U.S. democracy is viewed as failing, while Chinese governance is seen as succeeding. And while Trump’s presidency may be a symptom of that trend, it’s not the cause.
The largest geopolitical contest ever seen in human history – the China-U.S. contest – will accelerate and gain momentum in the coming decades. As I documented in my book “Has China Won?” this contest is driven by deep structural forces. American and Chinese presidents may come and go, but the contest will continue – of this, there’s no doubt.
What is doubtful is who will win: China or the United States?
There’s also no doubt about the critical factor that will determine the outcome of this contest. This was best spelled out by George Kennan way back in 1947 when he was advising his fellow Americans what would ultimately determine the outcome of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. He said that for the U.S. to succeed, it was vital for Americans to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.”
In the end, Kennan proved to be remarkably prescient. The United States won the Cold War against the Soviet Union not because of its military arsenal, but because U.S. society was undoubtedly more vibrant than Soviet society. Indeed, the Soviet Union’s GDP, even at its peak, never exceeded 40 to 50 percent of U.S. GDP. Even more critically, the American people saw a greater improvement in their standard of living than their Soviet counterparts did. Given this stunning success in the Cold War, many Americans, including thoughtful American commentators, assume that the United States will also naturally succeed in the contest against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This conventional wisdom in leading American minds is based on three fundamental assumptions, all of which need to be reconsidered. The first is that U.S. democracy is in a healthy state and is inherently superior to any non-democratic system like China’s. The second is that the CCP cannot possibly create a good society with “spiritual vitality” in China. The third is that the rest of the world, which makes up around 80 percent of the world’s population, will naturally admire the U.S. system over the Chinese system.
American Democracy
After the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 and his track record in the early months of his presidency in 2025, many American liberals have begun to worry about the state of U.S. democracy. Here’s what a few leading voices have said.
Tom Friedman wrote in July 2024, before Trump was re-elected, much less in office: “Just because we managed to barely survive the Trump stress test to our constitutional order once – not without some serious damage – does not mean our democracy can survive another four Trump years with his now Supreme Court-fortified sense of impunity.” David Ignatius argued in March 2025, “There is a sickening symmetry to President Donald Trump’s actions: While undermining U.S. democracy at home, he is also trying to end U.S. government support for democracy abroad.” Paul Krugman said in February 2025 that he was worried “that 2024 may have been our last real election… maybe historians will look back and say that American democracy ended in January 2025.”
Yet even though the Trump presidency has raised some challenges, U.S. democracy was being severely challenged long before Trump was elected, much less re-elected. Indeed, many leading American voices, including Paul Volcker, Joseph Stiglitz, and Martin Wolf, had warned years ago that the United States had functionally become a plutocracy. By definition, a plutocracy is the opposite of a democracy, as it serves to improve the lives of a tiny minority of Americans and not the majority.
The evidence is clear that this has happened. An important paper by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman from 2018 demonstrated how the stagnation of the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population “contrasts sharply with the upsurge of income” of the top 1 percent. For the bottom 50 percent of Americans, their share of pre-tax income declined from about 21 percent of the national total to 13 percent from 1970 to 2014, while the share of income of the top 1 percent increased from 9 percent to 20 percent in the same period. In other words, 1 percent of Americans now earn more than half of the country put together – by a wide margin.
In addition, the share of household wealth held by the top 0.1 percent went from 8.9 percent to 13.6 percent, while the share held by the bottom 50 percent went down from 3.8 percent to 2.5 percent. You can see, therefore, that the United States’ people are not benefiting from democracy.
The adverse economic trends for the majority of Americans have in turn led to deteriorating social conditions for the American people. Quite shockingly, in June 2024 conservative British-American commentator Niall Ferguson pointed out that many social indicators in the United States today mirror those of the Soviet Union, including severe declines in life expectancy and public confidence in institutions. “Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway,” Ferguson lamented.
He backed this claim with sobering figures:
“The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries… between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths – again of working-age Americans – over the same period… This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.”
Ferguson added, “In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”
The big question is this: how did a “democratic” American political system allow such a deterioration of the social condition of the masses? Two Princeton University economists, Martin Giles and Benjamin Page, have provided an answer. They studied the relative influence that average Americans have had on public policy outcomes compared to economic elites. Their conclusions are depressing:
“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy… Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of ‘affluent’ citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do… In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
The most critical statement made by Giles and Page is worth repeating: “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule.”
