Living in Southeast Asia, with a personal history etched across Australia and Europe, feels less like settling in a new country and more like standing at a chaotic intersection of civilisations – a crossroads where traffic hurtles past from every direction, the signals coded in different histories, and the rules of one highway quietly contradicting the rules of the other. We are suspended in an awkward, combustible moment: one civilisation is losing faith in its own story just as another is beginning to trust, with some justification, in the credibility of its narrative. The West baptises this unease as the “China problem”. In truth it’s facing a mirror, and doesn’t like what it sees.
For at least two centuries, industrial economism – the blend of mechanistic science, financialised capitalism, and the mythology of endless growth – has been exported as a kind of secular gospel around the world. It colonised minds as efficiently as it colonised territories. It insisted there was only one road to “development” and that road ran through London, New York, Brussels and, more recently, Silicon Valley.
China read that script, sampled it, rewrote much of it, and then declined the casting call of junior partner. That act of refusal – combined with the very visible material gains enjoyed by hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens over the past forty years – has thrown the West into a kind of psychosis. When the foundations of your own house are crumbling, the last thing you wish to witness is an alternative mansion rising across the street. So we are taught to hate the scaffolding rather than ask what it might be teaching us about our own foundations.
Different Stories About What a State Is For
One of the most striking differences between the Sinic and Occidental traditions lies in a very simple question: what is a government actually for? Does it represent the totality of a society or is it there to engineer the nuts and bolts and keep the machinery working?
In the mainstream Western narrative, at least in theory, the state is mandated to arbitrate among individuals pursuing their private interests in the marketplace. It is to be restrained, periodically elected, and permanently suspicious of its own authority. In practice, particularly since the 1980s, the state in many Western polities has progressively surrendered its core functions to corporate cartels, financial markets and a security establishment addicted to permanent war.
In the PRC’s post‑1978 evolution, the state has imagined itself far more explicitly as the architect of national development and the custodian of collective continuity. One‑party rule, an extended civilisational memory and trauma flowing from the “century of humiliation” have combined into a governing ethos: the party must deliver tangible material and social improvements for its legitimacy to endure. That is its primary claim to rule.
Does that ethos translate into practice? World Bank and UN data, irrespective of one’s ideological leanings, indicate that China has removed hundreds of millions of people from extreme poverty since 1980, achieving in just a few decades what no other polity has managed at comparable scale. At the same time, inequality has risen sharply, and there are serious questions about who benefits disproportionately from growth, especially in coastal urban centres. Yet if legitimacy is measured in whether your children are measurably less likely to be destitute than you were, the Chinese state has a credible case.
By contrast, in the US, UK and many other Western economies, decades of productivity gains have not translated into secure, dignified lives for large swathes of the population. Again, using their own official statistics, the US Census Bureau and the UK’s Office for National Statistics document persistent, often deepening, pockets of poverty, precarious employment, and collapsing public infrastructure. Life expectancy in some rich countries has stalled or even declined in certain demographics. These are not characteristics of a successful civilisation at ease with itself.
So we arrive at an awkward observation: the governing class in China appears structurally bound to the improvement of broad living standards as the basis of its mandate. Western governing classes are structurally bound to the expectations of capital markets, donors, and security establishments, often at the expense of that same mandate. It’s hardly surprising that external enemies are sought to explain internal decay.
Industrial Economism and Its Children
Both worlds, of course, have been immersed in the same industrial cosmology: the worship of growth, the idolisation of GDP, the expansion of international trade, routine commodification of life. But they have digested that cosmology very differently.
In the West, industrial economism has become the only publicly permissible faith. Elections change personnel, but seldom assumptions. Markets know best. The corporation is treated as a quasi‑person. The rich are presumed wiser than the rest. Public purpose is diluted into shareholder value. Even progressive movements are frequently captured by the language of return on investment and “innovation ecosystems”.
This creed has given the world astonishing technological sophistication while dispensing wars, climate breakdown, species loss, geopolitical tensions and levels of inequality that strain any pretence of social cohesion. It is predatory by design: growth must be wrung from somewhere, and if that means stripping forests, hollowing out towns, bombing countries that sit atop inconvenient resources, or indebting the young, so be it. In this system extraction is not a bug; it’s the organising principle.
China’s engagement with industrial modernity has been more ambivalent. The factories, highways, ports and data centres are all there. The environmental damage, at times breathtakingly severe, is also present, although recent years have seen large‑scale efforts to shift towards renewables and restore degraded ecosystems. But if one listens carefully to the internal rhetoric, particularly in Mandarin, the story is not solely, or even primarily, about growth. It’s also about rejuvenation, dignity, peace, and a return to a civilisational role rudely interrupted by imperial incursions.
Whether those aspirations will survive the gravitational pull of global capital and domestic vested interests is a valid question. What we can say, drawing on observable policy, is that Beijing’s planners are far more comfortable directing markets than being directed by them. Industrial policy is not a dirty phrase; it’s the everyday grammar of statecraft. Sectors are nurtured, shielded, sometimes sacrificed, in line with longer‑term national priorities.
