Scale Is Not a System: Learning from China without Mimicry

Kaiser Kuo’s (2025) ‘The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China’ is a bracing provocation. He argues that China is no longer merely ‘catching up’ but increasingly sets the tempo of economic, technological, and institutional development. Legitimacy in the twenty-first century, he contends, rests increasingly—though not exclusively—on performance, with climate policy as the decisive test: China is simultaneously the largest carbon dioxide emitter and the indispensable builder of clean energy, installing more solar and wind capacity each year than the rest of the world. The United States is already edging towards instruments it once disdained, such as industrial policy and state–private sector coordination, even as public discourse clings to reassuring rationalisations. Drawing on Joseph Levenson’s (1965) meum/verum distinction, Kuo diagnoses a widening gap between what Western societies hold dear and what the world renders true. His call is not a policy manual but a perceptual shift: to acknowledge achievement clearly rather than coping by predicting collapse.

The question, then, is not whether a reckoning is due—it surely is—but how to reckon well. A persuasive response must integrate what Kuo sees and what his sweeping lens blurs: the historical depth of multiple modernities, the cyclical fragility of performance-based legitimacy, the difference between a toolbox and an order, the gap between capacity and system integration, and the terms by which learning travels between regimes.

In this piece, I advance five claims. First, modernity has long been plural, and China radicalises that plurality by pushing it to continental scale. Second, performance-based legitimacy is powerful yet cyclical and depends on truth-tracking inputs. Third, scale is not system: enduring gains hinge on integration, not capacity totals. Fourth, convergence of instruments such as subsidies and procurement does not equal convergence of orders defined by accountability and reversibility. Fifth, learning travels between regimes under constraints that determine what can be adopted and how fast.

The aim of this reply is to sharpen, not blunt, Kuo’s challenge: to recognise what is genuinely new about China’s ascent while resisting the temptation to infer a wholesale hierarchy of systems from a hierarchy of outcomes in particular domains.

Multiple Modernities: What Is New and What Is Not

Drawing on Joseph Levenson (1965), Kuo presents China’s modernity as an alloy of Confucian legacies, Leninist organisation, technocratic authority, state capitalism, and market mechanisms. That description captures a real synthesis, but it is less novel than his rhetoric implies. For decades, social science has worked with the grammar of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000) and the ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001), which treat modern orders as path-dependent assemblages rather than linear convergences. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan already demonstrated that developmental states—anchored in meritocratic bureaucracies, industrial targeting, export discipline, and state-orchestrated provision of credit—could deliver rapid transformation without mirroring the institutions of Anglo-American capitalism (Amsden 1989; Johnson 1982; Wade 1990).

What distinguishes China is not so much the existence of an alternative as the scale, tempo, and organisational depth of its version: the fusion of developmental instrumentation with a party-state’s mobilisational capacity across a continental economy (Naughton and Tsai 2015). Reframing modernity as competition among competence profiles, rather than a civilisational contest, helps separate the question Kuo rightly foregrounds, ‘Who delivers?’, from the question he sometimes short-changes: by which institutional means and at what price? The point is not to transfer a presumed monopoly of modernity from West to East. It is to insist that modernity has long been plural, and that China’s rise radicalises that plurality by pushing it to a scale that resets global baselines.

Performance Legitimacy: Both Strength and Achilles’ Heel

Kuo is right to foreground delivery. Electrification, near-universal access to basic services, mass transport and digital build-out, and the rapid deployment of clean technologies yield palpable welfare gains. They make daily life safer, richer, and more predictable, and thus purchase political authority in ways that purely procedural arguments rarely do. But performance legitimacy is cyclical (World Bank 2024; Zheng 2014). It flourishes when growth is strong and improvements are legible; it frays when the composition of growth turns, when debt overhangs limit fiscal options, when the marginal return on infrastructure falls, or when expectations outpace delivery. The risk is not abstract. When accountability is grounded primarily in outputs, incentives tilt towards flattering statistics, off–balance-sheet liabilities, or overinvestment that produces future drag (Shih and Elkobi 2023; Messingschlager 2025).

