China, the world’s second-largest economy, presents a clear long-term danger to our civilization and its values.

In New Geography, Joel Kotkin acknowledges that America faces challenges from

not only with China, but with other cultures including worldwide Islam, South America and Russia. But of these competitors, only China, the world’s second-largest economy, presents a clear long-term danger to our civilization and its values.

…China’s wealth, married to political discipline, has made its appeal irresistible to large portions of the American corporate and political elite. Some of our most powerful firms consistently kowtow to suppression of human rights, most recently in Hong Kong as well as in mass incarcerations in Xinjiang. The pathetic bleating for China by NBA stars like LeBron James exposes how lucre influences even the most self-righteous social justice warriors. It’s remarkable how many powerful political voices, and woke academia, ignore the harsh reality of the Chinese police state.

This disconnect runs through large parts of the political class. The hapless Joe Biden earlier this year stated China was “not competition” for the United States even as his family sought to enrich themselves there. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that President Xi is “not a dictator” since he has to listen to his “constituents.” Sure, that also applied to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, each of whom employed huge resources both to cultivate the adulation of the masses and repress dissent.

…Chinese history lacks examples of a politically successful middle class winning in a rules-based democracy. It never embraced, as did Japan and other East Asian states, the primary lodestones of liberal civilization, such as individual and property rights. It represents instead an alternative to liberal capitalism, one that is being inculcated in its own population and also exported to universities and governments around the world.

…Mao’s portrait may still grace the yuan currency, but “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has created massive inequality. The country is now more unequal than Mexico, Brazil and Kenya as well as the United States and virtually all of Europe. In today’s China, about 1,300 individuals hold roughly 20 percent of the country’s wealth and the top 1 percent has roughly a third of it — while much of the country, particularly in the countryside, still lives at the brink of poverty.

…Among all our competitors, only China, home to nine of the world’s 20 biggest tech firms, presents any kind of challenge to American and Western economic preeminence. The regime intends to use this technology to expand its control by employing facial recognition systems to modulate behavior in ways approved by the state. By 2020 China is expected to deploy over 400 million surveillance cameras in cities across the country.

Often with the connivance of Western tech firms, China also seeks to harvest biometric data, track smartphones and impose a compulsory satellite-tracking system for vehicles. Brain-monitoring devices are becoming increasingly common in Chinese factories, ostensibly to improve productivity. It’s more likely, of course, meant to tap into and shape the thoughts of their potentially rebellious workers. As MIT researcher Christina Larson puts it, “Who needs democracy when you have data?”

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