The China factor in the great progression of the next 25 years
- Over 35 years, China has shifted from steam-era rail and rural villages to nationwide high-speed electrification and megacities — a great leap forward in material progress.
- China now anchors the clean-tech supply chain, but coal reliance and an entrenched surveillance state complicate its rise.
- The U.S. strategy should be to cooperate with China on climate tech (with a fallback plan), avoid a new cold war, and compete to keep AI’s frontier advancing within open, democratic norms.
I first saw China a little more than 35 years ago during a train trip from Hong Kong to Chengdu, a city deep in the interior of the country near the mountains that rise up into Tibet. The train was powered by steam, and the trip took four days and nights, winding through the hills and small mountains.
The China I saw out of that train’s window was the same one a traveler could have seen 100 or more years prior. At the time of my visit, China was a nation of close to a billion rural peasants living in small villages and mostly growing rice in paddies as far as you could see. For an American like me, it was like traveling back in time.
I took that same train route a month ago, and instead of four days, the trip took just eight hours. The train was one of the new fully electric, high-speed ones that China now produces totally on its own. It blew through the mountains in long tunnels and often traveled at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour — faster than any train in America today or for the foreseeable future.
The countryside that whipped past me was completely transformed. The little villages near the tracks had been replaced by massive cities with densely clustered high-rise buildings.
In those intervening 35 years, China had moved 800 million rural peasants — living in extreme poverty on US$2 a day — into city apartments and integrated them into the global economy. Prior to this trip, I had understood that on an intellectual level (and had even dipped into China from time to time over the years), but the process of retracing my original steps drove home the thoroughness of the transformation.
The signs of the clean energy transition were clearly visible outside the train’s window, too. Everywhere I looked, I saw electric power lines strung up — these didn’t do much for the view, but they get the Chinese closer to an all-electric energy future with a high-capacity grid. I could see wind turbines and solar panels from the train’s windows, too, and during my visits to the cores of big cities like Shanghai and Beijing, I noticed that roughly half the cars on the roads were fully electric.
So, China deserves kudos for what it has done to dramatically upgrade the living conditions of its people and greatly reduce the number of humans living in extreme poverty.
China also deserves applause for what it has done to accelerate the transition to a clean energy all-electric future — not just for its people, but for the entire world. Last year, China produced 70% of the world’s electric vehicles and more than half of its solar panels. The nation’s cutting-edge manufacturing can be counted on to keep driving down the price of clean tech for all of us.
My trip to China this September also reminded me of the costs the nation paid to make this great leap forward in material progress. And it reminded me of the dangers for others thinking about following China’s authoritarian model in the years ahead.
I took that original train trip years ago roughly a month after the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. I was an independent foreign correspondent on contract with Newsweek magazine at the time, and because all of its key full-time staff correspondents were in Beijing or other key big cities, I decided to head to Tibet, a region of China then under martial law and off-limits to journalists. (I will explain more later on what I found in Tibet and how I ended up in a Chinese jail.)
For those readers who weren’t alive at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre (or need a refresher), in the spring of 1989, university students began camping out and protesting in Tiananmen Square, the central square in Beijing, China’s capital. They were calling for political reform and more individual freedom, and eventually, workers and regular citizens joined them. By the peak of the protests, one million people had gathered in the square and the surrounding streets.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party, then led by the aging Deng Xiaoping, declared martial law, and in early June, the army moved in with rifles and tanks and opened fire on the protesters and bystanders in the square and the surrounding streets. The Red Cross estimated that several thousand people were killed and thousands more injured or arrested. The movement was crushed, the student leaders imprisoned, and any mention of the incident is heavily censored within China to this day.
I started my 2025 trip in Hong Kong — once one of the most free-wheeling cities in Asia — and found it noticeably docile. What had happened to this place? The answer is that China had cracked down on another political movement, this one in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020.
The parallels between what happened around the protests in Tiananmen Square and the more recent actions against Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement — named for protesters’ use of umbrellas to stop tear gas — are striking, and they drive home the dark side of the politics behind this high-capacity state accelerating material progress.
The short version of what happened is that, after 150 years of colonial rule, the British handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 under the condition that Hong Kong would operate under a separate system of largely Western democracy and legal rights for another 50 years, meaning until 2047.
In 2019, the Communist Party on the Chinese mainland started changing the rules, first with a law (introduced through its proxies in Hong Kong) to allow Hong Kong citizens to be extradited back to the mainland for trial under its authoritarian system.
