China Is Not a Competitor — It Is Democracy's Top Adversary! [Zhiding Lecture Hall · Enlightenment Forum · Yu Maochun] EP236

This video, presented by Miles Yu, provides an in-depth analysis of the fallacy held by Western commentators who view China as a competitor. The article points out that China is not a commercial competitor that plays by the rules, but rather the number one adversary whose essence is one-party dictatorship and totalitarian control, aiming to destroy the liberal democratic system. It argues from various aspects, such as information blockades, economic coercion, and strategic goals, the importance of precise positioning for the U.S. and Western countries in dealing with the threat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

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Hello everyone, welcome to the Enlightenment Forum of the Zhiding Lecture Hall. I am Miles Yu. For many years, the Western commentariat has been accustomed to using a reassuring narrative: China is America's greatest competitor. This sounds modern, restrained, and even carries a sense of sportsmanship, as if international affairs were like an Olympic podium where everyone follows the rules, shakes hands after the game, and then goes home. However, this mode of thinking is precisely the problem. It weakens a strategic threat into commercial competition, views regime expansion as a market challenge, and mistakes a hostile system for a peer that just wants to win in the same game. Competition should take place within a common framework, involving open exchange, reciprocal market access, predictable rules, and a basic consensus where both sides acknowledge each other's right to exist and succeed. The narrative that China is a competitor is built on three assumptions: first, that China is part of the global free market and democratic rule-of-law system; second, that China accepts these rules; and third, that China aims for the gold medal but also acknowledges the legitimacy of the silver and bronze medalists. However, none of these assumptions hold up in the face of reality.

Let us start with the nature of the Chinese regime. China is not just authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics; it is a Marxist-Leninist one-party dictatorship that views political pluralism as a fatal threat and treats its citizens as subjects who need to be managed, censored, and monitored. Freedom House rates China as not free, with a total score of only 9, reflecting its systematic suppression of political rights and civil liberties. Reporters Without Borders describes China as the world's largest prison for journalists, currently holding over 100 journalists. Pointing out these facts is not for moral posturing, but to maintain strategic clarity. A regime that cannot tolerate freedom of speech at home will not become a rule-abiding participant abroad, and a system built on coercion will not suddenly possess sportsmanship just because it exports solar panels.

Let us re-examine the equivalence implied by the term "competitor." If China were a normal competitor, exchanges and access should be reciprocal. While there might be friction in the flow of students, ideas, media, platforms, and capital, it should never be a one-sided blockade. However, the current imbalance is obvious. In the United States, Chinese students remain one of the largest international student groups, yet the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government has made the environment for Americans studying in China unsafe, unfree, and unwelcome. In the 2024-2025 academic year, 266,000 Chinese students were granted permission to study in the U.S.; by contrast, in the 2023-2024 academic year, there were only about 800 American students in China. In other words, for every American studying in China, there are over 300 Chinese students on American campuses. This is by no means a normal exchange, but an extremely asymmetrical openness, where one side does everything possible to absorb knowledge while the other faces blockades, surveillance, and intimidation.

The imbalance in the information sphere is even more stark; applying the label of "competitor" here is utterly absurd. While Americans are debating whether to ban apps like Douyin that are controlled by China, the CCP has long since implemented a comprehensive ban on American and Western platforms within its borders. This is not out of privacy concerns, but because free information and totalitarian control are fundamentally incompatible. Ordinary citizens in China cannot freely use platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, or services provided by Google—including email, maps, cloud storage, and YouTube—or the websites of almost all mainstream Western media. This is not a minor regulatory dispute, but a comprehensive and deliberate suppression of the open internet. This point is crucial because internet censorship is not just domestic repression, but strategic isolation. When a regime blocks the world's largest internet platforms, it is not competing in the marketplace of ideas; it is eliminating the entire market. It cuts off the Chinese people's access to independent news, diverse viewpoints, and investigative reporting, and even deprives them of basic internet tools that the free world considers infrastructure. The ultimate result is the creation of a society designed for blind obedience, where official narratives cannot be debated and instructions can only be passively accepted.

Next, let us look at the economic front. The premise of competition is a struggle based on market mechanisms: innovation, pricing, manufacturing, and sales. However, when a command economy pours massive subsidies into strategic industries, uses policy banks to control capital, protects its domestic market, and leverages regulatory privileges to manipulate outcomes, this struggle is no longer free-market competition, but industrial coercion disguised with price tags. Investigations into Chinese electric vehicles and other strategic industries have repeatedly revealed a pattern of large-scale state intervention: crushing foreign producers through price distortion. This is not fair competition, but predatory state tactics. The scale of the imbalance is even more evident in U.S.-China trade relations; even after years of tariff wars and discussions of decoupling, the U.S. goods trade deficit with China in 2024 still reached $295.4 billion. You could begrudgingly call this competition, but it is a competition where only one side is allowed to simultaneously serve as the offense, the defense, and the referee.

Most importantly, the "competitor" framework ignores the strategic ultimate goal of the CCP regime. A competitor tries to surpass you, while an enemy tries to destroy you. Beijing's calculation is not merely to sell more products or file more patents, but to normalize authoritarian rule, making it an alternative to replace free societies and democratic governance, and by shaping the global environment, to force free nations to pay a higher price to maintain their freedom. You can negotiate tariffs with a competitor, but you cannot defeat, through competition alone, a system that views your political model as a contagion and a fatal threat.

In fact, even in certain specific contexts, official U.S. regulatory language has long acknowledged this distinction. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, for specific national security purposes, the United States designates certain entities as foreign adversaries, a list that explicitly includes China alongside Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Although this designation is limited in scope and for a specific purpose rather than a declaration of war, it reflects a brutal reality: in critical areas, the U.S. government no longer views China merely as a competitor, but as a hostile strategic actor. Therefore, precise terminology is crucial. Language not only shapes budget allocations, alliance relationships, and risk tolerance, but also influences public expectations. Calling China a competitor easily breeds complacency, fostering the belief that simply running faster, innovating more, and doing better will suffice. Conversely, framing China as the primary adversary awakens realism: compelling us to actively defend the information space, reduce critical supply chain risks, protect academic research integrity, strengthen democratic institutions, and counter coercion with collective deterrence. You cannot engage in fair competition with a regime that blocks your speech, harvests your openness dividends, weaponizes your dependencies, and even attempts to make your democratic system look obsolete. This is by no means an Olympic race for a medal, but an existential struggle over whether free societies can remain free.