The first one is mainly whining about China stifling innovation and "the free market" through subsidies and keeps using the word "Technocrats" to describe China's leadership, I guess they realise authoritarians makes you sound like an ignorant boomer, so they're using a new fearmongering term.

A lot of this is just standard western boilerplate analysis of China's model refusing to even examine socialism (the article doesn't even mention the word once), just refusing to examine China's system beyond calling their leaders "technocrats", accusing them of being authoritarian and throwing in the standard "NO INTERNET FREEDOM" and kind of insisting that China's model is "slower" than the US and will never overtake the US in total manufacturing because of...reasons, but then also trying to put a call to action for the US saying that China will overtake them? Libs are rarely internally consistent.

Some of this even reads like it was made by the liberal evil twin of xiaohongshu, there's a vague understanding in here that China's current model is unsustainable and their economy has slowed down, but 0 actual analysis. Unlike a lot of these articles though, this one is confident that China will overcome their current challenges (probably what set off the writer of the second article).

It mainly seems to be a warning to the US that their sanctions and fumbling around in the dark won't work, and they need to revitalise industry in order to be more competitive with China, and in classic liberal fashion, they act like people simply need to will new factories and industries into existence, that they just need to believe hard enough and the factory fairy will visit them in the night and gift them with new factories.

It is nice to see a western article push back on the idea that China can't innovate and just "steals" technology from the west, even if they clearly don't have a proper understanding of all this, at least they aren't completely ignorant. Let's see how the second article goes.

The second one is more of a short letter than an article, which was a relief. I was worried it would ramble more than I do.

This one can be summarised with "The US cannot compete with China economically without adopting their political model" and of course, gommulism bad, so it's obviously a horrible thing. This quote is gold though:

But their analysis focuses on the results of China’s successful development while overlooking the political economy that made it possible: an authoritarian state based on unequal citizenship for migrants and the systematic extraction of surplus value created by workers.

Yeah, damn China with their awful treatment of migrants and exploitation of their workers, they should be more like the US!

But these two articles I think show the fundamental internal contradiction of western capital right now. They can recognise that China's model is more successful, while also recognising that restricting capital in any way will hurt their own bottom lines, and as such they cannot change anything. They know they're heading straight for the iceberg, but refuse to move out the way.

I expect articles like these to become increasingly impotent and nonsensical going forwards as the west strips the copper from the walls and China continues to actually improve things.