I'm Not Concerned About China and Neither Should You Be

China-bashing has become a very popular sport in the West in general and the US in particular, but I think it’s really stupid, so I want to explain why I’m not concerned about China and why you shouldn’t be either. For instance, after the Chinese company DeepSeek released a model that has capabilities roughly on a par with models at the frontier produced by US companies, but was trained at a much lower cost, a ton of people immediately started downplaying the company’s achievement by pointing out that DeepSeek engages in censorship.¹ For instance, if you ask the model to answer a question about the Tiananmen massacre or anything else that might embarrass the Chinese government, it will refuse to answer it. In fact, that’s only true if you query the model on DeepSeek’s website, because the censorship is not in the weights of the model itself and, since the model is open source, anyone can download the weights and run it from another computer, free of censorship. [EDIT: Actually, I thought this was the case because when I tried to run the version of DeepSeek-R1 hosted on Perplexity, it answered the question about Tiananmen without any issue, but I just tried with a distilled version I can run locally on my computer and it refused to answer it. This means that, contrary to what I wrote initially, some of the censorship is encoded in the weights of the model itself, presumably through post-training. I don’t understand how Perplexity was able to remove that bias though, but it can’t be that complicated, because they managed to do it very quickly.] In fact, other providers such as Perplexity have already deployed the model on their platform, so even people who lack any kind of technical ability can use DeepSeek’s model without any censorship.

Meanwhile, US companies like OpenAI also have “ethical safeguards”, which are not part of their model’s weights, but manipulate their output to ensure that it’s politically correct. This isn’t the same thing as straight up refusing to talk about certain issues, but it’s arguably more pernicious, because at least when a model just tells you that it can’t talk about what you asked it about you immediately understand what is going on. On the other hand, with the kind of things OpenAI and Western companies do, the average user has no idea that the output of the model has been tweaked to make sure it’s consistent with the ideology of the people who are employed in their ethics department. Moreover, OpenAI doesn’t release the weights of its models, so there is no way to go around those “ethical safeguards”. Finally, whereas DeepSeek has no choice but to engage in that kind of censorship because otherwise the people who run it will be thrown in prison, nobody is forcing Western companies to add “ethical safeguards” to their model.

But that’s not even the most important point or what really annoys me with that kind of reaction. The reason why I’m talking about this episode is that it illustrates the fact that many people in the West, especially in the US but not only, have a pathological obsession with China. They use ridiculously overblown rhetoric such as “totalitarian slave empire” to describe it, cast in a dark light anything that comes out of it and constantly engage in fear-mongering about it. The view I want to defend in this essay is that China haters vastly exaggerate not only the threat posed to the West by China but also how bad the Chinese government is relative to the US and other Western governments, devote far more attention to that threat and the Chinese government’s flaws relative to other problems than is warranted and, even if most of them don’t realize it, do all that not out of concern for human rights but out of American or Western chauvinism, because they want the US or the West to remain on top and can’t come to terms with the fact that American and Western dominance will not remain as undisputed as it used to be.

In practice, however bad you may think China is, there is nothing it can do to the West that even comes close to the harm we can do to ourselves. For instance, people in the West are constantly swimming in propaganda that is entirely homegrown and, while government-enforced censorship is relatively uncommon (although it also exists), people constantly engage in self-censorship on various topics that people in China and other dictatorships can discuss freely, but somehow Western liberals are trying to convince me that what I should be really concerned about is Chinese propaganda and censorship, despite the fact that it has virtually no effect on us and that we can’t do anything about it. I live in France and, for as long as I can remember, I’ve heard French intellectuals, elected and non-elected government officials, journalist and celebrities repeat absurd lies or propaganda slogans that almost nobody believes, such as “immigration has nothing to do with crime”, while people regularly engage in self-censorship on the same topics because they don’t want to be socially ostracized.

Sure, it’s not as bad as being arrested for saying what you think or reading stuff the government doesn’t want you to read, but it’s still pretty bad and the people who constantly talk about how bad Chinese propaganda and censorship, which again has virtually no effect on us and that we can’t do anything about, never talk about that. Now, that’s not particularly surprising given that Western liberals, who are both the main agents and the main victims of that propaganda, tend to be completely oblivious to it, but that doesn’t make their behavior any more rational. Of course, I still prefer to live in a Western democracy than in China, but how is that relevant? It’s not as if anyone, not even China, were trying to turn France or the US into a one-party state and, even if that were the case, it would have no chance of happening with or without Chinese help. I would prefer if the Chinese could also live in a democracy, but I also don’t think it’s my problem and, in any case, there is nothing I or even the West as a whole can do about it. If the Chinese want democracy, they will have to get it themselves.

