Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail

by Ray Dalio

To understand their circumstances and perspectives, I suggest that you not view what they are doing through stereotypes (e.g., of “what communists do”) and accept that they are trying, and will continue to try, to juggle these two seemingly inconsistent things. In their view capitalism is a way of raising the living standards of most people and is not meant to serve capitalists. Whether one thinks this approach is good or bad, their results have been extremely impressive so we should not expect the Chinese to abandon it for an American or Western approach. Rather, we should study it to see what we can learn from it, the same way that the Chinese have studied and learned from the West. After all, what we have is a competition of approaches that we need to understand in order to play this competitive game well. As far as foreign policy is concerned, China has become stronger and more forceful while the United States has become more confrontational. More specifically, from 2012 until the time of my writing China’s strengths have grown, which has become increasingly apparent and more openly shown (e.g., the Made in China 2025 plan trumpets its plans to dominate certain industries that the United States currently controls). This has sparked a strong reaction in the US, which became most evident after the election of Donald Trump in 2016.