiny skyscrapers in Shenzhen, Shanghai and other cities. The sheer scale of it all is astonishing.

Then internalize factoids such as this: China’s shipbuilding capacity is 200 times that of America’s.

And there are the dependencies the United States has inflicted upon itself over the last 30 years for essential requirements such as medicine and the critical components and minerals on which America’s economy and defense production depend.

Meanwhile, China’s military and paramilitary forces have undergone the largest expansion seen in any country since World War II. Today, in certain circumstances such as armed conflict to defend Japan, the Philippines or Taiwan, China could deliver the US military a bloody nose – or even strategic defeat.

One might be inclined to despair, and plaintively ask, as an acquaintance did recently after returning from a Chinese government-sponsored trip to China: “How can we compete with them?” He might as well have added, “We should submit now.”

In fact this type of demoralized submission is precisely China’s hoped-for outcome for sponsoring such trips. China’s rulers invest tremendous resources into cultivating the “resistance is futile” narrative among foreign elites and influentials. The practice is central to the success of Beijing’s multi-faceted political warfare.

But is submission justified?

Similar warnings appeared in the 1980’s when Japan was seemingly headed for global economic and political domination. The gloomy defeatism among some elites was proven wrong rather quickly.

The comparison of 1980s Japan to 2026 communist China is imperfect, and postwar Japan never viewed the United States as an enemy to be defeated and displaced.

Nevertheless, by many measures the People’s Republic of China presents an existential challenge on a level not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago.

Still, look closely and you’re likely to ask: “How could we not compete with the PRC?”

It’s a country run by what is in effect a brutally repressive – totalitarian, in fact – organized crime cartel. This is a cartel that:

-has chosen guns over butter. As it poured hundreds of billions of dollars into rapidly growing its navy to be larger than the US Navy, at the beginning of this decade by its own admission at least 600 million people had to live on $5 a day or less. Indeed, leave the shiny cities and you’ll find grinding poverty enough that the name Potemkin comes to mind when thinking of today’s China.
-issues a currency that isn’t freely convertible. What does that mean? For most of what China needs to buy from overseas – say, Australian iron ore to make steel to build its warships – it has to pay in convertible currency, i.e., US dollars. Or it can try paying for the Belt and Road in RMB. Beijing probably hasn’t got half the foreign exchange it needs. That’s principally earned these days from exports to other countries now that inbound foreign direct investment has dried up, due in no small part to China’s thuggish behavior
-has no rule of law, property rights or predictably enforceable contracts, and is thoroughly corrupt. The CCP’s stated intention is to put out of business foreign companies that come into China, replacing them with Chinese companies. At some point, enough foreign companies will realize China is a rigged casino. Ask Starbucks, McDonalds and Motorola. Tesla’s day and Apple’s day are coming.
-still depends heavily on foreign technology or, more precisely, on stealing foreign technology. It should be no surprise that China’s rulers consider IP theft a moral imperative. China’s new commercial airliner, the C919, depends heavily on foreign technology to get it into the air. The spy balloon that flew over America a few years back was packed with Western technology.
-is so lacking in confidence it wouldn’t dare hold elections and give its subjects a say in who rules them. The idea seems to be that Chinese citizens prefer a boot on the neck, and agree that The Party is infallible. Maybe. But nobody asks them.
-publicly identifies human rights and individual freedoms anathema to the regime, making that a matter of national policy under what the CCP calls Document 9. Means of brutal suppression of free speech, freedom of religion and other God-given rights include concentration camps – with a million Uighurs locked up, black prisons where people disappear and systematic rape a matter of policy. Also, there’s an active organ harvesting industry – directed against, among other innocents, people of faith, Falun Gong adherents in particular.
-conducts repressive cognitive warfare against its subjects that includes the establishment of the Great Firewall to keep out access to ideas such as human rights and democracy, a surveillance state beyond the merely Orwellian and an internal security apparatus whose funding surpasses that of the Peoples Liberation Army.
-faces internal fissures, with the southerners hating the northerners (and vice versa.) Xi Jinping intends, it is said, to make Cantonese – the language, at least, and the maybe the people – disappear. There are also urban versus rural splits along with serious ethnic frictions.
-created an environmental nightmare, heavily polluted, with unsafe water and poisoned earth that reduces already limited agricultural land and results in widespread cancer and other health issues that shortened lifespans for hundreds of millions.
-introduced in 1979 the CCP’s disastrous “one child” policy, creating a problem that can’t be corrected anytime soon The population is cratering while there are 30 million Chinese men with no chance of ever finding a wife. Widespread trafficking of women from across Asia to be “brides” for these ‘bare branches” has not made up for this horrific state-inflicted gender imbalance.
-has created such a dysfunctional state that its most successful people are angling to escape it. They try to move their wealth (and a relative with a local residence permit) out of China – and set up in the US, UK, Australia, Canada or somewhere else that’s free of totalitarian communist rule. Xi Jinping and family are reported to have immense wealth, some of it parked overseas. And these are the people benefiting most from the system but still doubtful about its future.

How could we not compete with the PRC? The question answers itself. We can compete, and we can win.

A powerful military is a prerequisite, but today that competition – more accurately, the war – is on the political warfare battlefield. Unfortunately, the US government has largely abdicated this field of battle.

If the US had a political warfare effort it would, with the facts laid out above, run wild.

America practically invented the modern concept of political warfare and waged it well enough to win the First Cold War against the Soviet Union.

These days it’s largely forgotten. Toward the end of the Biden administration the State Department official nominally responsible for political warfare was called before Congress and asked about the Department’s political warfare campaign against China. His answer: “Can you define ‘political warfare’ for me?”

It doesn’t appear the Trump administration would do much better.

Time to go back to school. Read how President Reagan waged it – and won.

If the US loses this competition – this existential war – to China, one will fairly conclude that that’s because it wanted to.