American politicians of both parties would like Americans to believe that the reason China keeps gaining on the United States is that Beijing is a nest of currency sorcerers, subsidy alchemists and bureaucratic pickpockets. That is a comforting theory because it allows Americans to preserve their favorite national hobby: losing focus while maintaining moral superiority.
It is also a wonderful arrangement for politicians. When factories age, schools stagnate, infrastructure decays, savings collapse and industrial policy consists mainly of election-year chest-thumping, it is enormously convenient to point across the Pacific and shout, “There’s the villain.” That way elected officials can avoid explaining why they spent decades confusing consumption with prosperity, debt with strength and grievance with strategy. The public gets a foreign scapegoat, the politicians get a domestic pardon, and everyone gets to avoid the more humiliating possibility that decline can be homemade.
It is always pleasant to discover that a rival did not beat you fair and square, but only by cheating. It saves the trouble of asking awkward questions about why the rival studied harder, saved more, built more factories, graduated more engineers, and treated economic competition as something more serious than halftime entertainment.
Savings first, excuses later
China’s gross savings rate has remained above 40% of GDP in recent years, including 43.4% in 2024 by one widely used economic database. By contrast, one recent summary put the average U.S. personal savings rate at 3.6% in 2024. One country stores acorns for winter. The other finances patio furniture at 19.99% APR and declares itself the indispensable nation.
This is not a moral judgment. It is arithmetic with attitude. High savings help finance investment, industrial expansion, infrastructure and resilience. Low savings help finance imported consumer goods and speeches about how unfair the global system has become.
China grew; America got distracted
Over the past several decades, China’s economic rise has been one of the most dramatic transformations in modern history. Cambridge University Press’s The Arc of the Chinese Economy reports that China’s GDP grew from about $361 billion in 1990 to about $17.79 trillion in 2023, while its economy rose from 6.1% of U.S. GDP in 1990 to 64.2% in 2023 in nominal-dollar terms. The same Cambridge source says China reached 125% of U.S. GDP by 2023 in purchasing-power terms.
That did not happen because a few trade officials in Beijing broke the U.S.-designed rules of the game. It happened because 1.4 billion people entered an ultra-competitive system where education, engineering, manufacturing and national advancement were not treated as elective hobbies. Meanwhile, America was busy turning every serious policy debate into either a culture-war costume party or a subsidies-for-my-friends seminar.
Hard work is not a trade violation
Recent reporting has repeated the now-jarring comparison that China graduates roughly 1.3 million engineers per year, versus about 130,000 in the United States. That is roughly a 10-to-1 annual advantage in engineering throughput. A country that adds that kind of technical depth year after year is not merely competing; it is accumulating industrial compound interest.
This does not prove that China’s political system is admirable. It proves something much ruder: hard work, intense competition, technical training and industrial scale still matter. Apparently, the future has cruelly refused to be rearranged by branding consultants, compliance seminars, political harangues and strategic vision statements printed on recycled cardstock.
The coming humiliation
America is coming, slowly and resentfully, to the conclusion that it may soon be number two. The humiliating part is not that another country rose. The humiliating part is that Americans may still insist this happened because the referees were biased, rather than because the other team spent 30 years lifting weights while America was eating candy.
None of this excuses intellectual property theft or coercive trade practices. Those are real and should be punished. But they are not a sufficient explanation for the scoreboard.
Cheating might help at the margin. It cannot explain decades of growth, savings, infrastructure, workforce development, export success and industrial learning on this scale.
Steve Albert lives in Montgomery.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Stop blaming China for America’s lost focus | Opinion
Reporting by Steve Albert, Opinion contributor / Cincinnati Enquirer
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Steve Albert, Opinion contributor | USA TODAY Network