When the majority does not rule, the U.S. political system has failed to function as a democracy. It has become a functional plutocracy. As Trump himself put it in 2015, “I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they [politicians] call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
This clear statement by Trump would seem to imply that he is aware that the system is broken and that something should be done about it. However, Trump won’t support the obvious solution – to curb the power of the rich plutocrats – since he’s part of that class himself. Instead, Trump is imposing tariffs on other countries with the goal of shifting manufacturing back to the United States. This, he believes, would create jobs to help out the working classes, especially the White working classes.
Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to work. Tariffs alone won’t bring back manufacturing. They will have to be combined with a comprehensive national industrial policy that provides incentives for manufacturing in the U.S. as well as generous worker retraining programs. Unfortunately, no such industrial policy is in the works. Most economists thus agree that Trump’s tariffs won’t bring jobs back to the United States. They will neither help the working classes nor overcome the challenge of eradicating plutocracy.
All this confirms the wisdom of David Brooks’ observation that Donald Trump “is the wrong answer to the right question.”
Until the fundamental challenge of overturning this functional plutocracy has been overcome, the United States will face a major disadvantage in the competition with China. As David Ignatius argued in 2022, “If we can’t get our act together to make decisions and keep the country solid and cohesive, no way we’re going to be able to compete with the Chinese.”
The Chinese Governance System
In contrast to the deteriorating social conditions of the American masses, the Chinese people have seen massive improvements in their social conditions in the four decades since the Four Modernizations were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. According to World Bank data, from 1979 to 2022, China’s life expectancy at birth increased from 64 to 79, while infant mortality dropped from 49 to 5 per 1,000 live births. GDP per capita (in current U.S. dollars) skyrocketed from $184 to over $12,600. The percentage of the Chinese population living at the poverty line of $2.15 a day was 72 percent in 1990; by 2017, it had dropped to 0 percent. The adult literacy rate was just 66 percent in 1982; by 2020, it was 97 percent.
Indeed, several Western commentators have acknowledged that the Chinese people have made extraordinary progress in recent decades. In an October 2024 article in International Security assessing China’s great power status, Professor Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College wrote, “China on most dimensions is not only a great power but a superpower.” Its gains were perhaps most impressive on the economic front:
“China’s economic growth since the 1980s has shocked the world. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated economic reforms in 1979 and improved its political relations with the West, the economy grew at about 10 percent per year until 2018. China’s economy doubled in size every eight years during the 1979–2018 period. As a result, the size of China’s economy has overtaken that of the U.S. economy (measured in GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity, which accounts for lower prices in China). In nominal or market terms, China has the world’s second-largest GDP after the United States… China’s economic capabilities already well exceed not only the median but the normal range for a great power.”
Lind also argued that China has become one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries; has reached great power status in terms of military capabilities; and has grown its international status and influence significantly.
Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution wrote, “China’s economic impact is powerful. But so too is its example. The country has become a showcase of what open markets can achieve. It is reinvigorating the debate on how trade can reduce global poverty.”
Ajay Banga, head of the World Bank, also outlined China’s extraordinary social progress over the past few decades:
“In 1978, 770 million people in China lived on the razor’s edge of extreme poverty. Nearly every single person – 98 percent – in the rural countryside were below the poverty line. But, the same year, China launched a determined strategy to embrace difficult reforms that fundamentally changed its development trajectory… In the decades that followed, China’s workforce grew by two-thirds, creating 315 million jobs – more than 8 million per year for 38 years straight. This explosive job growth coincided with the country’s fastest period of poverty reduction in history. China’s success was so significant it was responsible for cutting the global poverty rate from 44 percent to nine.”
In Western eyes, all these improvements in the economic and social conditions of the Chinese people can’t make up for the lack of political freedom. It’s true that the Chinese don’t have the ability to vote for or vote against the Chinese government. However, they do have the freedom to vote with their feet. If they feel oppressed, they are generally free to leave China and migrate to other countries.
To prevent this, the former Soviet Union prevented its citizens from traveling freely overseas as “tourists.” By contrast, China allows its people to do so. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), in 2019, the last year before COVID-19 struck, Chinese households made 168 million cross-border trips. Chinese traveled overseas freely and returned home freely.
In short, there are many signs that most Chinese people can live with the constrained political system they have.
It’s true that many Chinese still choose to migrate overseas, including to the United States. Yet, what used to be a one-way street of human migration to the U.S. has become a two-way street of migration. What’s truly surprising is that many leading Chinese scholars in the United States, including many who had long-term tenure positions in leading Ivy League universities, have chosen to return home to China. They include nuclear physicist Liu Chang from Princeton, physicist Gao Huajian who previously taught at Stanford, and mathematician Sun Song from the University of California, Berkeley.
