Recently, Professor Romano Prodi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, visited Renmin University. I was invited as a discussant to speak on stage with him about the China-Europe relations under the new world order. He began his speech by saying that a series of events in the past few weeks indicate a fundamental change in the world order. The events he referred to include the dramatic air combat between India and Pakistan, the tariff war launched by the United States against the entire world, and the trade war博弈 between China and the U.S. in Switzerland. In my view, many events in the past six months indeed support Mr. Prodi's aforementioned judgment. Ultimately, it is the balance of hard power tilting further towards China. Here are some examples.
Firstly, at the Zhuhai Airshow in late December 2024 and on Mao Zedong's birthday, China displayed the most advanced weapons equipment to the world, causing shock across the globe. At this airshow, not only was I personally invited to attend relevant international forums, but I also brought an old comrade delegation along. Various fighter jets, drones, all types of missiles and rockets, radars, and anti-drone equipment were on full display, dazzling the audience. Watching various aircraft perform flight demonstrations under the southern sun gave me a strong sense of unreality and aesthetic fatigue. We didn't pay much attention to the J-10C covered in plastic sheets placed in a corner; only advanced models like the J-20, J-35, and the yet-to-be-revealed H-20 sparked interest. However, less than two months after the airshow, the spotlight on the new star J-35 was overshadowed by an even more advanced sixth-generation fighter jet: on December 26th, Chairman Mao's birth anniversary, Chengfei publicly unveiled the J-36, while Shenyang Aircraft Corporation revealed the J-50. The former resembles a ginkgo leaf freely floating in the sky, while the latter looks like a swallow darting at high speed. In the fighter jet world, there is a saying that "beauty equals strength," as fighters with better aerodynamic designs usually have stronger functions. The simultaneous test flights of these two sixth-generation fighters deeply shocked the political and military circles of the United States, prompting the U.S. government to immediately showcase its own sixth-generation fighter PPTs. As a Gen Xer who witnessed the protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in May 1999, seeing us surpass the U.S. in the fighter jet domain and甩ing the backward label across the Pacific Ocean filled me with mixed emotions.
Secondly, the so-called DeepSeek moment arrived during the Chinese New Year. DeepSeek became popular first through Westerners trying it out and hyping it up, which caught the attention of the entire world. Everyone spent the Spring Festival holiday testing DeepSeek and pondering how general artificial intelligence could be applied in their respective fields and what it meant. Stimulated by DeepSeek, I conceived an article on the first day of the lunar new year exploring the application of artificial intelligence in regional studies, which was later published in the Overseas Edition of the People's Daily. It will soon be expanded into an academic paper for publication in relevant journals. Of course, the American capital market was more stimulated. It achieved functions comparable to those of leading American models at a much lower cost and even surpassed them in certain areas. Against the backdrop of strict sanctions on advanced AI chips, Chinese enterprises countered their lagging computing power with algorithmic innovation advantages, eventually matching the top American counterparts in functionality, fully demonstrating the wisdom and strength of the Chinese people. This also brings to mind an awkward fact for the West: today, mainly China and the United States compete in the field of artificial intelligence; and even in the U.S., half of the researchers working in artificial intelligence are of Chinese descent, far exceeding the proportion of Chinese Americans in the U.S. population. A friend in the relevant industry once jokingly told me: "In the U.S. AI circle, you can play Dou Dian during leisure social gatherings." Does this fact suggest that the competition in AI algorithms is actually a racial talent among East Asians, akin to basketball and sprinting among Africans? If that's true, then the competition in artificial intelligence ultimately becomes an internal competition between overseas Chinese and the Chinese mainland.
Thirdly, there was the brief but significant air battle between India and Pakistan in early May.
The air battle between India and Pakistan is said to be the largest-scale fighter group实战 confrontation since World War II. Professor Jin Canrong shared with me a new internet catchphrase: "True friends are within reach, India-Pakistan 6:0." China's fighter jets did not receive much exposure on the global arms stage, and the J-10 fighter jet is relatively outdated in China's military aircraft development sequence. However, this short but impressive air battle between India and Pakistan made the global strategic community take notice of China's fighter jets. Apparently, next month, the J-10 will be exhibited at the French aviation show. Interestingly, back in 2009, France had rejected the J-10's exhibition application. I consulted experts who informed me that these achievements do not mean that our older models, J-10C and Xiao Long, have suddenly become better than France's Rafale fighter jets; rather, it indicates that the overall software and hardware system of China's military industry has become stronger and more advanced. This is reflected in the enhanced detection range and lock-on capability of our radars, the extended range and end-stage acceleration of PL-15 missiles, and the data link communication capabilities between radars, aircraft, and missiles, all of which represent epoch-making changes.
