[U]Fortunately, we must take responsibility for our own failures. The Chinese developed a nation of producers; we are a nation of consumers. China is a nation of engineers, the United States a nation of lawyers. The Chinese willingly sacrifice today for tomorrow; we sacrifice tomorrow for today.
There are worrying signs that the Chinese are deliberately engaged in economic conquest of America. I can’t prove it, it can’t be documented. I can only cite scraps of evidence – a whispered word here, a secret CIA briefing there, knowing looks on the faces of the Chinese leaders I questioned.
Every economic measure taken by China […] was carefully controlled, directed and orchestrated by the government. How should we react? It seems to me that we must once again mobilize our economic forces. We must restructure our industrial and technological apparatus.
The passage above was written almost 40 years ago. Of course, it was not originally about China. This comes from Jack Anderson’s 1988 warning about the rise of Japanonly the proper names being modified.
It is almost uncanny how easily the panic language of 1980s Japan follows contemporary Chinese discourse. Market competition is presented as concealing state-led conquest. The rising Asian industrial powerhouse is described as technically brilliant, strategically patient and domestically disciplined. His competence is felt as an American decline.
For Americans who don’t remember the 1980s, it may be shocking to hear postwar Japan described with such hostility. Today’s Japan is generally seen less as an economic predator than as an aging ally and cultural export power.
But Anderson’s article was hardly an exception. Across the political spectrum, Japan was regularly presented not only as a competitor, but also as an economic conqueror. Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale warned that America’s children could be left to fend for themselves: “sweep Japanese computers“If the country did not force Japan to open its markets. Alarms were raised over trade deficits and direct investment in the United States.
In another complaint that could be slipped almost unchanged into today’s Chinese discourse, a 1985 New York Times article, “The danger of Japan“quoted the head of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment about Japan’s technical advantage at America’s expense:
They are ahead of us in terms of productivity in automobiles, steel and robotics. We are ahead in basic research, but they get all our scientific papers and research, and they add to that their mastery of “process technology”, translating basic research into making things. They recruit their managers from the factory; we get ours out of law schools.
The speech was framed as economic, technological and geopolitical, but the anxiety was always racially tinged – another reason it transfers so easily to China. This was sometimes explicit, as when Gore Vidal urged the United States to unite with the Soviet Union against a “highly centralized Asian world” dominated by a “Sino-Japanese axis”.
Among the public, the racial consequences were real. THE The Cato Institute noted who reported incidents of violence against Asians jumped 62 percent between 1985 and 1986, with Asians accounting for half of all racial incidents in Los Angeles and nearly a third in Boston. The most infamous case was that of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American beaten to death in Detroit in an ill-advised act of retaliation by two white auto workers who blamed Japan for job losses.
Of course, Japan in the 1980s and China in 2026 are far from the same, and that’s the problem. Japan was and remains a democratic ally of the United States: demilitarized after World War II, integrated into the American security system, and largely aligned with the liberal international order. China is a vast, centrally governed, one-party nation with a rapidly growing military. It is increasingly confident in using its commercial and diplomatic power to influence others, and at the same time it actively participates in international systems to promote its vision of an order emphasizing inviolable state sovereignty and non-interference.
This is why the familiarity of the language used in Anderson’s article is important. Current fears about China are not simply the result of Japanese panic. China poses real and unique challenges, from cybersecurity and supply chains to human rights. The fact is that the language of threat has migrated so easily across such different situations because it has never focused solely on the foreign country.
It was, and still is, also about the United States itself. His fears of decline, deindustrialization, loss of technical skills and uncertainty about whether the country still knows how to build the future. What attracts the attention of the United States is not only the fact that another country appears strong, but also the fact that it appears in precisely the same way that Americans fear that their country will become weak. Such discourse attributes to rival power a superhuman (almost inhuman) mastery of the virtues we fear we have lost: productivity, ingenuity, discipline, and the willingness to sacrifice for the future.
During U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent trip to China, Xi Jinping questioned whether the United States and China could “overcome the Thucydides Trap,” referring to the increased risk of war when an established power feels threatened by an emerging power. It was encouraging to see that the psychology of rivalry can itself become dangerous and that a military conflict between the United States and China would be catastrophic.
Thucydides’ Trap is often invoked as a warning that conflict can arise not only from the ambitions of an ascending power, but also from the established power’s reaction to them. Threat perception is rarely a purely objective reading of the other side. American concern over the rise of Japan in the 1980s, or the rise of China today, does not in itself prove that either country is attempting, or capable, of supplanting the United States.
Of course, American anxiety is not the only potential source of conflict. China has its own ambitions, red lines, grievances and domestic political pressures, all of which are playing out in a changing world order. It is a vast and varied nation with its own history, contradictions and internal challenges. The task for the United States is to avoid reducing China to a caricature that serves as a mirror for its own fears, and to develop the knowledge necessary to understand what China is actually doing and what can be done about it.
Japanese panic now seems exaggerated, as time has stripped away its urgency and revealed the scale of the projections it contained. Some of today’s Chinese discourse may well seem just as exaggerated 40 years from now. The immediate question is whether the anxiety of decline is already clouding U.S. judgment: not only does it increase the risk of conflict, but it also leads to missing the solutions and opportunities that China’s rise could make possible.