My Take | China and the United States are ‘mirror images of each other’

The leaders of two of the world’s most powerful countries had a dig at each other last week. In an address to top Communist Party cadres and government officials, President Xi Jinping touted a “brand new form of human civilisation” as China offered a non-Western model of economic development for other countries.

However, in his State of the Union speech, his American counterpart, Joe Biden, claimed democracies had strengthened and autocracies had weakened, presumably during his presidency, while no one would want Xi’s job.

Hardliners on both sides tend to emphasise their differences. But in the words of Yuen Yuen Ang, a politics professor at Johns Hopkins University, the two countries are “mirror images of each other”.

One of the most interesting discussions I have come across recently on the openly hostile relationship between the two countries has been a New York Times podcast interview with Ang.

At a fundamental level, she argues, both China and the United States are trying to resolve the problems of capitalism. I think she is exactly right. From that perspective, a good deal of recent developments, such as Xi’s crackdown on key sectors of the domestic economy and Biden’s turn to industrial policy and the “reshoring” and “friend-shoring” of industrial capabilities and supply chains, suddenly make a lot of sense; and even their different conceptions of freedom and social cohesion.

Following previous social scientists, Ang distinguishes between state and society, which includes the economy. Americans believe society/economy can only be free when the state is kept out of it, or at least as much as possible. That’s free-market capitalism, which is an end in itself. Chinese, however, see capitalism as a means – to national power and domestic prosperity. As opposed to the invisible hand, the strong arm of the state is needed to guide it.