This prompted huge demonstrations in Hong Kong — at their peak, one million people were on the streets (out of a total population of 7.5 million). The protests broadened to include calls for greater democracy, universal suffrage, and protection of civil liberties.
Clashes between the protesters and police grew more confrontational until June 2020, when Beijing imposed a sweeping National Security Law that criminalized dissent under vague categories like “subversion” or “collusion with foreign forces.”
Many activists and journalists were imprisoned, press freedoms curtailed, organizations disbanded, and the Umbrella Movement was thoroughly crushed. Hong Kong’s political system was reengineered to ensure that only “patriots” loyal to Beijing could run in so-called elections.
So on this recent trip I also found that much in China has remained the same over the past 35 years when it comes to personal and political freedoms. China is still an incredibly powerful authoritarian state ruled by one man with supreme power: Xi Jinping.
Both Xi and Deng can take credit for driving material progress: Deng for initially shifting China toward a market economy, and Xi for driving much of the modernization I described above. But both men were ruthless in centralizing political control, brooking no dissent and crushing civil liberties, like free speech.
The problem for the rest of the world, as well as the Chinese people, is that the 72-year-old Xi is alive and well and has fixed the political system so he can be supreme leader for life.
Why that really matters is that the world has crossed the threshold into the AI Age with two clear superpowers: America and China. A China controlled by Xi will almost certainly devise a super-empowered authoritarian society that most people are not going to want to live in — and that system will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever reform.
So, I have some good news and some bad news as I return from my trip to China. Below are my initial thoughts on each side of that ledger, and they are not comprehensive — a thorough breakdown might take other essays and the space of my upcoming book.
The good news of great material progress for the Chinese people
In this series, I have frequently written about the parallels between today and the last time the world went through a fundamental reinvention, at the end of World War II 80 years ago.
I have mostly focused on the epic story of America’s reinvention and the restructuring of the world order in the form of the Pax Americana. And I have made the argument that the breakdown of those systems that prevailed for 80 years is part of a healthy but traumatic process of reinvention as we create new systems for the 21st century around our era’s world-historic tools of AI, clean energy, and bioengineering.
China wrote its own epic story during that same 80-year span. For them, it was all about modernizing a poor, backward nation of peasants into a prosperous, advanced nation that can take its rightful place in the world.
It pretty much wasted the first 35 years with civil wars and crazy schemes, like The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, which were born out of communist theories and failed miserably. Over the past 45 years, though, it has pulled off the fastest and most comprehensive modernization process the world has ever seen.
The really explosive growth and the bulk of the transformation happened in just the last 25 years, which should be an inspiration to us all. I’ve been making the case that America, the West, and the world could be heading into 25 years of great progress — the process will be traumatic but ultimately will bring us to a much better world.
Such a transformation is difficult, but it can be done. From what I could see, the Chinese people seem pretty happy with the dramatic upgrade in their material well-being. I was able to have frank private conversations with some of them, including members of the younger generation equivalent to our Millennials.
They were genuinely proud of what their country had done in the span of their lives and reasonably happy with their current material well-being, though uniformly frustrated with the high cost of housing despite all that frantic building.
The physical evidence of the transformation is undeniable. On my first visit, Shenzhen on the mainland just outside of Hong Kong was transitioning from a fishing village into a Special Economic Zone to assemble simple garments and toys for foreign companies. The nearby trading city of Guangzhou was just starting the same process.
When I traveled through them and the surrounding Pearl River Delta region this time, I found a megalopolis of more than 85 million people, arguably making it the largest continuous urban area on Earth. It was simply astounding to see so many high-rise buildings extending in all directions for miles upon miles.
The way the authoritarian Communist Party made this happen would be impossible to replicate in a modern liberal democracy — they did what people like Robert Moses did to build the interstate highway system through New York City in the 1950s, only on steroids.
All that new housing, those high-speed train lines, the new terminals in all major cities, the freeways, and the power lines were cleared by government decree using China’s version of eminent domain.
In China, the government owns all the land, and people who own a house or an apartment in those high-rise buildings can only get a long-term lease on the land below it. The government can take the land back anytime and give you what it deems the right compensation for it.
There is no way for a person to object or sue, let alone demand an environmental impact statement to slow things down. That is the downside for individuals — but the upside is that China gets shit done.