Renowned Chinese-American mathematician Yau Shing-Tung, who retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach at Tsinghua University, argued, “This exodus is unfortunate for the U.S. as it could diminish its research capabilities. For China, the return of these scientists means it is gaining top talent, but it also results in weakened ties with the U.S. and a loss of first-hand knowledge of advanced technologies.”
And the cause is clear: not only China’s progress, but regression in the United States. As the South China Morning Post reported, “In a survey of 1,300 US-based scientists of Chinese descent conducted between late 2021 and early 2022, 72 percent of respondents said they did not feel safe as academic researchers. And 61 percent said they had thought about leaving the United States for either Asian or non-Asian countries.”
Finally, when foreign observers try to benchmark the Chinese political system, they shouldn’t compare it just with foreign systems. They should benchmark it against its predecessors. Here, one fact is undeniable. In terms of improving living standards, the Chinese people have enjoyed the best 40 years in 4,000 years of Chinese history. This also explains the great pride many Chinese feel, contributing to the “spiritual vitality” of Chinese society.
Is America or China More Admired by the World?
Most Americans assume that in global public opinion, the United States must naturally be a more admired nation than China since it is democratic, and China is run by a communist party. Indeed, when U.S. politicians pour scorn on China and its political system, they assume that these views must be shared by the rest of the world.
For example, Marco Rubio (then a senator, now the U.S. secretary of state) wrote in 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, “If we rise to the occasion, the Chinese Communist Party will surely meet its just end in time, and July 1 will then be observed as a day of mourning in a free, democratic China. Until that day arrives, let us take a moment to reflect on, and pray for, the brave Chinese – as well as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians – who have suffered under the CCP.”
Unlike Rubio, most foreign visitors to China do not see the Chinese people suffering. They see them thriving.
There are two big facts about our world that many Americans aren’t aware of. First, only 12 percent of the world’s population lives in the West; 88 percent lives outside the West. Broadly speaking, they are described as the “Global South.” The second fact is that the Global South doesn’t share the black and white attitudes of Western countries when passing judgements on democratic versus autocratic states. They have a more sophisticated understanding of the relative merits of U.S. and Chinese societies.
This sophistication is a result of greater access to information. One of the biggest transformations that has taken place in the human condition has happened as a result of the share of the world population connected to the internet skyrocketing from 0.05 percent in 1990 (when the Cold War ended) to 68 percent in 2024. Scenes of the daily lives of U.S. and Chinese people can now be seen in great detail by the vast majority of the world’s population. As a result, the long-term trend has been one of declining respect for the United States and rising respect for China.
It’s important to emphasize here that this trend was well underway before Trump was re-elected in November 2024. According to a global survey conducted by Pew Research across 16 countries in 2021, 80 percent of respondents no longer believe that the U.S. is a “good model for democracy.” On the other hand, a Pew Research survey in 2023 revealed that in the Global South, a substantial majority viewed China positively. In Nigeria and Kenya, for instance, 80 percent and 72 percent of the survey respondents, respectively, had positive views of China. This growth in respect for China in the Global South has been attributed to China’s successful infrastructure developments in several countries, as well as its provision of millions of doses of vaccines during COVID-19 to developing nations – in stark contrast with the West’s vaccine protectionism.
Many Americans, especially liberal Americans, would like to believe that the declining global respect for the United States is a temporary Trump-induced condition, which will be rectified when Americans elects its next Barack Obama. They should carefully re-examine this confident belief. At the end of the day, the intelligence of the Global South should not be underestimated. They are aware that the United States had evolved into a plutocracy long before Trump was elected and re-elected. They are also aware that in terms of assisting poor developing countries, especially in Africa, the United States has been pulling back, while China has been stepping up.
For instance, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has pushed back against criticisms of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) being a form of “debt-trap diplomacy,” arguing that “having a road that has problems in terms of financing would be better than having no road at all and no debt.” He added, “For someone to come and complain that you are [taking infrastructure loans] with China when you are not offering any alternative, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Equally importantly, when foreign visitors visit “rich” America and “developing” China, they are struck by the poor state of U.S. infrastructure (such as roads, railways, bridges, airports, and urban centers) compared to China’s infrastructure. Yet, this stark contrast in physical infrastructure represents only the tip of the iceberg. It’s a result of the declining competence in governance in the United States and the rising competence in governance in China. Hence, if George Kennan were alive today and if he were to visit the leading Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, he would be amazed by the contrast with their respective American counterparts like Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
There’s no question that the United States can bounce back from its present travails. It’s always a mistake to underestimate the great U.S. society. Yet, until that happens, the broad trend line is clear: greater global respect for China and declining global respect for America. U.S. democracy is viewed as failing, while Chinese governance is seen as succeeding. And while Trump’s presidency may be a symptom of that trend, it’s not the cause.