I should also make clear, because this is relevant to my claim that Western liberals exaggerate how bad China is, that if I prefer to live in a Western democracy than in China, that’s not because in a democracy I get to choose how I’m governed, since I don’t. In a democracy, just as in any other regime, there are people who rule and people who are ruled. Democracy has not somehow abolished that distinction and, in that respect at least, it’s just like any other regime. Government may be somewhat more responsive in a democracy, although that’s hardly obvious and I think the evidence for that view is relatively weak, but in any case even in a democracy the ruling elite often ignores people’s preferences. For instance, the overwhelming majority of the population in France has been clamoring against immigration for decades, but it has continued unabated.² Yet somehow this doesn’t seem to trouble most of the people who constantly talk about how bad the Chinese have it because they don’t get to choose how they’re governed. In reality, democracy is not a method of government, but a method of legitimation. Elections are not really a mechanism by which people choose how they are governed, but the mechanism we use to confer legitimacy on the government, which can’t operate no matter the nature of the regime without the consent of the governed or at least without the consent of enough of them.³

The reason why elections can do that is not because they’re actually a way for people to govern themselves, which they’re not, but because people believe they are and in general are deeply committed to the fiction that democracy is government “of the people, for the people, by the people”. This myth is to democracy what the doctrine of the divine right of kings was to monarchy or what the doctrine of the Party’s role as the vanguard of the proletariat was to the Bolshevik regime. Of course, that’s not to say that democratic governments don’t respond at all to people’s preferences and that elections don’t play a role in the relevant mechanisms, but non-democratic governments are also responsive to people’s preferences to some extent even if the mechanisms are different and elections generally play a much smaller role in them. You can argue that, as a form of political organization, democracy is superior to a one-party state like China, but that’s not because there is anything more “natural” about elections as a method of legitimation and certainly not because democracy has somehow abolished the distinction between the people who rule and the people who are ruled. If you ask me, the reason why democracy is superior to the alternatives is that, for the most part, it makes it possible for people to say and read what they want without risking being thrown in prison or losing their property.⁴

So I’m not saying that democracy is not valuable, I’m just saying that, if democracy is valuable, that’s not because it allows people to govern themselves, which is a fiction.⁵ China haters tend to overestimate how much better people in Western democracies have it because, in addition to the real benefits of democracy, they ascribe to it imaginary ones. In other words, I’m not making a false equivalence between China and Western democracies (which probably won’t prevent some logically challenged people from making that accusation), I’m just pointing out that the difference, while real and important, is not as large as people think. Besides, whatever else may be said about the Popular Republic of China (at least since Deng Xiaoping took over after Mao’s death), it’s hardly a uniquely bad dictatorship since, its violations of human rights notwithstanding, it has at least improved the population’s standard of living and even achieved the largest reduction of poverty in history. I don’t think it had to be a dictatorship to do that, but most authoritarian governments are not more respectful of human rights and can’t boast of the same track-record, yet as long as they’re geopolitically aligned with the West it doesn’t seem to bother China haters very much.

Which brings me to the next topic. Even when they’re not trying to scare me by talking about how China isn’t a democracy, people also try to convince me that I should be very concerned about Chinese foreign policy, but they never explain why. This is a very complicated issue, which I could only address seriously by devoting a separate essay to it, but I nevertheless want to make a few remarks about it here. The most common argument that people who argue that we should worry about China’s foreign policy is that it might invade Taiwan. Now, I certainly don’t deny that it’s the case, but I also don’t see why someone in the West should be particularly concerned about this. China hawks argue that it would be extremely disruptive because Taiwan dominates the market for the most advanced semiconductors, but I think we’d adjust relatively quickly and that in any case that’s not worth risking a war between the US and China, which would be immensely more disruptive for the West and the rest of the world. Of course, China hawks argue that it wouldn’t happen because their policy would deter China, but I actually think it would make a Chinese more likely because, to cut a long story short, a US pledge to defend Taiwan would be interpreted in a threatening way by China yet it would probably not be credible.