Despite the one-sided battlefield situation, the Indian government and media stubbornly refuse to admit defeat, instead celebrating it as a victory for ten days and claiming that the entire world media is lying together. In the age of mobile internet, to avoid losing power due to military setbacks, they shamelessly manipulate public perception domestically. Such self-deception inevitably foretells a larger and more thorough military disaster for India next time. If the conflict erupts again, and the Pakistani military no longer stops at a favorable outcome but instead pursues the enemy relentlessly, conducting airstrikes on Indian territory and advancing ground forces to occupy part of the disputed territories, the resulting cognitive shift within India will have a significant impact on Indian politics, potentially toppling Modi, who likes to pretend to be something he is not.
Of course, this air battle also caused panic whispers in the West. The Rafale fighter jet is Europe's王牌fighter, but it performed so poorly against China's older models that it raises concerns about how F-22 and F-35 will fare against China's sixth-generation fighters. These are the main worries of military experts in the U.S. and Europe. Recently, the U.S. military suffered接连 losses near the Red Sea, with both carriers and aircraft claiming they were "almost hit" and had to "emergency maneuver to avoid." The Houthis' eight-times-the-speed-of-sound missiles, despite lacking strong data system support, managed to cause such chaos for the U.S. military that they had to sign a non-aggression agreement with the Houthis. If the opponent were China, how would the U.S. military perform? Previous U.S. generals all spoke in unison, claiming that U.S. military simulations of a war with China resulted in U.S. victories at great cost; however, Defense Secretary Hagis, selected by Trump, frankly told the press what he saw in the simulation reports—without exception, the U.S. military suffered defeats because China's missiles could completely destroy the U.S. carrier fleet in the western Pacific within twenty minutes.
Lastly and most importantly, the second round of tariff battles between China and Trump since April.
In this round of tariff wars, China is the only country standing up to confront the U.S. directly. By early May, the two sides reached a temporary easing in Switzerland. Through struggle, concessions were obtained, and through strength, peace was sought, which was quite evident in China's current game. Previously, voices of pro-Americanism, admiration for America, and fear of America have largely disappeared. Commentators worldwide, except for Trump's sycophants and propagandists, generally believe that China holds the upper hand. Compared to the trade war in 2018, China's reliance on the U.S. economy has clearly decreased by 2025: the share of exports to the U.S. in total exports has dropped; the importance of exports in China's economy has diminished; central bank base money expansion no longer depends on foreign exchange reserves increasing through foreign currency occupation; however, the U.S. consumer's dependence on Chinese goods seems not to have truly decreased. Mutual interdependence implies power, and in most cases, Party A has power over Party B. However, in products like rare earth elements, where substitutes are difficult to find in the short term, supply scarcity and demand rigidity give Party B power over Party A. Besides rare earths, there are small things like needles, which also give China a dominant position over the U.S. About 65% of the needles used in the U.S. are supplied by China, with another 16% produced domestically and the rest coming from other countries around the world. The head of the U.S. medical association questioned politicians, asking if the trade war continues until the end of May, when will the U.S. needle inventory run out? "We will have to decide who gets priority for needles—are we saving cancer patients or emergency victims? Are we allocating them limitedly to over a million diabetes patients or to the broader drug-using population?"
Of course, this is just the first round of engagement in Trump's 2.0 era, and the struggle and game-playing are far from over. There are still many uncertainties ahead. The biggest uncertainty is that U.S. Treasury bonds, once considered risk-free assets, are becoming risky assets, with yields remaining high. Meanwhile, approximately five trillion dollars in massive funds are gradually leaving dollar assets and shifting to European and Asian assets. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that the U.S. government might use tariffs as a condition to demand concessions from other countries regarding the purchase and holding of its Treasury bonds. It is also possible that the U.S. may instigate political unrest and military conflicts in some European location to quickly increase the risk premium in non-U.S. regions, thereby driving tens of trillions of dollars back into dollar assets.