China’s clean energy transition is stupendous and the world needs it
One area where China getting shit done has implications for all of us is in its scaling of clean energy technologies.
China is building a 21st century electric grid, and not just in its big cities. I took high-speed trains across the wide spans of China, and the electrification is nationwide, with high-capacity power lines everywhere.
The power running through them is increasingly shifting to renewables. Last year, China installed 277 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity, which is half of all the solar added globally in 2024.
That said, China is still generating roughly 60% of its electrical power from coal, which it can mine within its national boundaries. And China is the biggest emitter of CO2 by far, responsible for up to 32% of the world’s emissions, compared to 14% from the U.S.
So, we can’t applaud China too much, but we can keep encouraging it to scale up that clean energy transition. We need it to transition as fast as it possibly can for the sake of the planet’s climate. It’s totally in China’s strategic interest to wean off coal for its own environmental reasons and to leapfrog to clean energies since it has no natural gas or oil reserves.
China is building about half of the world’s new nuclear capacity currently, and last year, it installed about 60% of all new wind capacity in the world, too. Its installed wind power generation is about 560 GW, making it by far the largest in the world.
And then there’s electric vehicles. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it seemed like half the cars in the core of big cities like Beijing and Shanghai were fully electric. You can easily tell because they have distinct green license plates that make them easy to spot.
Why the fast consumer uptake? Because China has no oil, it’s in its interest to leapfrog to electric, so the government recently installed policies that made an electric car easier to buy and cheaper to license than a traditional gas car.
On the production side, China has about 100 new electric car companies — the situation is reminiscent of the automotive industry free-for-all in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. Electric car showrooms from various companies with names you have never heard of are in many shopping and strip malls.
Electric vehicles accounted for 50% of all new car sales in China in 2024. The world produced 17 million electric cars that same year — and 70% of those were produced in China.
China is the superpower driving the clean energy transition, particularly now that President Donald Trump is dismantling all the good work President Joe Biden did on that front. The world needs China to now maximize the scaling.
For that matter, I think the big-picture look at the situation is that China has cracked the code on the entire clean energy transition — with the exception of the ultimate fusion energy.
It has assembled all the engineering prowess and fine-tuned the manufacturing process to get us to the point where clean energy is now cheaper than carbon energy — and it will keep dropping in price as China continues to scale.
Though it still has a lot of ground to cover, China has tipped in the massive clean energy transition. This is great for them, and it could be great for us all.
The bad news of freedoms and the authoritarian trajectory going forward
I did eventually make it to Tibet that first time I was in China 35 years ago, despite the entire region being locked under martial law.
No one knew who I was when I applied for a visa or crossed the border — this was before the internet enabled any search of that kind — and as I roamed the country, no official knew where I was or anything I was doing or saying.
I eventually witnessed a mass protest of Tibetans outside the summer palace of the Dalai Lama — the exiled religious leader of Tibetan Buddhism — in Lhasa. I started taking photographs as the Chinese military broke through the resisting crowds and grabbed the ringleaders, who were a bunch of Buddhist nuns.
I took advantage of the confusion to swap out the canister of film that captured all the key shots and slap in another empty one. I slipped the key canister to my girlfriend (now wife), who crotched it.
I was soon arrested because the military had seen this tall foreigner taking photos, but they had not seen my sleight of hand. When they got me to the jail for questioning, I opened the back of the camera and exposed the film, thereby destroying the evidence.
The police were mad since I had, in fact, destroyed the evidence, so they took all the other canisters I had on me. The problem was there was no way to develop film in the capital city of Lhasa at that time. They needed to send the canisters back to Chengdu to pull that off, and they figured that would take a week.
They eventually let me go, and I made it back to my girlfriend and the hidden canister of film that mattered. We then headed overland to the western border with Nepal, where we easily got out of China. Those officials on that remote border didn’t even have a phone to get a heads-up.
We got the photos out, and I wrote a bunch of stories, which featured one key shot that you can see just below.
What I just described to you would be absolutely impossible to do today. During my 2025 trip, my passport was scanned not only to cross China’s border, but every time I entered or exited a train. For foreigners, passports are scanned at hotels, museums, and similar places. China knew exactly where I was and when.
We foreigners can temporarily live with that level of surveillance, but it’s constant for Chinese citizens — they have to scan their national ID cards in the same way I used my passport in all the same places.