More profoundly, performance cannot sustain itself without truth-tracking inputs (Landemore 2013). Accurate measurement (Henderson et al. 2012), contestable analysis, and open channels for error signals are not luxuries; they are the conditions under which course correction becomes possible before missteps compound. High-modernist schemes fail not because coordination is inherently misguided, but because synchronised blind-spots at the centre suppress feedback from the periphery (Scott 1998). China has shown genuine adaptive capacity in multiple domains (Heilmann 2008); nevertheless, structural filters—such as censorship, sanction risks for dissenting expertise, and a legal environment that limits adversarial scrutiny—are latent governance hazards. Kuo’s tilt towards performance rightly unsettles complacency in liberal democracies. It should not, however, imply that procedures are dispensable frictions. Procedures are the scaffolding on which sustainable performance rests. 

Scale, System, and Selectivity 

Anyone who has walked Shenzhen’s hardware corridors (FT 2024), watched Yangtze River Delta factories collapse product cycles from months to weeks, or traced ultra-high-voltage transmission lines across the North China Plain knows how scale becomes its own productive factor. Scale compresses learning, localises entire supply chains, and shifts global cost curves, especially in renewables and manufacturing—points that Kuo rightly foregrounds. But scale is not the same as system. Scale denotes volume and speed; a system is the institutional machinery that turns volumes into durable performance. Nowhere is the difference clearer than in energy (USCC 2025). Capacity additions in wind and solar power are unprecedented, yet the realised climate benefit depends on integration: curtailment rates, dispatch rules, interprovincial coordination, storage, and demand-side flexibility. These are not photographic triumphs; they are engineering, institutional, and regulatory problems whose solutions are less visible than gleaming arrays.

Kuo’s portrait sometimes risks treating headline capacity as the story. The story is better told as a layered sequence: build the kit, harden the grid, align the market, and socialise the flexibility costs. A similar selectivity appears in the treatment of coal. It is true, as Kuo emphasises, that China is simultaneously the largest carbon emitter and the largest builder of clean energy. Both sides of that ledger matter. The surge of renewable capacity demonstrates the ability to turn learning-by-doing into economies of scale with global effects. The persistence of coal approvals (Howe 2025) and commissioning, even as clean capacity soars, reflects a different calculus: adequacy and stability concerns, regional development imperatives, and political-economy constituencies that treat redundancy as insurance. None of this negates the achievement; it qualifies how the achievement should be read. Scale, to count as durable progress, must be matched by system integration and credible pathways to unwind lock-in.

Industrial Policy: Mirror Image or Categorical Difference?

Kuo reads the United States’ shift—from the CHIPS and Science Act (US Congress 2022a) to the Inflation Reduction Act (US Congress 2022b) and a broader protectionist turn—as a mirror borrowing of Chinese instruments. There is a family resemblance at the level of tools: subsidies, tax credits, public procurement, and strategic coordination; his reverse ‘self-strengthening’ analogy is apt as a description of means. But a toolbox (Juhász et al. 2024) is not an order. Instruments can converge while regimes remain meaningfully different. In democracies, the allocation of subsidies, the siting of projects, and the conditions attached to public support are legitimacy-bound (US Code n.d.: § 706): they are contested in courts, parliaments, and the press; they are subject to disclosure; they can be reversed when evidence changes. That process is often slow and exasperating. Yet, it mitigates capture, disciplines favouritism, and preserves competition at the frontier.

Authoritarian coordination can move more quickly and align capital and the provision of permits at impressive speed. But speed bought at the price of opacity carries a risk of synchronised error, overbuild, and path dependence when priorities are misjudged (Reuters 2025a; USCC 2021). The more interesting symmetry runs deeper than mirroring. Both systems face the same design problems: how to match instruments to missions rather than constituencies; how to pace the exit from support once technologies mature; and how to keep policy from becoming hostage to incumbents. China tackles these problems through hierarchy and party discipline (Lin 2021). The United States, in contrast, confronts a paradox in the age of Trump 2.0. On the one hand, there is a revived ‘America First’ industrial and trade agenda under President Donald Trump that unleashes massive corporate on-shoring and investment pledges (The White House 2025). On the other hand, it still operates via pluralism, courts, regulatory veto points, and a fragmented federal structure. The result is fast-moving tools, but slower, contested orders. Neither path is costless; each implies characteristic virtues and characteristic failures. A comparative frame that separates the convergence of tools from the divergence of orders yields a sharper view than a rhetoric of imitation.

