after Richard David Hames – adapted
A shorter, accessible reframing that preserves Hames’ core argument: China’s rise exposes Western contradictions, but both remain trapped in the same industrial worldview. The real challenge is not geopolitical rivalry but re-imagining prosperity beyond growth.
Living in Southeast Asia today can feel like standing at a crossroads where two civilizations pass each other at speed. One is losing confidence in its own story. The other is beginning to trust its narrative again—sometimes with reason, sometimes with blind spots. The West calls this discomfort “the China problem”. In reality, it is staring into a mirror and recoiling.
For two centuries, the West exported a belief system built on industry, growth, and markets. It presented this model as universal truth: develop like us, or remain behind. China studied that script carefully, adopted what worked, discarded what didn’t—and then refused the role of junior partner. That refusal, more than anything else, unsettled the West.
What Is a State for?
At the heart of the divide lies a simple question: what is government actually for?
In Western theory, the state exists to referee between individuals pursuing private interests. It is meant to be limited, suspicious of power, and shaped by elections. In practice, especially since the 1980s, many Western states have surrendered key functions to markets, corporations, and security systems. Public purpose thinned out. Capital gained the upper hand.
In China’s modern evolution, the state sees itself differently: as architect of development and guardian of collective continuity. Its legitimacy rests less on elections than on outcomes. The unspoken contract is blunt—deliver rising living standards, or lose the mandate to rule.
By the numbers alone, China’s record is hard to dismiss. Hundreds of millions lifted from extreme poverty in four decades. Infrastructure built at a scale unseen elsewhere. This does not erase inequality, repression, or environmental damage—but it explains why many Chinese experience their state as functional rather than hollow.
Meanwhile, in much of the West, productivity rose while secure lives did not. Infrastructure decayed. Public services frayed. Life expectancy stalled. These are not signs of a civilization at ease with itself.
Markets: Master or Tool?
Both China and the West live inside the same industrial worldview—growth, GDP, trade, consumption. The difference lies in how it is digested.
In the West, markets have become sacred. Elections change faces, not assumptions. Corporations are treated like persons. Public good is translated into shareholder value. Even social reform is framed as “return on investment.”
China never fully sanctified markets. It uses them, directs them, restrains them when needed. Industrial policy is not an embarrassment—it is everyday governance. Sectors are built, protected, or abandoned in line with long-term priorities.
This does not make China virtuous. It makes it strategic.
Captured Elites and manufactured Enemies
Western citizens increasingly sense that their governments no longer act primarily in their interest. That intuition is not paranoia. Policy in many democracies is shaped by a dense web of corporate power, financial interests, defense industries, and foreign influence—often legal, often invisible, always effective.
China has elites too. The difference is structural: capital exists at the party’s pleasure, not the other way around. When business forgets that, the correction can be sudden. From a Western lens this looks authoritarian. From within China, it is framed as preventing the state from being captured.
Unable to confront internal decay, Western systems look outward. China becomes the explanation for what Western leaders themselves dismantled: deindustrialization, inequality, social fragmentation. Hatred substitutes for self-examination.
Endless Money for War
One of the West’s most telling contradictions is fiscal. Money is always available for war, surveillance, and bailouts. Suddenly scarce when healthcare, housing, or infrastructure are discussed.
China’s military budget has grown, but its defining investments over forty years have been concrete rather than conquest: railways, ports, housing, energy systems. Its primary export has been infrastructure, not invasion.
This does not make Beijing benign. It does make Western moral outrage look selective.
Time Horizons Matter
Western politics runs on short cycles: elections, quarters, headlines. Long-term planning is constantly postponed. China plans in decades. Five-year plans, multi-generation projects, civilizational timeframes.
That difference alone explains why Western bridges collapse while Chinese trains multiply.
The Deeper Crisis
China’s rise and the West’s unease are not the real story. The deeper issue is industrial economism itself—the belief that progress equals endless expansion.
Both systems remain trapped inside it. Both measure success in volume rather than vitality. Both strain a planet that does not negotiate.
China has beaten the West at its own industrial game on several fronts. That exposes Western failure—but it does not redeem the game. Winning faster does not make it sustainable.
What might be learned—if we dared
Strip away propaganda and fear, and a few lessons remain:
- States can guide markets instead of worshipping them.
- Legitimacy grows from lived improvement, not slogans.
- Dignity matters to societies shaped by humiliation.
- Long time horizons change what becomes possible.
None of this requires adopting China’s political system. It requires recovering capacities the West once had—and surrendered.
Beyond choosing Sides
The choice is not Washington or Beijing. Both are variations of the same industrial myth. The real task is to imagine forms of prosperity that do not depend on exhaustion—of people, of meaning, of Earth itself.
Two civilizations are passing each other. One wounded by its illusions. The other energized, but not immune to the same disease. Both are heading, for now, toward the same ecological edge.
The lesson is not to pick a better driver.
It is to question why we are racing toward the cliff at all.
© Robert F. Tjón, January 2026 | Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Inspired by Richard David Hames, Two Civilizations Passing in Opposite Directions👇
https://substack.com/@richarddavidhames/note/p-184512594?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=35vtu2