Moreover, if a Chinese attempt to change the status quo in Taiwan could be disruptive, that’s mostly because the US is being deliberately ambiguous about whether it would intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion or blockade of the island. Indeed, the truth is that, if the US made it clear that it would not and that Taiwan is on its own, the Taiwanese would probably cave and make some kind of deal with China rather than face it alone and, even if they tried, it would probably be over relatively quickly. I know people will bring up the failure of Russia’s initial assault against Ukraine to deny that, but that’s just stupid because, even putting aside the fact that Ukraine isn’t looking too hot at the moment despite the fact that it’s not alone but has the backing of NATO, the gap in power between China and Taiwan is on a completely different scale from that between Russia and Ukraine.⁶ Now, I know that Taiwan is an island, which makes it easier to defend than Ukraine other things being equal. But other things are obviously not equal, because at the end of the day it’s still a country of 23 million that, in the scenario I’m talking about here, would have to fight a nation of 1.4 billion that spends more than 10 times as much on defense even before one adjusts for price differences.⁷

At this point, people in the anti-China crowd are going to reply that I’m selfish and a horrible person for not caring about Taiwan, but even putting aside the fact that in doing so they’ll be moving the goalposts (remember how the original claim was that I should be concerned by China’s plan to subjugate Taiwan on the ground that it would have terrible consequences for the West?), I just want to point out that, to call a spade a spade, they are full of shit. As I write this, there are many conflicts elsewhere in the world that are far worse than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be, at least if the US stays out of it, yet none of the people who are constantly waxing lyrical about the plight of the Taiwanese people rarely if ever say a word about them and certainly don’t clamor for a military intervention to prevent the killing. How often do you hear the people who insist that the US should commit to defend Taiwan against China say that Washington should intervene in the Sudanese civil war, which has already killed far more people than a Chinese invasion of Taiwan ever would? When do you think is the last time any of them has spared a thought for the people that Rwanda-backed rebels in eastern Congo have been massacring for years? I could go on for a while.

In fact, in some cases (such as the crimes that Israel has been committing against Palestinians for decades with active support from the US and other Western nations), the same people often don’t just ignore human rights violations and aggression but often go out of their way to justify it, so you’ll have to forgive me if I have a hard time taking seriously their moral lectures. Indeed, unlike a Chinese invasion of Taiwan (which hasn’t happened yet and may never happen, especially if the US doesn’t mislead the Taiwanese into believing it can protect them from China), those conflicts are not merely hypothetical but are actually happening at the moment and sometimes have been happening for years if not decades, so if they’re so concerned about human rights violations and injustice committed against innocent people, you’d think they would talk more about them, but they barely mention them at all.⁸ Don’t get me wrong, it sucks for the Taiwanese and I obviously don’t think they deserve to be reunified with China against their will, but I would also be lying if I said that it’s keeping me up at night. However, the plight of the Taiwanese is obviously not what’s keeping China haters at night either, otherwise there wouldn’t be such a perfect harmony between their foreign policy obsessions and geopolitical alignment with the West.

Another claim people make to argue that we should oppose a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, which I find more honest than pretending that it’s because they care about the plight of the Taiwanese, is that even if Taiwan’s reunification with China wouldn’t affect the West much per se, it would pave the way for China’s achievement of regional hegemony and this would eventually lead to Chinese world hegemony or at least allow China to take steps that would adversely affect the West in a major way. The problem with that argument is that we aren’t told exactly what China would do that would be so terrible for the West once it has taken over Taiwan and how it would do it. It’s obviously not going to invade the US, Europe or even Japan. I guess we can’t rule out that it might invade another of its neighbors, this would hardly be the first time, but it has shown little inclination toward a program of territorial conquest so far and even if eventually it did invade Vietnam again for instance, that would hardly be very disruptive for the West and certainly not so disruptive that we should risk a war with China over Taiwan to preclude such a very hypothetical scenario.⁹ China hawks often talk about how a takeover of Taiwan would allow China to control the South China Sea, which as they like to point out is a major trade route, but much more rarely explain why that would be so terrible for the West. Do they think that China is going to wake up one day and decide to interdict foreign cargo ships from operating in the area? Most of the trade that goes through the South China Sea is probably to or from China, so it would only harm itself in the process.

Unless China hawks can not only say exactly what China might do once it controls Taiwan that would be so bad for the West that it’s worth risking war between the US and China to prevent it, but also how it would do it, I don’t see why anyone should take seriously what they’re saying. However, I don’t think they can answer that question, which is why instead they make vague claims about hegemony and shipping lanes. Besides, I don’t think it’s realistic for the US and its allies to prevent China from achieving some kind of hegemony in East Asia eventually, it’s just too big and you can’t escape geography. Just in virtue of the size of China’s economy, its neighbors will inevitably become economically dependent on it (they already are to a large extent and this dependence will only increase going forward), which just as inevitably will give it a lot of political influence. Whether it takes over Taiwan or not won’t fundamentally affect that. At best, the US might be able to prevent it for a while, but it will happen eventually and if the US insists that will just make things worse. The idea that, in the long run, the US can balance China in East Asia strikes me as delusional. It’s just too big for anyone, even the US, to balance it in its own neighborhood.¹⁰ People claim that spheres of influence don’t exist, because the idea contradicts the mythical “rules-based international order”, but they obviously do. As I argued before, in foreign policy, failing to appreciate the limits of your power is a cardinal sin.

