Beijing Is Not Playing a Long Game

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.