Climate Policy: Integration, Institutions, and Legitimacy

Kuo is at his strongest when he treats climate as a test of legitimacy. He stresses the paradox that China is at once the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter and the largest builder of renewables, installing more solar and wind capacity each year than the rest of the world—a juxtaposition that elevates delivery as a source of legitimacy. Polities that decarbonise faster gain not only moral standing but also regulatory voice and strategic leverage, because they set standards, shape supply chains, and harvest the learning that others must import. China’s contribution to the transition is now indispensable. Manufacturing depth in photovoltaics and batteries has pushed costs down worldwide, and domestic build-out has given scale to technologies that might otherwise have languished in pilot projects.

Yet, the ultimate measure of climate credibility is not annual capacity but system performance over time: emissions trajectories across sectoral boundaries (Myllyvirta 2025); the degree of coal lock-in and the speed at which it is unwound (Reuters 2025b); the alignment of grid codes, market rules, and cross-provincial trading with the physics of variable generation. This is where Kuo’s argument would benefit from going further. The bottlenecks that matter most in every major economy are procedural rather than financial: permits for transmission lines, standards for interoperability, planning horizons for network operators, liability rules that allocate the costs of flexibility, and the governance of data that underwrite balancing markets.

Democracies must therefore accelerate without abandoning due process. That is not a contradiction but a design problem. Early and binding participation reduces late-stage litigation; deadlines that bite discipline both administrations and developers; specialised tribunals build expertise in the engineering and economics of networks; digital file management makes transparency the default rather than the exception. Getting these institutional details right does not detract from Kuo’s central claim about performance; it shows what performance requires to be credible.

Psychology, Motive—and What Travels

Kuo frames much Western, especially US, reaction to China less as sober strategy than as a psychological reckoning. He argues that as China stops merely ‘catching up’ and begins to set the pace of development, familiar narratives yield denial, deflection, and anxious overreaction. In his account, status and identity anxieties matter: an ‘odd combination of self-doubt, complacency, and hubris’, and, in some quarters, a racialised unease—the ‘twilight of white privilege’—map on to the perceived twilight of US hegemony. He links these motifs to concrete signals in American discourse: a Democratic ‘abundance’ turn; the eager reception of Dan Wang’s book Breakneck (2025); Silicon Valley accelerationists and parts of the MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) right expressing a grudging ‘China envy’; and a generational shift in which younger Americans, steeped in social media ‘infrastructure porn’, see China as futuristic rather than backward.

Naming such pathologies has value; it can clear the air and restrain bad-faith rhetoric. But psychologising disagreement is a double-edged sword. When geostrategic, rule-of-law, or human-rights–based objections are recoded primarily as grievance, legitimate dissent is discounted and argument collapses into motive analysis. A serious reckoning requires steel-manning the counter-case rather than pathologising it.

It is, for example, possible to criticise concentration risks in critical supply chains (EC 2023), to defend open scientific ecologies, or to worry about coercive dependencies (EU 2023) without succumbing to civilisational panic. Likewise, one can admire China’s orchestration of manufacturing and infrastructure while doubting that such orchestration—absent institutionalised contradiction and adversarial scrutiny—can reliably sustain frontier discovery over long horizons. A debate that makes motives the main object of analysis risks silence precisely where discrimination among claims, evidence, and institutional designs is most needed.

Taking Kuo’s psychological register seriously also clarifies the next question: how much of China’s achievement travels? Demonstration is not diffusion. China’s distinctive combination—a task-setting party-state across tiers, cadre incentives tied to measurable targets, fiscal instruments that mobilise investment off the central balance sheet, and a national narrative authorising long time horizons—cannot be imported as easily as turbines or rolling stock. Many can buy equipment; far fewer can institutionalise the administrative density that turns kit into capacity. Overstating exportability sets adopters up for disappointment and tempts Beijing to mistake technical cooperation for institutional transplantation. What prudently travels is the signal, not a blueprint—that developmental space exists and that certain hierarchy–market hybrids can deliver quickly—without implying that downstream equilibria will or should look alike. This aligns with Kuo’s own claim that China’s success constitutes proof to the Global South that ‘another model can work’, while keeping clear the limits of transposability.

What the West Should Actually Learn

If the West is to learn without mimicry, it must restore its capacity to decide, to build, and to correct. The first task is to reconstitute mission capability under the discipline of law. That begins with specifying ends that can be audited—grids upgraded, storage deployed, industrial heat decarbonised—and with choosing instruments that admit evaluation. It requires sunset clauses for subsidies, milestones for mid-course review, and a willingness to terminate even popular programs when they fail evidence tests.