In much of the West, industrial policy is mentioned only when crisis forces it into the open, as with the recent scramble for semiconductor fabrication or vaccine supply chains. Even then, it’s often executed not as a coherent developmental plan but as a series of subsidies to large incumbents, who immediately lobby for deregulation once the immediate threat has passed.
Foreign Influence, Captured Elites, and the Myth of Sovereignty
Recently, some countries in the West have been criticised by their own citizens for behaving as if they are occupied, their political establishment acting on behalf of foreign interests. There’s some truth in that intuition, although the reality is more tangled than a single external puppeteer pulling all the strings.
In the US, UK, and European Union, policy formation is shaped by a latticework of power: corporate lobbying, defence contractors, financial institutions, fossil fuel interests, and yes, foreign governments with well‑organised diasporas and sophisticated influence operations. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Gulf monarchies, and others have all invested heavily in Washington and European capitals – through think‑tanks, direct lobbying, media partnerships and arms deals – to ensure their priorities are heard. This is well documented in public registries, investigative journalism and legislative inquiries.
Yet the deeper distortion arises from the way money, media and career incentives fuse domestic and foreign elites into a single transnational privileged class. When a politician knows that life after office will be spent on corporate boards, in hedge funds, defence firms or lucrative speaking tours sponsored by friendly governments, the domain of “national interest” tends to contract to the tastes of that circle.
China has its own elite networks, of course, but the relationship between capital and political authority is organised differently. Business magnates can become immensely wealthy, but they exist with the understanding that the party sits above them. When that understanding is forgotten, the reminder can be abrupt. From a liberal Western perspective this is seen as arbitrary repression. From within the Chinese system it’s often framed – at least by its defenders – as disciplining capital before capital completely captures the state.
Here lies a quiet lesson: if political systems genuinely wish to serve their populations, they cannot allow money – whether domestic or foreign – to become the principal medium through which policy is imagined and constructed. Western democracies tell themselves that they are sovereign because their representatives are periodically elected. Yet when those same individuals habitually serve the same narrow interests, election day becomes ritual rather than renewal.
“No Money for People, Endless Money for War”
One of the more obscene features of contemporary Western governance is the ease with which public funds are mobilised for war, surveillance and corporate bailouts, while basic social investments can be treated as utopian fantasies.
This is a recurring pattern. In an affluent country like the US, for example, proposals for universal healthcare, affordable housing, or decent public transport are met with hand‑wringing about deficits and “hard choices”. Meanwhile, additional tens or hundreds of billions can be summoned almost overnight for new weapons systems, overseas military bases, or speculative interventions in distant conflicts. This is not incompetence. These numbers are not hidden; they are brazenly published in official budgets and defence white papers. It’s an unspoken hierarchy of value. Human security – in the sense of healthy bodies, educated minds, resilient communities and restored ecosystems – is not how power keeps itself in power. Strategic security – in the sense of projecting force, guarding access to resources, and signalling toughness to domestic audiences – is.
By comparison, China’s military budget, though rising, still lags the United States by a large margin according to SIPRI and other independent trackers. Beijing has certainly not renounced force, as regional neighbours are acutely aware, but the signature of the past four decades has been dams, ports, railways, factories, and urban housing more than overseas invasions. Its primary foreign instrument has been infrastructure and trade, albeit with geopolitical aims woven through.
Again, this is not to sanctify Beijing’s intentions. It’s to point out that many Western governments now rely on warfare, or at least perpetual confrontation, as an economic stimulant, a mechanism for elite enrichment, and a distraction from unresolved domestic crises. Hatred of China, like hostility towards earlier designated enemies, serves to keep that machinery humming.
The Manufacture of Enemies
Why, then, must some populations be taught to loathe China when it’s in everyone’s best interests to cooperate?
Partly because China’s very existence in its current form contradicts a foundational Western article of faith: that market liberalism plus multi‑party elections are the only engines of modern prosperity. The PRC is an uncomfortable data point. It blends authoritarian one‑party rule with extensive markets, long‑term planning and a determined, sometimes heavy‑handed, form of state capitalism. It’s a hybrid that was supposed to fail. Yet, on many economic and infrastructural indicators, it has outperformed far more libertarian societies.
That alone invites cognitive dissonance. If a society with internet controls, political party oversight, and limited electoral choice is delivering better material outcomes for more of its people than a putative beacon of liberty, then the Western mythos begins to fray. Better, then, to insist that any success must be fraudulent, stolen, or temporary – and to portray the entire model as incompatible with “our values”.
Secondly, Western elites require a scapegoat for the disintegration of their own social contracts. Manufacturing jobs didn’t evaporate by accident; boardrooms signed those contracts. Whole regions were de‑industrialised not by Chinese planners, but by Western executives chasing cheaper labour and lax regulations. Yet to admit that is to confess betrayal. Far easier to highlight “Chinese cheating”, “unfair competition” and “job theft”.
Thirdly, rivalry with China justifies the continuation, even escalation, of the security state at home. Surveillance infrastructure built under the banner of counter‑terrorism after 2001 now rebrands itself as protection against “foreign interference” and “Chinese spying”. Military budgets once sustained by the “war on terror” are now repackaged for a new cold war. Every hypersonic test, every 5G mast, every port built under the Belt and Road Initiative becomes a fresh exhibit in a narrative of looming threat.