In Beijing, I wanted to visit Tsinghua University, which is considered the MIT of China and one of the nation’s AI hubs. Students needed to scan their cards at every entrance to the campus, and anyone hoping to visit it, even to just walk around, needed to apply a week in advance. There is no way that students would ever be able to gather to protest like they did in Tiananmen Square.
Video cameras are everywhere, and facial recognition software is routinely used, even to open public lockers that you rent to store your personal belongings. (They know you are there, too.)
I had a private conversation with a 42-year-old woman who was born and raised in Shanghai. She said you used to have to closely watch your purse in the city to keep pickpockets from grabbing it and running off. With the arrival of video surveillance over the last 10 years, all that minor criminal activity has disappeared. She was somewhat glad not to worry about theft, but also pretty concerned about where all this surveillance would lead.
And then, of course, there is the pervasive online surveillance and censorship. She said that, during the pandemic, she posted some relatively mild comments about being frustrated with the government on WeChat, which is a Chinese app that combines group messaging (like our WhatsApp) and social media (like our X).
She was kicked off the platform for three months and had to make a case to officials for why she should be let back on, which she eventually was.
All this was before the real arrival of AI.
The arrival of AI and the need for a new grand strategy for America
I saw signs of AI surfacing in public ways as I traveled. The photo above marks a neighborhood in Shanghai that’s home to clusters of AI startups. When I took the one below, I was in a comparable neighborhood in Beijing — that image is of the Tsinghua University Science Park (TusPark) complex that houses AI startups outside Tsinghua University.
Those scenes looked very corporate and official, like something blessed by the government, and I could not find any of the scrappy bottom-up startup activity that is pervasive in my base of San Francisco.
As for signs of AI in the media or the general public, the tech does not seem to be generating nearly the same amount of excitement or fear in China as it is in America. To be fair, I don’t speak Mandarin, and so might be misreading the signs that I did see.
My hunch, though, is that the arrival of AI is complicated for the Chinese people. They might see some of the same positive possibilities that we do, but they also can see how such tools could supercharge surveillance.
I think that AI developed within China almost certainly is going to help empower and prolong the control of the Communist Party for the foreseeable future, probably through all 25 years of the Great Progression.
I think that is something those of us outside of China have to come to terms with, and I think the Chinese people probably think it, too. There are so few signs of any internal resistance or push for reform even now — and that’s before we see AI start to really bite.
The purpose of my recent trip to China was partly to get better clarity about a new grand strategy for America. I have been developing this strategy as part of the new grand narrative for the world that will become my next book, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
I came back with a much clearer sense of that strategy. It will take more essays and, ultimately, the book to fully lay it out, but here’s some of the basic set of ideas to be developed:
A key part of the reinvention of the systems that defined the world of the last 80 years is that we have to get beyond the frame of a cold war with a global adversary as a driver of progress.
China is not Russia, and it would be a much more formidable adversary in both a cold war or a hot one. We don’t want to go there.
The Chinese and American economies are infinitely more entwined than the separate worlds of Soviet communism and the free world were during the Cold War. To fully disentangle them would set both sides — and the whole world — back decades.
If we take a planetary perspective — what is in the best interests of human beings on planet Earth — we need China to help the world transition to a clean energy future and turn the corner on climate change before it’s too late.
It’s highly unlikely that America or any other nation will be able to replicate the manufacturing juggernaut China has established to scale climate tech.
America should basically cede that key technology of the Great Progression to Chinese global leadership. It should develop a Plan B that would allow it to build out its own clean tech industries if necessary, like it does with essential military technologies. But, in general, it should just buy and use increasingly cheap Chinese clean tech going forward.
America should play to its strengths and focus on the next huge technological frontier of artificial intelligence — the main transformative technology of the Great Progression. That’s where all the real innovation is needed. Clean tech is pretty much figured out.
The world needs AI to be developed within an open, pluralistic, free democracy — and not an authoritarian state.
Everyone needs to accept that the Communist Party is probably going to control China for the next 25 years and that the development of its authoritarian version of AI is going to ensure it stays in power.
But that top-down control, the absence of mechanisms for changing course, and the lack of freedoms that open up real innovation will probably also ensure that the Chinese will not be able to lead the way globally on AI.
All this assumes that America and the West do not backslide into their own versions of authoritarianism. I feel confident they will not, and I see many signs that the backsliding is starting to bottom out and that the rebound will soon begin. But that will take another essay to lay out.
