China's GDP quadrupled in twenty years, its military budget tripled in a decade, and its largest trading partners are building supply chains designed to survive without it.
Computing power is the new uranium. That is not a metaphor — it is the operating logic behind the most aggressive export controls the United States has imposed on any country since the Cold War. In October 2022, the Biden administration targeted China's access to advanced semiconductors and the equipment to make them, on the theory that a China with frontier AI chips is a China the United States cannot safely coexist with. Beijing called it technological warfare. Taipei watched from ninety miles away, manufacturing 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips.
The controls landed inside an argument building since 2001, when China joined the WTO and the bet was that trade integration would produce political liberalization. The bet lost. China got rich. It did not get liberal. The country that invited it into the global system now treats its trade deficit as a wound and its tariffs as a tourniquet.
Graham Allison catalogued sixteen cases of a rising power threatening to displace a ruling one. Twelve ended in war. The camp does not predict war so much as observe that the people who don't predict it have been wrong more often. But in Shenzhen, a factory that made toys in 1995 now produces autonomous delivery robots. The camp finds the hawkish turn economically illiterate. Trade created the largest middle class in history. Unwinding it would be the most expensive tantrum in economic history.
The people who survived the 2021 chip shortage — when a single factory fire sent ripple effects through automotive production on four continents — do not care whether China is a threat or an opportunity. The are building redundancy whether the geopoliticians sort out their theories or not. And the camp asks whether the entire threat-or-opportunity framing is the wrong axis — whether what looks like confrontation is actually two civilizations at different stages of the same modernization arc.
China's economic challenges are real — slowing growth, a property crisis, a demographic cliff. But a weakening China may be more dangerous than a rising one. Taiwan sits in the strait between those two possibilities.
Where do you stand?
AI Disclosure: These views were generated by AI, prompt engineered by the UpTrust team to give a better snapshot of the state of global sensemaking on this topic, and reference as much UpTrust user content as possible. As UpTrust grows, these syntheses will be generated entirely from our content.