China rising, America falling
Trump's policies are making China great. America? Not so much.
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In a remarkable 2005 article for Foreign Affairs, Chinese party official Zheng Bijian first articulated to Western audiences the concept of a “peaceful rise” for China.
At the time, China was on the cusp of its emergence as a global power, and many US experts feared China’s aggression, both economically and militarily. Bijian’s essay sought to allay these concerns, arguing that China could ascend to “great-power status” in harmony with the international order, rather than in opposition to it.
Twenty years later, China has indeed attained its goal of becoming an economic superpower. In 2005, China’s GDP (in constant 2015 dollars) was only about $4.5 trillion, less than a third of America’s economic output. In 2024, its GDP had swelled to nearly $18.5 trillion, compared to $22.6 trillion for the US. Certainly, GDP is only the crudest of indicators of economic might, but there’s no denying China’s ascension.
Just in recent weeks, China has been racking up triumph after triumph, cementing its global stature. In contrast, the United States seems on the fast track to decline, ensuring not just China’s continued rise but its future dominance.
For instance:
Chinese universities grabbed seven out of 10 spots in the just-released Leiden Rankings, based on the quality and volume of scientific research. Harvard University fell to third from the top spot, while the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins were the only two other US institutions to crack the top 25. Chinese universities now produce 35 percent of all top journal publications, says a new NBER analysis, compared to 15 percent from US schools.
China recently announced the world’s largest-ever trade surplus of $1 trillion in 2025—achieved despite President Donald Trump’s double-digit tariffs on Chinese imports. American manufacturing output, meanwhile, contracted for the tenth straight month, and jobs continued to shrink.
Chinese automaker is now the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs, selling 2 million cars in 2025. Tesla sales, on the other hand, slumped by 9 percent.
And in a brutal Et tu, Brute moment, Canada announced a new trade deal with China to lower tariffs on EVs, canola, and other products. (Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney also got a standing ovation at Davos this week with a speech condemning the “rupture” created by Trump’s policies and positioning Canada as a force for global stability.)
Trump’s embarrassing speech at Davos this week reassured no one that America can maintain its pre-eminence, and his policies will only accelerate America’s slide into second place.
His tariffs, for instance, have burdened American consumers while failing to stimulate domestic growth. Though Trump has touted his “trade deals” with other countries and their pledges to invest, nothing significant has materialized (and nothing, frankly, is likely).
Trump’s immigration policies have also robbed the nation of critical labor and talent, and the world’s brightest minds are settling elsewhere. New international student enrollment, for example, dropped by 17 percent last fall, while net immigration to the United States was negative for the first time in 50 years. The Brookings Institution estimates a net loss of jobs in 2026 as a result of the loss in migration, along with depressed consumer spending and GDP growth.
And as much as Trump covets Venezuelan oil, the future belongs to Chinese batteries, as author Dan Wang recently argued in The New York Times and clean energy expert Laura Gillam wrote for the Monthly. China has leapfrogged the United States in its clean energy investments, paving the way for future monopolies on clean energy technology. Trump, meanwhile, is waging war on windmills and pursuing a dead-end strategy to revitalize coal.
Trump is moreover destroying the seed corn of US competitiveness with his attacks on higher education and funding for scientific research. Though Congress appears to be rebuffing his plans for drastically slashing research, the pauses and cancellations of funding earlier this year have been hugely disruptive to researchers.
In the years before China’s rise, the United States’ hope was “containment.” Today, we’d be hard-pressed to compete.