When comparing visions for the world in 50 years, Putin and Xi Jinping both have dystopian visions, while the Western vision is superior—but China's is undermining its own growth rates through domestic repression.

For a long time, the West assumed China's grand strategy was to accept Western norms and use them to become wealthy, but this assumption may no longer hold true today as China appears to have shifted its priorities.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power, his economic reforms and strengthening of Communist Party rule ran in parallel—allowing peasants and private businesses to be more productive made the country wealthier while the Party maintained political control.

Twenty years into Deng's reforms, China developed a much better educated population and large multinational corporations with global reach, at which point the Communist Party came to view these educated elites as competitors for political power.

Western civilization is built on three foundational pillars: Greek analytical thinking (laws of identity and non-contradiction), Roman law and institutions for enforcement, and Christian values emphasizing that the individual has a soul that precedes and supersedes government.

Governments and structures of authority in China have historically been top-down, whether under Confucianism or communism, unlike the West which cements institutions with written laws and courts that adjudicate disputes.

Educated and wealthy Chinese at higher levels of economic development naturally desire political voice that reflects their economic contributions, which the Communist Party explicitly rejected and continues to reject.

China's repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang is partly driven by Xi's lesson from the Soviet Union: preventing the emergence of a discrete ethnic unit (with a flourishing culture, language, and leadership) that could serve as a springboard for separatism or independence.

Deng Xiaoping's opening to the world and embrace of international commerce initially ran parallel to the Communist Party's consolidation of power, but Xi Jinping's ultimate long-term goal beyond that cooperation remains unclear.

In Western civilization, the primary unit of society is the individual with rights; in Chinese civilization, the primary unit is the group, and people have obligations to different groups rather than individual rights.

The rules-based order is fundamentally defined not by US dictation but by international agreements and treaties that signatories voluntarily join, allowing for adjustment and incorporation of best practices from new members.

Chinese civilization places primacy on avoiding chaos, stemming from millennia of experience with massive interstate warfare denominated in hundreds of thousands of soldiers, which Western civilization did not experience on that scale until the Napoleonic wars.

The Chinese ideal political state is called 'all under heaven' (Tianxia), a theoretical state of unity where all is harmonized under central Chinese authority, producing peace, order, and prosperity.

In China, political and administrative authority operates through 'guanxi' networks—human relationship networks structured like inverted family trees, where top-level authority cascades orders down through branching networks, and the exact implementation by lower levels is often opaque to the top.

China historically treated all non-Chinese peoples as barbarians and believed only Chinese civilization was legitimate, with the natural assumption being that other peoples would eventually 'sinify' and adopt Chinese culture.

For modern China, 'returning Asia to normalcy and the world to normalcy' means restoring China to its historical position at the center, which the Chinese view as having been unjustly disrupted by Western colonialism and Japanese invasion in the 19th and 20th centuries.

When Xi Jinping came to power, he consulted experts on the Soviet Union collapse and learned that the USSR's fatal mistake was allowing political reforms before economic reforms, and that allowing flourishing cultures within nationality-based republics (like Kazakhstan and Tajikistan as discrete units) made it easy for them to break away.

Historically and currently, China deals only bilaterally with other powers rather than through multilateral alliance systems, and treats all smaller powers as inferiors, which includes nearly every other state on the planet.

Xi Jinping's domestic repression policies are tanking China's growth rates, undermining the foundation of China's economic rise and competitive position.

The West made an assumption that China would always cooperate within the international system, similar to Germany's assumption that Russia would always pursue profitable commerce—both assumptions reflected faith in the self-reinforcing nature of the rules-based order.