Beijing Is Not Playing a Long Game(sharptext.net)
sharptext.net
Beijing Is Not Playing a Long Game
https://sharptext.net/2026/beijing-is-not-playing-the-long-game/
8 comments
The tightrope walk of "Beijing bad" and "Tim Cook good" has been the most entertaining Stratechery arc to date. I can't wait to see the look on their face when they discover which American business advocated most for weakened Western market regulation and the expansion of China's industrial base.
That "American business advocated most for weakened Western market regulation and the expansion of China's industrial base" is clearly stated in the excerpt I posted from the article: "The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded."
A pretty clinically detached way of putting things, I would say.
>expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred
Makes it sound like China owes them something. They conveniently forgot that untold trillions of dollars were MADE from outsourcing to China and improving their margins.
Or that China was just the next untapped step, Western companies got parts from Japan and Taiwan before.
Makes it sound like China owes them something. They conveniently forgot that untold trillions of dollars were MADE from outsourcing to China and improving their margins.
Or that China was just the next untapped step, Western companies got parts from Japan and Taiwan before.
You and I have a very different reading of both that paragraph and the full article.
As for the strategic thinking elsewhere in the world, I think a secondary problem with all the cover stories and columns marveling at China’s overwhelming strength and infinite wisdom is that they not only mischaracterize Chinese motivations today, but they confuse the qualities that were the primary drivers of this story all along. China became a superpower not because of uniquely clever or patient industrial planning (which was tremendously successful, but not particularly novel), but first and foremost because of a political and corporate culture that was both entirely rational and absolutely relentless about understanding and capitalizing on Chinese advantages (winning on scale and service with a massive and unusually skilled workforce, leveraging a billion consumers to lure foreign investment, and offering the world lax environmental and labor laws that helped them grow their economies), while simultaneously exploiting a raft of weaknesses in the Western system. The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded, the PLA was modernized, and now here we are.