For three decades, the West told itself a comforting story about China. Admit it into the global trading system, the theory went, and market forces would do the rest: prosperity would breed a middle class, and a middle class would eventually demand a political voice. Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 on that assumption. Twenty-five years later, the assumption looks like one of the great strategic misreadings of the post-Cold War era. China gained unrestricted access to Western markets. It never opened its own on comparable terms, and it never loosened the Communist Party’s grip on the economy or the state. 

None of this means China’s rise is a mirage. It is not. China builds infrastructure at a pace no democracy can match, dominates manufacturing in electric vehicles, solar panels, robotics and telecoms, and in select fields of artificial intelligence, it now competes with or leads the United States.

None of this means China’s rise is a mirage. It is not. China builds infrastructure at a pace no democracy can match, dominates manufacturing in electric vehicles, solar panels, robotics and telecoms, and in select fields of artificial intelligence, it now competes with or leads the United States.

Huawei alone proves that Chinese engineering can be genuinely world-class. But scale is not the same as strength, and growth is not the same as health. Underneath the impressive statistics sits an economy that runs on debt, propped up by a state that prizes control over efficiency and cannot admit failure without threatening its own legitimacy.

Start with the headline figure. Beijing’s official growth target for 2026 sits at 4.5 to 5 percent, already the lowest target China has set since the early 1990s. The first half of the year came in at 4.7 percent, with growth actually slowing to 4.3 percent in the second quarter as household........

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