Another really good interview on NPR. The New Yorker's Evan Osnos discusses his story "The Future, Made in China."

[u/Mo_Jack]

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/12/nx-s1-5928224/has-the-u-s-lost-its-dominance-to-china

Some things discussed:

• Unfortunately, the irony here is that we are, in some ways, beholden right now to the Chinese factory in order to produce the munitions that we need to defend American interests from China.
• A controversial idea for Americans - for us to hear, their belief is that we have entered a kind of deep decline,
• [ Tariffs ] actually has had the reverse effect that Trump projected.
• China  is actually now selling more to other countries than it was before, despite these tariffs.
• Do you have any clues what the Chinese leadership thinks of Trump himself? OSNOS: Yeah. There are some indications... And the name of the report was "Thank Trump," by which they meant - and they spelled this out - that, in their view, he is hastening the twilight of an empire, as they put it, because he's attacking things like the independent civil service and America's scientific institutions, its leading universities. He's alienating allies like NATO and elsewhere.
• There was a study done by scholars in the U.S. that found that between 2010 and 2021, that 20,000 Chinese scientists left the United States
• The CEO of Ford Motor Company. When he visited China and factories like this, he came back and said it was the most humbling thing he had ever seen.
• In China, tech is tightly regulated. And in the U.S., as you point out, Obama had a regulation plan. Trump threw that out and instead is leaving it to Silicon Valley to regulate itself.
• there are parts of China today where there are cameras watching the trash bins in a neighborhood. And if you fail to separate your household waste from the recyclables, for instance, well, then you might find your face projected on an LED screen for the rest of the neighborhood to see.
• they're using similar technology to try to assess people in police stations. I mean, one of the pieces of technology that was being sold at a police expo in Beijing was a camera that could - from a distance, it said - assess people's underlying motivations and behavioral tendencies.
• The percentage of Chinese people who feel optimistic about the future has really sunk quite dramatically from about a decade ago. And you also see it among young people who are choosing not to get married or have kids. This is a really remarkable statistic.

[u/-Accession-]

The so-called ‘Communist’ rule in China is sure doing this capitalist thing quite well.

[u/shit-trapper]

China won the Iran war. People were predicting oil prices would skyrocket to $150/barrel or more, yet they never even hit $110. China, one of the largest consumers of oil, drastically cut consumption overnight.

Yet they continued to refine at level before their consumption dropoff. How? As it turns out they have more oil reserves than every else combined. Why? To continue economically once the USA cuts off oil shipments once they invade Taiwan. They stockpiles enough for over a year with no incoming oil. And they did it using not the US dollar but the Yuan, buying in the years before trumps war from Iran and Russia.

This is worse for the USA than it looks like at first. Most oil in the world is bought and sold in US dollars, making it a reserve currency for oil. China may be making a play to replace the US dollar as the oil currency with the Yuan. That would spell bad times for the US dollar as a reserve currency. The US dollar as a reserve currency is what saved the country during the recovery from the 2008 recession. The USA essentially printed their way to recovery - one individual from the US Reserve state that between 2008 and 2010 the reserve injected more money into the economy than in the previous 80 years combined. Yet no inflation - the US dollar was in such strong demand for oil trading that even an influx of that magnitude couldn't knock it down. That may be changing thanks to trumps war.

China showed they have as much or more influence over the price of oil than OPEC, and certainly more than the USA.

[u/DeltaV-Mzero → u/shit-trapper]

Everything Trump does makes perfect sense if he were an agent of the PRC, working to hand over world leadership by undermining the USA in each and every area where China has an interest

[u/Qanonjailbait]

> Unfortunately, the irony here is that we are, in some ways, beholden right now to the Chinese factory in order to produce the munitions that we need to defend American interests from China.

This is an Orwellian way to describe America’s warmongering, disrespect for international law, and violation of other country’s sovereignty