- Arnaud Bertrand - Seeing China Clearly: How to Read a Rising Power
- Arnaud Bertrand - Seeing China Clearly: How to Read a Rising Power - sashimi December 19, 2025, 1:05 pm
- Thanks. Nm - Shyaku December 27, 2025, 3:30 pm
Posted by sashimi
on December 19, 2025, 1:05 pm
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18 Dec 2025 https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/my-speech-to-german-business-leaders My speech to German business leaders about China. ... When I moved to China in 2015, I thought I understood the country. I'd read the newspapers, I'd read books about it, and I had followed the various debates. What I thought I knew was the conventional wisdom we'd all been taught: that China was a dictatorship with an economy built on cheap labor, that its citizens were indoctrinated by state propaganda, and that the whole system was an anachronism that would inevitably collapse or liberalize. Then I lived there for eight years. And I discovered that virtually everything I thought I knew was wrong. Instead, the China I experienced was going through a genuine renaissance like never before in its entire history - a country advancing at breathtaking speed, progressively leapfrogging the West in critical domains. What struck me most was the asymmetry of knowledge. I was constantly meeting Chinese professionals who had studied at Oxford, Stanford, Sciences Po. They spoke fluent English or French. They understood the West intimately - our politics, our culture, our way of thinking. But during extended travels across China, even in major cities, I would go weeks without seeing another Westerner. They had invested in understanding us. We hadn't deemed them worth understanding. I entered China believing its citizens were indoctrinated. I left certain that we were far more so. We committed a big error: we believed our own moral sermons constituted strategic analysis. Now, why does this matter for us Europeans? Because this isn't just about one country. The historian Adam Tooze, who teaches at Columbia University, recently gave a fascinating presentation, putting it in terms I find compelling. He said: "China isn't just an analytical problem. It is THE analytical problem of modernity. It is the master key to understanding modernity." I think he's right. And his argument is worth understanding. Tooze points to a single graph that he says shows the economic history of our species on the planet. It's a graph on global coal production from antiquity to today. For the first 2,000 years or so, not much happens, it's fairly flat. Then starting in the early 1,700s, lasting for about 250 years - the entire span of what we call the Industrial Revolution - you see the familiar story. Britain's early lead, America's rise, Germany's industrialization, other nations following. Production grows, but gradually, predictably. Then, around the year 2,000, something unprecedented happened. China's line doesn't just rise gradually like the others - it absolutely sky rockets vertically upward. China's energy consumption in less than two decades dwarfs the combined consumption of every other nation across the previous two and a half centuries. Tooze calls this "a sudden, utterly radical break with all previous human history." And it wasn't driven by exports to the West - that's only 10 to 15 percent of Chinese growth. It was driven by the most massive urbanization project in human history: the construction of China's new cities, the movement of hundreds of million people, the modernization of the entire Chinese housing stock in 30 years. What does this mean? Tooze has a phrase I find haunting: "the provincialization of the West." We are no longer the central driver of world history. As he puts it: "The industrial history of the West was a preface to China's industrial history, it turns out." Now, you might think this is just one academic's opinion. But this shift is now officially acknowledged at the highest levels. The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy - this is the strategy guiding Trump's administration - declares in black and white that "permanent American domination of the entire world" was now "a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal." The 2025 National Security Strategy is, in my view, America's resignation letter to global hegemony, almost entirely triggered by China's rise and America's recognition that it now has a peer. Recognition which, incidentally, is explicit in the document. Your own chancellor, Friedrich Merz just essentially confirmed this. He just said that Pax Americana "no longer exists." And crucially, he added: "This course is not temporary. Trump did not appear overnight, and this policy will not disappear overnight either." In other words, it's structural, it's here to stay. Which means that a remarkable consensus has emerged from Washington to Berlin to Beijing: American primacy is over, the multipolar world is here. The question is no longer whether this shift is happening. It's how to navigate it. ... |
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