None of this denies that there are legitimate concerns about aspects of Chinese policy: treatment of ethnic minorities, restrictions on dissent, maritime assertiveness, and so on. But the asymmetry of outrage is telling. When Western allies commit abuses, the language softens, the headlines fade faster. When Beijing does so, we witness a full orchestration of indignation and moral theatre. The issue is not that criticism exists; it’s that it is so selectively applied.
Different Ways of Imagining Time
Beneath all of this lies another discrepancy: how each civilisation imagines time.
Industrial economism, in its Western form, experiences time as a series of quarterly earnings, news cycles and electoral races. It is fundamentally impatient. Policy must deliver a headline quickly or it is discarded. Politicians rarely think beyond the next poll. The result is an addiction to short‑term fixes: tax cuts, monetary tweaks, symbolic gestures. Structural reform is constantly promised yet continually deferred.
Chinese statecraft, for all its faults, speaks in longer rhythms: five‑year plans, multi‑decade industrial corridors, century‑long civilisational rejuvenation. Policies are framed as steps in extended arcs rather than isolated announcements. This doesn’t guarantee wisdom; long‑term folly is still folly. But it means that certain investments – in high‑speed rail, public transit, automobile innovation, quantum computing, domestic manufacturing, education, and now green technologies – can be followed through systematically over time.
If one asks why Western bridges collapse while Chinese high‑speed trains keep multiplying, part of the answer lies in these rival temporalities. It’s not that one culture is inherently more virtuous. It’s that its institutions have been tuned, for now, to a different kind of pulse.
Lessons from a Passing Hegemony
The decline of Western dominance and the rise of China are not simply episodes in a geopolitical soap opera. They are signals from the future, and experiences from the past, echoing into a present that is refusing to hear.
First, any civilisation that systematically diverts public wealth into warfare, speculation and private hoarding, while allowing large parts of its population to fall into insecurity, will eventually lose both internal cohesion and external respect. No amount of propaganda can permanently disguise potholed streets, shuttered factories and citizens working three jobs to stand still.
Second, a governing system that cannot insulate itself from the capture of private wealth will gradually forget that its purpose is to mediate the greater common good. Parliaments, congresses and cabinets then become little more than arbitration chambers between rival oligarchic factions. At that point, sovereignty becomes a slogan rather than a lived reality.
Third, growth alone is an unreliable measure of health. China’s rapid industrialisation has generated towering environmental costs and new inequalities that may yet undermine its own achievements if left unaddressed. But when growth translates into electricity where there was darkness, clinics where there was untreated disease, and secure roofs where there were shacks, people will forgive – at least for a time – a great deal else. Legitimacy rides on the everyday.
Fourth, demonising rivals may be politically convenient but it impoverishes our imagination. By insisting that there’s nothing to learn from China except what to fear, Western elites blind their populations to experiments in long‑term planning, technology deployment, poverty alleviation and state‑directed industrial strategy that could be adapted, in quite different political contexts, for public benefit.
Finally, perhaps the most important lesson of all: both civilisational projects sit on the same burning planet. Industrial economism, whether draped in Western liberal rhetoric or Chinese developmental slogans, has pushed biospheric systems to the brink. If either bloc persists in defining success purely through accumulation – more steel, more concrete, more data centres, more missiles – then the entire argument about who is rising and who is falling becomes grotesquely irrelevant.
Towards Another Imagination
If there’s a path beyond this civilisational stand‑off, it will not emerge from choosing sides in a binary contest between Washington and Beijing. Both are steeped, in different ways, in the same industrial mythology of conquest – of nature, of future time, of competing blocs. The theatre is different, the script recognisably similar.
The more fruitful pivot is to step outside the frame and ask: what kind of organising story would allow human beings, in all their restless diversity, to flourish within the constraints of a finite biosphere without constantly preying on each other? That’s not a Western question, or a Chinese question. It’s a species question.
Beyond the Industrial Spell
Industrial economism presents itself as common sense. It never announces: “I am a dogma.” It simply murmurs, day and night, that human worth is measured by output, that progress is defined by throughput, that the purpose of life is to consume and compete. Politicians then dress this liturgy in whatever local theology is to hand: civilisational destiny, national greatness, God’s will, even social justice. Underneath, the engine remains the same.
The Sinic world has absorbed that engine more shrewdly than most. It has coupled the turbines of industrial production with a political tradition that prizes continuity, hierarchy and adaptive pragmatism. It can close a factory overnight if the numbers in Zhongnanhai no longer add up, evict a corrupt official if the scandal threatens stability, rezone entire provinces to suit a new logistical corridor. Social pain is imposed from above in the name of a longer arc. It’s largely accepted.
The Occidental world wrapped the same engine in a different story: individual liberty, property rights, competition as virtue. It promised citizens that freedom meant choice, and that choice would be abundant. For a while, that story contained enough truth to fuel real loyalty. Wages rose. Public services expanded. The children of the poor could, occasionally, become doctors, engineers, even prime ministers.
