I’ve been chewing on this for months and I can’t unsee it anymore. It was the crazy schitzo chinese professor who made me realize that chinese communism is meant to destroy the enemies of the market and create an environment where all the enemies of capitalism (religion, democracy, people power) are subordinated to the value of growth. Everyone still talks like it’s 1995: America = freedom & individualism, China = commie monolith. That script is dead. What’s actually happening is a weird value swap across the Pacific.
China is aggressively importing pieces of the classical liberal West—Greek philosophy, Enlightenment ideas, meritocratic hunger, even reverence for old books while the United States has started importing the cultural and institutional pathologies you used to associate with failing third-world Marxist experiments.
Look at the Western canon right now.
In the Anglosphere you can literally get flagged on government extremism lists in the UK for teaching kids too much Shakespeare, Milton, or Hobbes. American English haven’t even heard of Plato. The Federalist Papers are “problematic” documents written by slavers. Peking University and Tsinghua have serious classics departments doing Greek and Latin the way Oxford used to. The New Yorker ran a piece last year basically admitting the CCP is using Western philosophy as a kind of performance-enhancing drug for governance and cadre training. Meanwhile the only place in the west for people to study the classics , is youtube .
And then there’s Jonathan Bi’s Western Canon podcast: He launched the Chinese feed later, didn’t even dub it, and it still blew past every other country combined in views and subscribers.
Chinese twenty-somethings are treating these texts like cheat codes, like tools for running the world better. Meanwhile we’re busy “decolonizing” our own syllabus. Economically it’s the same inversion.
Deng let capitalism in the door forty years ago and China never really closed it again. Shenzhen still feels more like 1995 Silicon Valley than San Francisco does in 2026.
The comma one is cancelled. comma.ai will be exploring other products and markets. Hello from Shenzhen, China. -GH 3/3
They kept the parts of Western liberalism that actually produce stuff: competition, merit, insane work ethic, willingness to let entrepreneurs run. America, on the other hand, has spent the last decade importing the governance style of late-stage third-world socialism with extra steps: regulatory capture everywhere, antitrust theater that mostly punishes success, DEI quotas over competence in elite institutions, cancel culture functioning like informal struggle sessions.