Regarding the real motives behind Trump's tariff war and how to respond to it, I explained this in a video recorded on July 1, 2019. Interested readers can revisit the related video. Recently, this video has been hotly discussed again on multiple domestic and international online platforms because many elements of Trump's new tariff policies introduced on "Liberation Day," April 2, 2025, were already "predicted" in the video. These include a general tariff of 10%, special tariffs on strategic products such as steel, aluminum, and automobiles, and tariffs on countries like Europe, Japan, and Vietnam. This article needs to reiterate that we must distinguish between Trump's personal intentions (to raise funds for domestic tax cuts), the purposes of the trade war he tells voters (such as bringing manufacturing back), and the private agendas his bureaucrats try to insert (forcing other countries to follow the U.S. to counter China). Ultimately, if we want to engage in a transaction with him and achieve success, we must address the root cause and guide the situation accordingly. Over the past six years, I have repeatedly emphasized in many articles and speeches that we should not pursue the principle of low tariffs in Sino-U.S. trade relations, nor do we need equivalent tariffs; we only need to defend the principle of non-discrimination. In other words, as long as the tariffs faced by goods from Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, etc., sold to the U.S. are similar to those for Chinese goods, we can provide very favorable tariff rates for U.S. goods exported to China. Driving the U.S. to increase its tariff levels on other countries will greatly accelerate China's march toward the center of the world market system.
How has China reversed the tide in hard power?
Hard power includes military strength and economic industrial strength. China has long surpassed the U.S. in manufacturing scale, but there are still notable gaps and shortcomings in quality. Our experience of being subject to the "chip embargo" during the Sino-U.S. technology war since 2018 is a concrete manifestation. However, with the successful implementation of the Made in China 2025 plan, high-end chips will soon cease to be a problem. In the near future, in terms of both quality and quantity, China's manufacturing will surpass the U.S., a view that I believe most observers would agree with. The real disagreement lies mainly in the comparison of military strength.
"China's military strength is systematically surpassing the U.S. and the West," for three years now, Professor Jin Canrong and I have been arguing this point everywhere, but this view is considered overly optimistic and hard to accept by most scholars and policymakers, and even among military leaders, the majority disagree. People's cognition is mainly formed during their youth, and once it solidifies, it is difficult to reshape without great wisdom or experiencing major upheavals. New information can only be integrated into existing frameworks, while contradictory information is ignored or underestimated, and matching information is amplified and reinforced. The middle-aged generation of the 60s and 70s encountered a more advanced and developed Western world at the turn of the century, forming admiration and even fear of the West. However, China has developed too rapidly, and before this group exits the social stage, the power balance between China and the West has already undergone a qualitative change.
In military-industrial and dual-use technologies, many innovative concepts were first proposed by Americans with technical indicators that often startled their Chinese counterparts, but ultimately, Chinese military industries often outpaced the U.S. in achieving and equipping them first. Electromagnetic cannons, electromagnetic catapults, hypersonic missiles, sixth-generation fighters, superconducting radars, laser weapons, supersonic drones, and others—all have followed this pattern. Recently, President Trump announced plans to build a comprehensive missile defense system covering the entire U.S. mainland. I estimate that in 5-8 years, China will produce an advanced missile defense system powered by artificial intelligence, while the U.S. missile defense system is likely to remain a half-finished project.
This phenomenon of catching up and surpassing is rooted in four advantages China has over the U.S. and the West.
First is the clustering effect of manufacturing industries and technological spillover effects. The Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta are hubs of the East Asian and global production networks. China's industrial chain is complete and massive. Completeness leads to efficiency, and scale results in low manufacturing costs. Due to the abundance of supporting facilities, well before the arrival of the pandemic, the world's hardware innovation hub had shifted to Shenzhen. Even the innovation manufacturing teams on the U.S. West Coast needed to place their hardware R&D segments in Shenzhen because here, all non-standard parts could be customized within one or two days.
Second is the high density of talent. China graduates nearly ten million students annually, with around 4.2 million being science and engineering majors. This exceeds the total number of science and engineering graduates from developed economies such as the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined. In terms of quality, China's science and engineering education is not inferior. Especially when combined with the manufacturing and infrastructure boom, professors and graduate students in China have ample funding, equipment, and practical opportunities to enhance their research capabilities and hands-on skills. Although the U.S. can attract top global talent through higher education and high salaries, most science and engineering talents either switch to finance or become coders rather than becoming experts in their respective fields.