Then the spell was broken – gradually at first, then abruptly. Financial capital unshackled itself. Production went abroad. Digital platforms extracted value from every waking interaction. Governments ceded economic strategy to markets and tried to manage the fallout with slogans and spin. The drama of democracy continued, but the plot thinned.
Meanwhile, the Sinic synthesis – state‑led development with market tools – began to produce visible, concrete artefacts: bridges that didn’t collapse, trains that arrived on time, cities that sprouted from scrubland, phone networks that worked in remote villages, and an expanding middle class with real, not symbolic, purchasing power. It was messy, uneven, often brutal in its dispossessions, but it was undeniably transformational.
This conjuncture – Western disillusion and Chinese acceleration – is what gives rise to the shrillness of today’s anti‑China narratives. When your own doctrine is faltering, you must either revise the doctrine or attack the heretic who appears to be succeeding with a different catechism.
Fear of the Alternative
If the average citizen in Europe or North America, in Latin America or Africa, were presented with a calm comparison of outcomes rather than propaganda, they might ask really awkward questions. Why can a nominally socialist state deliver high‑speed rail to third‑tier cities while the richest countries on earth argue for decades over upgrading a single airport terminal? Why can a country that, within living memory, suffered mass famine now export food, vaccines and technology, while many post‑colonial societies, tutored for decades by Western economists, remain trapped in commodity dependence and debt?
There are many answers to those questions, and they don’t all flatter Beijing. Scale matters. Timing matters. Historical trauma matters. The brutal discipline of one‑party rule matters. But for Western elites, the mere act of asking those questions is dangerous. It punctures the carefully curated sense that “our” system may be flawed but is still the only serious game in town.
So the conversation is shut down before it begins. Any recognition of China’s extraordinary attainments is portrayed as a naïve admiration for authoritarianism. Any proposal that lessons could be drawn from Chinese industrial policy, long‑term planning, or experimental governance is immediately condemned as betrayal. Nuances are flattened into caricature: we have values, they have control; we have freedom, they have surveillance; we have debate, they have propaganda.
But here is the irony: to my own knowledge, many Chinese intellectuals, planners and citizens are intensely aware of the flaws in their own system. They argue about pollution, corruption, censorship, labour conditions, unaccountable authority. Those conversations happen in universities, in policy circles, on encrypted apps, around dinner tables. They are constrained by red lines, but they exist. In many Western societies, it’s increasingly difficult even to conduct an honest public conversation about the failures of industrial economism without being pushed to pick a camp: liberal capitalism or some cartoonish image of totalitarianism.
The Poverty of Western Imagination
When a civilisation loses confidence, its imagination can so easily waste away. It clings to binary moral tales. It becomes obsessed with policing boundaries. Outsiders are treated less as possible teachers and more as existential threats. Dialogue gives way to moralising.
You can see this in the way Western media and policy elites frame almost every issue involving China. Technology? It must be about espionage. Infrastructure in the global South? It must be colonialism with red flags. Diplomatic initiatives? They must be ploys to divide “our allies”. Education exchanges? Trojan horses. Solar panels? Dumping. Electric vehicles? Unfair competition. Rarely is it permitted that Beijing might be pursuing a mix of self‑interest and wider opportunity, just as Western powers have always done, albeit through a different institutional choreography.
This refusal to acknowledge complexity is not primarily about China at all. It’s about safeguarding an increasingly brittle self‑image. To admit that others might now be better at certain things – poverty reduction, infrastructure roll‑out, disciplined industrial strategy – would be to invite uncomfortable domestic scrutiny. Why, exactly, can’t we provide those goods for our own populations? Why do we have money for expeditionary forces but not the homeless? Why do we bail out banks but lecture families on tightening belts?
As long as the answer can be outsourced to a story about Chinese perfidy, Western societies are spared the more radical conclusion: that their ruling arrangements no longer serve the majority, that their sacred market is rigged, and that their democracy has been hollowed out by money and media.
China’s Own Contradictions
It would be absurd, and frankly patronising, to paint China as a benevolent technocracy serenely guiding its people into a harmonious future with ne’er a problem in sight. Its model has contradictions of its own that are already surfacing.
An ageing population, a property bubble, regional imbalances, intense pressure on young people to work hard and do well, and the lure of consumerism all strain the ideological fabric. Environmental degradation, while being tackled with remarkable speed in some sectors, continues to haunt others. Digital surveillance and social credit experiments, whatever their rationale, are starting to raise weighty questions about autonomy, dignity and the use of power.
There are also unresolved tensions between national pride and cosmopolitan curiosity, between the desire to control narratives and the permeability of information flows, between the need for stability and the creative chaos that genuine innovation often requires.
Yet these tensions are at least recognised as strategic questions inside the Chinese system, even if openly discussing them can be risky. Policies do shift. Experiments are tried, succeed, fail, and are quietly retired. A kind of relentless, albeit sometimes ruthless, learning is built into the machinery of governance. For all its rigidity at the top, the system has adaptive capacities that sclerotic Western bureaucracies might envy.
The deeper question – and it is one for the coming decades – is whether that adaptive capacity can be turned towards a post‑industrial paradigm, one in which quality, sufficiency, and ecological restoration displace sheer quantitative expansion. Can a civilisation that has staked so much on “catching up” reimagine success in terms that do not simply replicate Western excess with Chinese characteristics?