The second task is procedural acceleration without procedural abandonment. The slow parts of the transition are largely procedural: planning law, environmental review, and litigation. These are not obstacles to be bulldozed but institutions to be redesigned so that speed and legitimacy reinforce each other. Front-loaded participation reduces incentives to litigate late; strict timelines discipline administrations and developers alike; specialised chambers for infrastructure disputes build expertise; and digital transparency allows citizens to track bottlenecks in real time.

The third task is to protect the open innovation ecology that makes long-horizon discovery possible. University autonomy, academic freedom, data access, and talent mobility are not ornamental. They are the reason frontier breakthroughs cluster where contestation is welcomed, and reputations accrue to those who disprove rather than flatter. De-risking where security is genuinely at stake need not metastasise into a general suspicion of exchange. Precision in security policy is a virtue and a precondition for preserving the scientific openness that generates long-run advantage.

The fourth task is to define resilience as a system property: diversified supply chains, interoperable standards, emergency reserves, and transparent stress testing. That concept of resilience resists both naive dependence and performative autarky.

A Different Reading of ‘Meum/Verum’

Levenson’s contrast between meum (the ‘mine’, referring to a society’s inherited self-understanding, norms, and justificatory narratives) and verum (the ‘true’, referring to what observable reality compels us to accept) captures the vertigo that accompanies epochal change. Kuo applies this lens to the contemporary United States: the meum no longer maps cleanly on to a world in which China helps set the pace of modernity. There is insight in that framing. But the remedy is not to subordinate the meum of liberal procedure to the verum of observed performance. Procedures are not an empty fetish of form; they are epistemic institutions that make truth legible in political life: free inquiry that exposes error (Besley and Burgess 2002), publicity that forces justification (Habermas 1989), courts that can compel disclosure, and opposition that has incentives to discover mistakes (Hirschman 1970). These institutions do not guarantee success. They do, however, increase the probability that when things go wrong, society will know and, when it knows, it can repair (Landemore 2013). On this reading, procedures are not the cost of doing politics; they are the operating system that allows performance to be sustained over long horizons. Kuo is right to demand that democracies deliver; the right response is to enhance the procedural conditions under which delivery is repeatable, not to trade those conditions for one-off speed.

Seen in this light, reckoning requires binocular vision: acknowledging China’s capacities while equally scrutinising its systemic risks; admiring its scale while emphasising the need for rigorous institutional quality. Kuo does not choose the comfortable path. He challenges where habitual defences have dulled critical analysis, and this sharpness is the strength of his essay. However, the reckoning for which he calls will be sustained only if it maintains this dual focus. The recognition of China’s capacity must be balanced with the acknowledgement of its systemic risks; the appreciation for industrial pragmatism must be balanced by insistence on procedure-bound politics; admiration for scale must be tempered by attention to institutional quality. The twenty-first century will be ordered not by a single model of modernity, but by a contest of compatible competencies: Who decarbonises reliably? Who aligns innovation with justice? Who corrects errors when it matters most?

In this competition, liberal democracies still possess deep resources—if they choose to use them. Universities that attract global talent, public spheres that can force revision, courts that can discipline power, and civic organisations that can translate consent into capacity remain powerful tools. However, Kuo deliberately highlights the contrast with the United States, stressing its dysfunction—polarisation, institutional paralysis, and, notably, its retreat from the Paris climate accords, coupled with a protectionist turn. The right lesson, however, is not to sacrifice epistemic institutions for the sake of one-off speed. For both North America and Europe, the task is clear: to rebuild state capacity within the discipline of law, to plan, permit, and procure faster, while preserving the error-correcting features of open inquiry, publicity, and review that keep performance truth-tracking across changing administrations. This is what ‘learning without mimicry’ requires.

Kuo’s reckoning calls for intellectual honesty, and the honest answer is twofold. First, China has delivered—at scale. Second, it does not follow that an authoritarian technocratic model is superior. The future will belong to systems that can build, learn, and correct. The measure of that capacity will not be the wattage of today’s power plants or the length of today’s high-speed rail, but the depth of institutions, the openness of knowledge, and the elasticity of politics. On these dimensions, a renewed democratic project remains competitive. The true challenge is not to succumb to a new monopoly of modernity but to recover the quiet strength of law-bound, self-correcting capacity.

Featured Image: Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, Qinghai (2017): Stunning scale, but scale alone is not a system. Source: NASA Earth Observatory (Jesse Allen), using USGS Landsat data; public domain.

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