But it doesn’t mean that China will ever achieve the kind of global hegemony that, even before the end of the Cold War, the US has enjoyed since 1945. I think a lot of people think that, because the US used the regional hegemony it had achieved in the Western hemisphere by the beginning of the 20th century as a springboard for global hegemony after WW2, China will do the same thing if we let it achieve regional hegemony in East Asia.¹¹ However, even putting aside the fact that again there isn’t really anything we can do about it, the case of the US is historically anomalous and there is no reason to think that China will replicate that sequence. There had never been a country with such a relative power advantage before the US after 1945 and there is every reason to believe it will never happen again.¹² Even in the best case scenario for China, if it averts demographic collapse and overtakes the US in terms of GDP, the US will remain close and collectively the West will remain more powerful. Moreover, while GDP is the best proxy for overall power in the long-run, the US also has advantages that are not perfectly captured by GDP and have a lot of inertia, such as the dollar’s special status, its privileged relationship with the international organizations that regulate the world economy, etc. As long as China doesn’t open up, it’s also unlikely that its soft power will be able to rival that of the US. Catching up is really hard to do and the US will remain the dominant power at the global power for a long time.

Thus, although it’s already very powerful and is bound to become even more powerful, it’s not as if China were ever going to be in a position to impose its way of life on us. Not that it’s trying for that matter. So there is no need to panic, let alone risk a war against China over Taiwan, we’re going to be fine. The people who are obsessed with China ironically underestimate the West and overestimate China. It’s not as if China was going to replace the US as the global hegemon and be able to shape the international system in the way the US did after WW2. In general, this obsession with China and the constant fear-mongering about it seem totally irrational, it’s hardly the worst country in the world and it can’t do that much to harm people in the West unless we go out of our way to pick a fight with it. In fact, people in the West have benefited much more from China’s rise than they have been harmed and it’s not even close, so we should rejoice in that development instead of deploring it. Not only have we been getting a lot of cheap goods for years, but now that China is becoming rich and educated, we’re even starting to get technological innovations from it and there is every reason to believe that will become even more true going forward, unless we do something to deprive ourselves of that.¹³ I understand disliking the Chinese government, I can’t say that I’m exactly a fan either, but that’s not our problem and there isn’t anything we can do about it anyway. China is not defined by the crimes of the Chinese government anymore than the US is defined by the crimes of the US government, so it’s absurd that you can’t say anything about China without people bringing that up and that people talk about China as if nothing else mattered.¹⁴

The truth is that, despite the lofty ideals they profess to justify their hostility toward China and argue that we must “stand up to it”, it’s hard not to conclude that at the end of the day China hawks are really motivated by American or Western chauvinism. They’re just used to the US or the West being on top and they have a hard time accepting that we’re no longer going to be the only game in town. I’m not even accusing them of arguing in bad faith, I’m sure that most of them have convinced themselves that if they are so concerned by China that’s because they love democracy, abhor “the CCP” or feel sympathy for the Taiwanese, but evidently that’s not really why.¹⁵ They just take pride in being the most powerful country or culture in the world and resent that China threatens that status. The most self-aware of them actually realize that and openly talk about how their goal is to preserve American hegemony, even if that’s always mixed with idealistic considerations due to their belief in the benign character of that hegemony (to be clear we certainly could have done a lot worse than the US as far as global hegemons go), but most of them clearly don’t. Now, I think national pride is perfect fine per se and that having a spirit of competition is a good thing, but not if that leads you to develop an unhealthy obsession with another country’s flaws instead of motivating you to improve yours or to promote dumb policies that will make everyone worse off.

1. It has also been argued that, although DeepSeek-V3 really has capabilities roughly on a par with the best models released by US companies and it really cost significantly less money to train it, this is just what you’d expect based on the trend in cost reduction observed in the US. Thus, it just shows that a Chinese company was not only able to produce a frontier LLM but also to shift the capabilities/training cost curve in the way US companies have previously been able to do, not that it beat the trend in cost reduction by shifting that curve much more than what you would have expected a US company to do. I’m not sure that’s correct, though I think it probably is, but in any case this is a perfectly reasonable argument and not what I’m talking about when I criticize people for downplaying DeepSeek’s achievement with dumb arguments.