What Might Be Learned – If We Were Not Afraid
Strip away the racket of propaganda, and some lessons from the Sinic experience are neither baffling nor uniquely Chinese. They are simply things that industrial economism, within its Western edition, has scrapped, forgotten or wilfully ignored.
The first is that states can, if they choose, direct markets instead of merely servicing them. Industrial policy is not witchcraft. It requires clarity of purpose, institutional memory, and the courage to say no to powerful interests whose gains don’t align with long‑term social wellbeing. China has practised this with steel, ships, solar, rail, and electronics. Other societies could, in theory, do the same in housing, healthcare, food systems, regenerative energy and more.
The second is that legitimacy does not grow solely from ballots counted every few years; it grows from tangible improvements in everyday life. A woman in a village who gains access to reliable electricity, clean water and education for her children will not be convinced by lectures about abstract freedoms if those lectures come from societies that have failed to provide such basics to their own citizens. Conversely, a society that boasts of gleaming freedoms while leaving millions to sleep in cars, tents or slums should not be surprised when its lectures ring hollow.
The third is that national dignity matters. Peoples humiliated, whether by imperial conquest, structural adjustment, drone strikes or casual racism, will seek ways to repair their sense of self. China’s narrative of rejuvenation resonates not just domestically but across parts of the global South precisely because many countries recognise the familiar pattern: a once‑proud civilisation knocked down, then told to be grateful for development recipes that keep it subordinate. When Beijing appears with roads, rail, ports and the promise of a different partnership – however self‑serving – that story carries weight.
The fourth is that time horizons shape what’s possible and what’s not. If everything is filtered through the lens of the next election, the next quarter, the next cycle of outrage, then infrastructure is left to rot, education erodes, and public trust dissolves. If, on the other hand, you are able to look two or three decades ahead and act accordingly, different choices appear on the horizon. It’s still likely that you’ll make a few catastrophic mistakes, but at least you’re not condemned to an endless series of short‑term improvisations that never address the most serious underlying causes.
These are not uniquely Chinese virtues. Any society could, in principle, cultivate them. Yet at this moment in history, the most visible large‑scale experiment in that direction happens to be occurring under a red flag with yellow stars. So it is anathematised, lest the example prove contagious.
The Coming Reckoning
Industrial economism is reaching its limits. On a finite planet now emitting record levels of greenhouse gases, tearing through aquifers, emptying oceans and shredding the social fabric, the fantasy of infinite growth begins to look less like progress and more like a death wish.
In this context, the spectacle of two great blocs quarrelling over who will dominate the next wave of industrial expansion – who will control AI chips, shipping lanes, rare earths, orbital platforms – feels increasingly deranged. It’s as if two rival arsonists are arguing over who has the superior flame‑thrower as the house burns.
Whether Western or Sinic in flavour, any civilisation that persists in treating the Earth as a warehouse rather than a living organism will crash into the same wall. Whether that crash is sudden or gradual, spectacular or concealed, is the only variable.
Here, then, is the uncomfortable truth: the real story is not the “rise of authoritarian China” or the “decline of the democratic West” as such. It’s the exhaustion of an industrial worldview that reduces life to inputs and outputs, turns the future into a spreadsheet, and can’t bring itself to imagine sufficiency without feeling cheated.
China’s ascent exposes the West’s contradictions because it has beaten the West at its own game on several fronts. But that game itself is faulty. Winning it more efficiently does nothing to redeem it. The deeper civilisational shift required – towards cultures that prize balance over extraction, reciprocity over conquest, depth over distraction – is still largely gestational, surfacing in pockets and movements that rarely make the headlines.
Waking Up From the Wrong Dream
I often urge my consulting clients to “wake up” to the fact that a few Western countries behave like occupied nations, their principals acting in the interests of foreign powers while their own citizens sink into precarity. Today I would broaden that: most of humanity is, in one way or another, occupied – not only by specific foreign states or corporations, but by an inherited dream that no longer fits the world we actually inhabit.
That dream tells us we must compete or die, accumulate or be left behind, pick a camp or be crushed between them. It whispers that China is the enemy, or that America is the enemy, or that Islam is the enemy, or that migrants are the enemy. It is remarkably flexible in its choice of villain, far less so in its underlying script.
Breaking that spell requires more than switching allegiance from one bloc to another, or swapping Western propaganda for Chinese. It requires cultivating the capacity to hold two truths at once: that China’s developmental achievements are real and instructive, and that its authoritarian reflexes are dangerous; that Western traditions of individual rights and critical inquiry are to be cherished, and that Western empires have devastated countless lives and ecosystems in their pursuit of profit.
It also requires something else: a willingness to imagine political and economic arrangements that do not yet exist at scale, that integrate the best of various civilisational heritages while discarding their more toxic residues. Such arrangements would take ecological limits as axiomatic, treat basic security as non‑negotiable rather than as charity, and measure success in the richness of human and planetary relationships rather than the fevered chart of GDP.
