Seen from afar, Beijing cuts the figure of an omnipotent puppeteer, coolly orchestrating the dislocations of the modern world. There is malice in the margins, certainly, but malice is rarely the whole story.
I have no interest in acting as an apologist for China. Nor do I feel compelled to run interference for the architects of Western complacency—the administrative minds of Berlin, Sacramento, and their ideological cousins. They engineered their own predicaments through decades of willful blindness, and they will endure the arithmetic of their choices. When the consequences arrive in full, they will predictably manufacture scapegoats to absolve the decision-makers. They have only themselves to blame.
Yet attributing this unraveling to an all-seeing Chinese grand strategy misreads the board entirely. China is not a mastermind; it is an increasingly trapped giant, caught in an internal dilemma of its own design.
The ambition to remain merely the workshop of the world proved psychologically insufficient for Beijing. The regime felt compelled to demonstrate the absolute supremacy of its developmental model. This was never primarily about external prestige; it was an exercise in domestic pacification. The regime trades on national pride, feeding its domestic audience a narrative of civilizational vindication—the Middle Kingdom ascendant, essential, and peerless, whose validation lies in the world’s reliance upon it.
Strip away the geopolitical theater, however, and the core reality is mechanical and fragile. China has grotesquely overbuilt its industrial apparatus. It now finds itself drowning in its own excess capacity, structurally dependent on forcing its surplus onto external markets that cannot absorb it indefinitely. What looks from a distance like ruthless strategic conquest is, beneath the surface, the frantic maintenance of an industrial Ponzi scheme—compelled to expand forward simply to stave off collapse.
https://tilakdoshi.substack.com/p/beijings-useful-idiots-germany-california