In n+1:
Envious enchantment with Chinese life offers a tonic to weary disenchantment with American life. People feel, in a word, cooked. According to a Gallup poll from November 2025, Americans’ “satisfaction with the way things are going in the US” stands at 23 percent. Corporate con men walk free while day laborers are terrorized; stock valuations soar while wages stagnate; private jets spew carbon high above a country of crumbling bridges, shuttered hospitals, and unaffordable homes. The symptoms are morbid; the mood is futureless. If the imagined terms of competition with China have begun to soften, this must be due in part to the sense that in the United States, we have few tools left with which to compete. Fear of American decline has shadowed our politics for half a century, but never before has our slow fall been so mirrored and mocked by another’s rapid rise.
How to diagnose this contradictory condition, this Sinophobic Sinophilia? Orientalism remains endemic to Western self-imaging, but the tropes have mutated since the China panics of a century ago, when British diplomats and American journalists delivered thinly sourced screeds with titles like Is China Mad?, What’s Wrong with China, and China: The Pity of It. (Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, the Senate’s leading China hawk, is nevertheless helping to keep the genre alive with his recent Seven Things You Can’t Say About China.) Back then, race science and imperial hauteur joined to imagine the country as an ancient civilization fallen into decay and disarray, trapped by the past; today, the decay and disarray are our own, while China rockets humanity into the future.
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