Will such a reimagining emerge from Beijing’s corridors, Washington’s think‑tanks, village assemblies in Africa, barrios in Latin America, the slums of South Asia, digital networks of youth refusing inherited categories – or some messy combination of all of these? I really don’t know. What we can say, with some confidence, is that clinging to the crumbling edifice of Western industrial supremacy, or cheering uncritically for a Sinic variant of the same creed, will not deliver the metamorphosis our species now requires.
Two civilisations are indeed passing each other on the road. One is limping, wounded by its own illusions. The other is striding forward with evident momentum and equally evident blind spots. Both are heading, for now, towards an ecological precipice that cares nothing for flags or slogans. The lesson is not to choose which driver we prefer as we push the throttle to the floor. It’s to question why we are treating the cliff as a destination at all.
People routinely ask me whether industrial economism (without the more predatory aspects of capitalism possibly) has already infected the East with its lethal virus. My answer invariably surprises those people who only pay attention to my criticism of the West. Industrial economism is not just infecting the East; in many respects the entire Global South has embraced it with a zeal the West has half‑forgotten. The infection is now global. The strains differ. The underlying fever is the same.
The more interesting question is not whether the East, and China specifically, is being drawn into this paradigm, but whether any large civilisation has yet found a credible way of stepping beyond it without imploding.
The East Didn’t Escape the Machine – It Re‑engineered It
If we strip away the ideological varnish, China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and now India in its own way, have all participated in the same civilisational wager: industrialisation as the fast track out of humiliation and poverty.
The Chinese case is simply the most visible, both because of its scale and because it violates Western orthodoxy. Here’s a party‑state that took core elements of capitalist industrialism – wage labour, factory discipline, global supply chains, a development bias towards concrete and steel – and recombined them with Leninist political organisation and a Confucian habit of long‑range statecraft. The result is industrial economism with Chinese characteristics.
Look at the pattern. Rural labour is drawn into factories. Agricultural land is paved over. Energy use explodes. Cities metastasise. Consumer culture is carefully cultivated. Education is retooled to feed STEM and management pipelines. The country is wired up with logistics, data and credit. GDP is watched with a fervour bordering on religious.
These are not accidental side‑effects. They are the central grammar of industrial economism. The West may have written the first draft. The East is now contributing new chapters.
Predation Is a Feature, Not a Glitch
Historically speaking, industrial systems have relied on predation at three levels.
Materially, they require escalating extractions of energy and matter. Even when cleaner technologies are used, the combined throughput has so far continued to rise. Every additional layer of infrastructure – ports, data centres, electric vehicle fleets, mega‑cities – takes its tithe from forests, rivers, soils, mineral seams and the atmosphere.
Socially, they have depended on disciplined, often cheap labour and on the capacity to externalise costs onto someone else: marginalised communities, future generations, distant landscapes. Whether that discipline is imposed via market insecurity, police batons, party cadres or algorithmic management, the logic is the same: keep wages suppressed relative to productivity, and keep the discontent manageable.
Geopolitically, they have tended to secure resources and markets through asymmetric power. In the classic Western version this meant gunboats, coups, debt traps, and structural adjustment. In the Sinic and East Asian versions today it may take other forms: control of critical supply chains, strategic port access, financial leverage, standards‑setting in emerging technologies. The choreography is less obviously violent on most days. The underlying drive – to secure favourable terms of trade in a world of finite resources – remains.
So when we speak of “industrial economism without predation”, we’re really asking whether it is possible to have high‑energy, high‑throughput, globally networked societies that do not lean on exploitation and ecological overshoot. That’s not just a simple policy adjustment. It’s a civilisational pivot that has never yet been achieved.
Eastern Aspirations, Western Dreams
Part of why the infection has taken so deeply in the East is that it meshes with a powerful yearning: to prove the West wrong on its own chosen terrain.
After centuries of condescension and direct domination, former “peripheral” societies were handed a humiliating script: you are behind, we are ahead; development means becoming like us, only more slowly, and always within the limits we determine. China, Japan, the Asian Tigers and now others have been rewriting that script, not by rejecting industrial modernity but by outperforming its original authors on key metrics: literacy, life expectancy, infrastructure rollout, manufacturing prowess, technological adaptation.
Yet the standards of success by which these achievements are judged – rising consumption, urban lifestyles, visibility in global rankings – are themselves Western in origin. The dream of the good life has been packaged, above all, as access to the shopping mall and the skyline. The dream travels faster than any critique of the dream.
As a result, East Asian middle classes now aspire, quite understandably, to lifestyles that the biosphere cannot possibly generalise to eight billion human beings. The same motorways, same air travel patterns, same meat‑heavy diets, same data‑hungry devices, same high‑rise glass towers that made the West feel “developed” after 1945 are now the badges of success from Shanghai to Seoul, and from Bangkok to Bangalore.
In that sense, industrial economism has not only infected the East; the East is in danger of becoming its most impassioned defender just as the West begins, grudgingly and incoherently, to suspect that the model is untenable.
China at the Fork in the Road
China illustrates both the power and the peril of this trajectory. On one hand, it has demonstrated that a determined state can compress centuries of industrialisation into decades. It has built one of the world’s largest renewable energy fleets, the largest high‑speed rail network, and entire new cities in the time it takes a Western democracy to argue over an airport runway.