Third is long-term planning and reasonable investment. China's military system is a hybrid model, combining the state-planned system learned from the Soviet Union with the market-oriented and capitalized system learned from the U.S. However, China's military management successfully controls the immune reaction between these two different institutional genes. Since 1999, China has consistently increased its research and development spending on advanced military equipment but does not spend large sums to equip them in bulk. Thus, relatively limited military budgets support continuous iteration and evolution of military equipment. In contrast, the U.S. military budget far exceeds that of China or any other country. However, due to complacency after the Cold War, they focused their military research on reducing casualties in counterinsurgency operations and peacekeeping missions rather than preparing thoroughly for the inevitable great-power military conflicts. American defense companies face pressure from stock markets, leading to a short-term tendency of "quarterly capitalism," constantly encouraging politicians to launch various "hunting-style" so-called wars, wasting the nation's massive military budgets on endless conflicts in the Islamic world.
Fourth is the advantage of being a latecomer. We excel at crossing the river by feeling the stones left by the U.S., achieving catch-up and surpassing through reverse engineering and re-innovation, thus avoiding blind investments and reducing trial-and-error costs. This advantage indeed brought us many benefits over the past thirty years. However, in times when China holds a relative leadership position, its military industry must dare to imagine and excel in originality; otherwise, it will be lost in confusion.
A friend reminded me that military struggles are not about comparing treasures like a dragon king; the superiority in equipment does not explain everything. Factors such as human elements—organizational efficiency, strategic cognition, decision-making level, and military morale—are important variables. The U.S. military's advantage over ours lies in their continuous warfare since the Cold War, making their experience far richer than ours. This statement is actually debatable. After the Cold War, the U.S. military indeed engaged in combat, but rather than fighting, they were hunting. Hunters typically do not worry about whether the prey is intellectually superior or has better weapons, nor do they fear falling into traps set by the prey. However, war is different; both sides strive for victory, investing all resources, wisdom, and willpower to attempt to overpower each other. Hence, chance and the fog of war are the norm, and the outcomes often resemble gambling. Thus, the U.S. military's thirty-plus years of combat experience have led to the following impacts: how should two great powers equipped with artificial intelligence and space-based weapons fight a direct military conflict? No one knows until they truly fight; but the Chinese know they don't know, while the Americans don't know that they don't know.
Another friend reminded me: war is not a solo effort. The U.S. has a vast alliance system, but how many reliable allies does China have? How should this be responded to? From one perspective, due to the existence of artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and global strike capabilities, neither side dares to openly declare war on the other, especially not to attack the homeland directly, as such actions would amount to mutual annihilation. Given this, military struggles easily evolve into proxy wars, as the Ukraine-Russia conflict fully demonstrates. In this case, allies are no longer an asset but a burden and a weakness. If your allies are attacked and you fail to provide substantial support, your strategic credibility suffers, and other allies may drift away. If you support them and the war still fails, it reflects your lack of strength and diminishes your prestige. The U.S. has signed numerous alliances and taken on excessive security protection obligations. In the future, if entering a great-power confrontation era, it will face "runoff" pressure. In contrast, China has only one treaty ally, and it appears that this country does not need China's protection in the foreseeable future.
From another perspective, if we describe the increasingly adversarial relationship between China and the U.S. as a futures market's long-short main对决, then China, the long-side main force so far, has not leveraged up; it is merely operating on its own capital. On the other hand, the U.S., the short-side main force, has gathered a group of smaller followers to bolster its presence and join forces to short sell and suppress. Even so, the overall trend is gradually tilting in favor of the long side. Anyone with investment experience knows that once the long side exerts itself, the short side's camp will陷入short selling chaos and stampede, with many of America's smaller allies switching sides. Some countries will seek to prove their loyalty by offering投名状, creating a squeeze short situation.
Conclusion
This article argues that the balance of hard power is tilting in our favor, aiming to understand the changes in the situation realistically and calmly rather than to boost morale or incite strategic blindness. If the above trends are roughly correct, then China's foreign strategy community needs to consider a series of questions: how should we reconstruct China's foreign strategy from a position of strength and advantage? How can we transform and extend the soft power advantages from our hard power strengths? Six hundred years ago, Zheng He's fleet undoubtedly held a hard power advantage in the Indo-Pacific region but ultimately met a self-destructive fate. What lessons can the people of six hundred years later learn to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Ming navy?
Original source: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7511231906277573159/
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