2. To be clear, I think that’s not so much because people in the ruling elite wanted more immigration than because they thought opposition to immigration was vulgar and except for that didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but the result was the same because, in the absence of complex and sweeping policy changes, immigration flows are mostly determined by inertia.

3. Even in a totalitarian state that relies heavily on extreme coercion, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, the dictator can’t rule on his own. There has to be enough people, both inside and outside government, willing to obey him. This is a fact that Étienne de La Boétie, in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, had already understood clearly several centuries ago, but I think most people today still don’t understand it or at least fail to fully appreciate its significance.

4. Democracy may also have some advantages in terms of governance, but I think the evidence for that claim is much weaker than people generally realize and, in any case, the jury is still out on that point.

5. Nor am I saying that we should try to disabuse the masses of that myth, because the fact that people believe in it is precisely why elections can have such a strong legitimation effect, so if the masses stopped believing in the fiction that democracy is government “of the people, for the people, by the people” then it would no longer function. In fact, this is precisely why I’m in favor of mechanisms like Switzerland’s popular initiative system, because they incentivize the ruling class not to stray too far from the preferences of the majority and I fear that otherwise the growing chasm between the preferences of the majority and those of the ruling elite threatens to break the magic of democracy, by undermining the belief that democracy is government “of the people, for the people, by the people”.

6. In fact, while people were saying at the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War that Russia’s failure would make China think twice about invading Taiwan, I think that, when all is said and done, it’s more likely that the Russo-Ukrainian War will make Taiwan think twice about resisting China, lest it suffers the same fate as Ukraine.

7. I don’t want to keep arguing that Taiwan wouldn’t stand a chance on its own against China, because I think it’s obvious, but I will just add here that if you think that a highly developed country with a very educated, almost exclusively urban population and a median age of 45 is going to fight the kind of insurgency warfare that a poor, young, predominantly rural society of illiterate peasants like Vietnam fought, I really don’t know what to say to you.

8. This is even harder to reconcile with the view that what motivates China haters to, those conflicts are often enabled by Western governments and would sometimes end pretty quickly were it not for that fact, so people in the West to make that happen than to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

9. China’s claims on contested areas in the South China Sea and its program of land reclamation over there, however objectionable it may be, is hardly on a par with Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia or the creation of Manchukuo by Japan and the way in which China is pushing those claims is probably not unrelated to the prospect of a war with the US over Taiwan.

10. In the end, the US couldn’t even protect Ukraine from Russia, which is much weaker than China. I know that people will say that, had the West been less hesitant to help Ukraine and military assistance been less half-assed, it would have turned out differently, but I think it’s implausible that it would have fundamentally altered the outcome. It’s true that NATO has often procrastinated in providing various weapon systems to Ukraine, but it still provided a massive amount of assistance and, had the West sent even more, it wouldn’t have solved Ukraine’s manpower issue and there is no reason to believe that Russia wouldn’t also have increased the amount of resources it commits to the war. Perhaps more importantly, although it’s obviously true that NATO is collectively far more powerful than Russia, this can’t do Ukraine any good if political and organizational constraints prevent the superior resources that are theoretically available to NATO from being allocated to the defense of Ukraine. As I have already noted recently, no matter how much people try to wish them away, such constraints are no less real than physical ones and can’t be ignored. The same constraints would no doubt play a prominent role in a war between the US and China over Taiwan and should therefore be taken into account in planning.

11. My friend Steven Glinert, who will probably hate this essay, explicitly suggested that comparison in a recent post where he makes the case that Americans should care about a possible takeover of Taiwan by China.

12. I guess you could argue that whoever achieves artificial super-intelligence first might be in a position to enjoy the kind of domination the US did at the end of WW2, but even assuming it doesn’t kill us all before that, I think it’s unlikely that any nation would keep a monopoly over artificial super-intelligence for very long, so I doubt that the country that achieves it first will have time to establish a global hegemony before the others catch up.

13. Sure, the effect has not been distributionally neutral, but this doesn’t change the fact that overall this development has benefited the West immensely. It’s funny that liberals, who ordinarily correctly blame conservatives for their zero-sum thinking, engage in exactly the same kind of bad reasoning on China because they hate it.

14. Once again, if after reading this sentence you’re inclined to accuse me of making a false equivalence, I’m begging you to pause and think for a minute about what the claim I made actually implies before you do so.

15. To be clear, I’m also not saying that China haters don’t really love democracy, abhor the CCP or feel sympathy for the Taiwanese, I’m sure they do even if I also think that often they have simplistic views on those issues. I’m just saying that it’s not really why they’re so obsessed with China and that in fact the opposite is probably closer to the truth.