On the other hand, it did so by driving coal use to vertiginous heights, draining aquifers, polluting rivers, and tolerating levels of air pollution that, at one point, were visibly choking its great cities. It did so by encouraging a property boom that left vacant apartments and indebted households. It did so by feeding a culture of relentless work and study stress that even now is producing its own social malaise.
Beijing’s planners appear acutely aware of these contradictions. The policy shift towards “ecological civilisation”, the clampdown on some speculative sectors, the attempt to boost domestic consumption while rebalancing growth away from sheer real estate inflation – these are not purely cosmetic. They reflect a realisation that the old industrial script, if followed blindly, leads to revolt, exhaustion, and environmental breakdown.
Yet the gravitational pull of the industrial creed remains virtually intact. Local cadres are still evaluated by growth figures. Millions of workers still depend on construction and heavy industry. Global supply chains still lure with foreign exchange earnings. The party’s prestige is still bound up with visible projects and statistical targets. To pull back from that edge, while retaining legitimacy and social stability, is an extraordinarily delicate manoeuvre.
So yes, the infection is present. The patient also knows, perhaps more than most, that the fever cannot simply be allowed to burn unchecked.
Is a “Gentler” Industrialism Possible?
This question points to hope: hope that there might be a version of industrial modernity that keeps its emancipatory gifts – mass literacy, healthcare, sanitation, communications, secure shelter – without the rapacious habits of neoliberal capitalism.
In principle, this outcome seems plausible. We have technologies that can provide abundant clean energy, that can design buildings for efficiency rather than ostentation, that can circulate materials in closed loops, that can support education and healthcare without devouring entire landscapes. We understand enough about ecosystems to restore rather than just exploit them. We know, from many indigenous and pre‑industrial traditions, how to live richly with far less throughput.
But in practice, no major industrial society, East or West, has yet been able to organise and align its institutions, incentives and cultural aspirations around sufficiency instead of accumulation. No large state has said, with conviction and follow‑through: enough material growth; from here on, we will grow in depth, not scale.
Instead, industrial economism behaves like an operating system that automatically reinstalls itself after every crash. Environmental regulations are introduced, then weakened. Social protections are implemented, then stripped. Financial crises spark brief calls for reform, then the same speculative games resume. Even “green growth” often means new forms of extraction – lithium, cobalt, rare earths – to feed an only slightly modified consumer juggernaut.
East Asia is no exception. China’s solar and wind expansion sits alongside massive new coal‑fired capacity. South Korea’s and Japan’s high‑tech sectors are intimately tied to globalised consumption patterns and resource chains. Southeast Asia’s fast‑growing economies are repeating many of the West’s earlier mistakes in land use, urban design and industrial agriculture, albeit with smartphones in every hand.
So if a gentler industrialism is possible, it has not yet manifested at scale. We’re living, at best, in a transitional interregnum where the old model is plainly unsustainable and the new one has not yet appeared in a coherent form.
The Deep Question the East Now Faces
For the East – and here I include not only the Sinic world but a swathe of Asian, African and Latin American societies fast‑tracking industrialisation – the immediate arena is no longer simply “catch up with the West”. In many sectors, that has been done, or will soon be achieved. The deeper question is: once you have caught up, what story replaces catching up?
If the only available script is “more of the same” – more cars, more megacities, more hyper‑consumption, more strategic rivalry – then the East will encounter what the West is already discovering: that there’s no stable plateau at the top of this mountain. Beyond a certain point, each additional unit of material throughput brings diminishing returns to wellbeing and escalating damage to the living systems on which we all depend.
At that threshold, civilisations must turn, not towards each other as enemies, but together towards a different figure entirely: the limits of the planet itself. Those limits are not ideological. They are not negotiable. They cannot be defeated by propaganda or outcompeted through industrial cleverness. They set the outer boundary for all future stories.
The irony is that both the Sinic and Occidental traditions contain, in their older philosophical lineages, resources for such a pivot. Taoist, Buddhist, Confucian, Islamic, Christian, indigenous and humanist currents all, in their diverse ways, speak of balance, restraint, respect for the more‑than‑human world, scepticism about greed, and the futility of endless accumulation. Those voices were sidelined during the industrial surge. They are still there, waiting to be remembered and recombined.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Industrial economism has indeed infected the East. In some places it has become the dominant religion, replacing previous devotions with a new trinity of Growth, Technology and Nation. The West, meanwhile, is trapped in its own crisis of faith, no longer able to believe in the story of progress it continues to proclaim, yet terrified of anything that might supplant it.
The lesson is not that the East should reject industrial modernity wholesale and romanticise a pre‑industrial past. That would be neither realistic nor just. Billions still lack basic goods that modern infrastructure can provide. The lesson, rather, is that the East now stands close enough to the Western experience to see where this path leads if pursued blindly to its end.
It’s not too late – for Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta, Lagos, São Paulo, Berlin or Washington – to treat industrial economism not as destiny but as a phase: a dangerous adolescence through which human societies might yet pass as a rite of passage, provided we mature into a different relationship with matter, energy, time and each other.
