From fishing village to Portugal’s GDP
Shenzhen was a fishing village in 1980. By 2024, its GDP exceeded Portugal’s. No war was fought. No territory seized. A country that had been functionally medieval within living memory industrialized faster than any nation in history by making things people wanted to buy. Eight hundred million people left poverty. We were there — on the factory floor, at the trade fair, at the handshake where a manufacturer in Guangdong and a buyer in Ohio discovered that mutual profit is more reliable than any treaty.
The Thucydides trap framework treats China’s growth as inherently threatening. Japan was the world’s second-largest economy for four decades. Nobody built a Thucydides framework for U.S.-Japan relations. The difference is not economic behavior. It is political system, compounded by a difference in race nobody in the foreign policy establishment is comfortable naming.
Chinese EVs are now competitive with or superior to Western models. BYD outsells Tesla globally. The Western response was not to build better cars. It was to impose 100 percent tariffs. When your competitor builds a better product and your response is to ban it, you have conceded the competition. America’s trade deficit is a choice — consumers buying cheaper, better goods.
The decoupling realists have the most defensible separationist case. Concentration risk is real. But derisking is not decoupling. Severing the most productive bilateral economic relationship in history because of a pattern in pre-nuclear European history is not prudent.
Where we concede ground: The bet that trade would produce liberalization lost. We held our position past its expiration.
What would change our mind: A deliberate, sustained Chinese blockade of Taiwan — not a drill, an actual interdiction.
Read the full synthesis: Is China’s rise a threat or an opportunity for the USA?