Welcome to A Good Append Here.

I'm your host Mia Wong.

And today we're going to be talking about something a little bit different.

In the last half decade, a growing political focus on China has transformed a cottage industry

of American China watchers into a sprawling metropolis of pseudo-analysis, a veritable

machine that turns out racialized fear of the Chinese other, and transforms it into

economic papers that close with, quote, unquote, policy solutions about the so-called China

problem.

In these circles, a consensus is emerging about what they call Chinese state capitalism,

and its supposed risk to the United States.

China's economy, they argue, is not a free market economy like that of the United States.

Instead, China's larger array of state-owned industries and its willingness to use investments

to incentivize specific kinds of research while protecting companies from pure market

competition means that the state, and not the market, dictates the course of the Chinese

economy.

Under these assumptions, the Chinese economy poses two major threats to American companies

in the American security state.

First, state-owned industries subsidized by the state will inevitably out-compete American

companies because American companies can't match the sheer quantity of capital held by

the Chinese state, which violates the fairness and competitiveness of the free market by making

companies compete on unequal grounds.

Second, the close ties between the Chinese government and state-owned industries, and even

...