Whether such a maturation can occur peacefully, deliberately, and at scale is the great unanswered question of our time. What we do know is that neither condemning the West while copying its most self‑destructive habits, nor demonising China while ignoring its hard‑won lessons in planning and provision, will get us there. We will need something wilder and more subtle than that: a civilisational conversation that admits its own complicity, reclaims buried wisdom, and dares to imagine forms of prosperity that don’t require the world to be eaten alive.
Industrial economism has already gone global. It’s already gone feral. The more urgent inquiry is how, and where, the first serious experiments in moving beyond it will arise – and whether we will recognise them when they do.
Coda: After the Crossing
So we arrive at this strange confluence: two great civilisations, each convinced it is exceptional, both enthralled by a machine that recognises neither lineage nor virtue.
The West, exhausted yet still truculent, is discovering that its preferred myths – the self‑regulating market, the benevolent hegemon, the endless frontier – no longer match the evidence in front of people’s eyes. Wages flatline. Debts rise. City infrastructure frays. The young lose faith. The poor, who were promised inclusion, are blamed instead for their exclusion.
The Sinic world, energised and outward‑looking, has mastered many of the techniques the West once claimed as its exclusive magic: precision manufacturing, complex logistics, global finance, technological innovation at scale. It has combined them with its own customs of statecraft and civilisational memory to produce something recognisably modern yet structurally different from liberal capitalism. The trains run. The lights come on. The statistics dazzle.
And yet, beneath the surface, both projects are caught in the same gravitational field. Both count success in units of stuff. Both conflate volume with value. Both treat the biosphere as a background stage rather than the primary actor. Both compete – sometimes directly, sometimes through proxies – to sustain industrial habits that are now visibly unravelling the conditions for long‑term human flourishing.
We are watching two champion swimmers racing each other in a pool that’s quietly draining.
For ordinary people – in Wuhan, in Wolverhampton, in Washington, in Wollongong – the spectacle is at once compelling and curiously irrelevant. You cannot eat a GDP ranking. You cannot inhale a narrative of national greatness without choking on the smog it helps to excuse. You cannot raise your children on military parades and summit communiqués. You raise them on water that is either drinkable or not, streets that are either safe or not, schools that either expand their minds or crush their spirits.
If there’s a lesson in this passing of powers, it is not that one side is wicked and the other virtuous. It is that civilisation itself, as currently imagined by its dominant institutions, has wandered into a hall of mirrors. We compare models of governance and portfolios of weapons as if those were the decisive artefacts, while the deeper architecture – how we relate to each other, to time, to the living world – is left largely untouched and unquestioned.
China’s rise exposes the lie that there is only one way to organise a complex society. Western decline exposes the lie that wealth and military strength guarantee coherence. The planetary crisis exposes the lie that industrial modernity, in any of its current guises, is compatible with a flourishing biosphere over the longer term.
Once those three illusions crack, space opens for a different conversation. Not a conversation about whether Washington or Beijing should call the shots. Not a conversation about which flag flies over the next generation of semiconductor plants. A conversation about what it would mean to design economies where shelter, care, learning and participation are treated as primary infrastructure rather than afterthoughts; where success is measured less in the height of towers and more in the health of soils, rivers and minds; where technology serves the texture of life instead of hollowing it out.
This is not a matter of moral exhortation. It’s a matter of survival with dignity. Industrial economism, left to its own devices, will keep doing what it does best: externalising costs, deepening inequalities, and consuming the future to feed the present. It is very good at that. It is very bad at stopping. The issue at hand, then, is where the first serious interruptions will come from.
Perhaps from city‑regions that decide to re‑localise essential systems and treat energy, food and housing as commons rather than markets. Perhaps from coalitions of states in the global South that refuse to be mere resource warehouses or geopolitical pawns, and insist on development compacts grounded in regeneration rather than extraction. Perhaps from younger generations in Beijing, Brighton and Boston alike, who look at their frenetic, precarious lives and quietly opt out of scripts that no longer make sense to them.
Perhaps – and here I am asking rather than asserting – from a reweaving of older wisdom traditions into contemporary practice: Taoist ease with non‑forcing, indigenous understandings of custodianship, ecological science’s patient tracing of interdependence, feminist economics’ insistence that care work is not an invisible subsidy but the core of any functioning society.
None of this will come pre‑packaged from a ministry in Zhongnanhai or a department in Whitehall. It will not be televised as a single event. It will arrive, if it arrives at all, as a mosaic of experiments – some clumsy, some luminous – in which people quietly step outside the default settings of industrial economism and discover that other arrangements are indeed possible, and even preferable.
When that happens, the West’s fall and China’s rise will be seen, in retrospect, as transitional episodes in a larger story: the story of a species learning, late and under duress, that cleverness is not the same as wisdom, that power is not the same as purpose, and that no civilisation, however proud, is exempt from the physics of a small, generous, overburdened planet.
For now, two civilisations pass each other in opposite directions, each misreading the other, each tempted to weaponise its injuries and its triumphs. We would be foolish to cheer either on without question. The more urgent work lies elsewhere: in learning to withdraw our loyalty from a worldview that treats life as collateral, and to lend our imagination, our energy and our compassion to those fragile beginnings where a different kind of civilisation – quieter, saner, less intoxicated with its own reflection – is trying to be born.