The rise of China is bullshit
A 2025 study shows that most Chinese progress under modern strongmen was a result of industrialization they should have had long ago. They moved farmers off the farms as many countries had already done in the early 20th century, but they did it in the 1980s and 90s and then took a bow.
Approximately 22% to 25% of China’s labor force was employed in agriculture as of 2023–2024, a significant decline from 70% in 1978. Meanwhile direct on-farm employment in the United States accounts for approximately 1.2% to 1.4% of total employment. When you subtract out industrialization America has higher mobility than China (not that US mobility is anything to brag about).
Yes China has great infrastructure like railroads and great manufacturing like electric cars, because strongmen excel at those kinds of projects:
But for the bottom 50% these projects don’t do much:
Plus although industries such as electric vehicles are booming, they make up only a small share of the economy compared with floundering sectors such as real estate.
In Xu’s telling, meanwhile, China is today so obsessed with fine-grained surveillance and social control that it is strangling itself economically and socially. The state-dominated economy is inefficient, household income is too low, China’s population is declining, and top-down control of personnel and ideology stymies innovation. The ongoing real estate slump, Xu suggests, could even spark “a financial and fiscal crisis.”
China posted a record $1.189 trillion trade surplus in 2025, which grew further in early 2026 despite U.S. tariffs. Meanwhile the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services rose to $57.3 billion in February 2026 with an over 15% contribution from China.
Yes America created a middle class by being the dominant manufacturing power, but our trade surplus remained below 1.6% of GDP after 1950 where China’s is over 6%. So even under normal circumstances this level of manufacturing for the world would not be healthy but now on top of that roughly 77% of Chinese jobs are highly susceptible to automation.
Where then does rise of China bullshit come from? It’s based on the same thinking that says AI will continue to grow smarter — things that rise continue to rise. With this thinking you can even reach the incredible conclusion that both AI and China will continue to rise at the same time even though the former means the end of almost all jobs in the latter.
When China release a propaganda video like above are people too stupid to understand that if robots are all that then China’s human labor is obsolete? No they are not — if you ask a cab driver about Waymo he will tell you he doesn’t like it and he is right. The video above isn’t aimed at the 77% of China that might lose their jobs but rather the other 23% that is on top and think they will stay there.
Unfortunately for China’s upper class there is not much reason to think they can pull that off. No matter what musical chairs Xi Jinping plays with military leadership, if China cannot bring more of its society into the fold then its “rise” (which again was just basic industrialization) is over.