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In our view, all of the comparisons between China and the United States that you hear around American watercoolers these days aren’t about China at all. They are about us. China is just a mirror. We’re really talking about ourselves and our own loss of self-confidence. We see in the Chinese some character traits that we once had—that once defined us as a nation—but that we seem to have lost.

Orville Schell heads up the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York City. He is one of America’s most experienced China-watchers. He also attended the Tianjin conference, and one afternoon, after a particularly powerful presentation there about China’s latest economic leap forward, Tom asked Schell why he thought China’s rise has come to unnerve and obsess Americans.

“Because we have recently begun to find ourselves so unable to get things done, we tend to look with a certain over-idealistic yearning when it comes to China,” Schell answered. “We see what they have done and project onto them something we miss, fearfully miss, in ourselves”—that “can-do, get-it-done, everyone-pull-together, whatever-it-takes” attitude that built our highways and dams and put a man on the moon. “These were hallmarks of our childhood culture,” said Schell. “But now we view our country turning into the opposite, even as we see China becoming animated by these same kinds of energies … China desperately wants to prove itself to the world, while at the same time America seems to be losing its hunger to demonstrate its excellence.” The Chinese are motivated, Schell continued, by a “deep yearning to restore China to greatness, and, sadly, one all too often feels that we are losing that very motor force in America.”

The two of us do feel that, but we do not advocate policies and practices to sustain American greatness out of arrogance or a spirit of chauvinism. We do it out of a love for our country and a powerful belief in what a force for good America can be—for its own citizens and for the world—at its best. We are well aware of America’s imperfections, past and present. We know that every week in America a politician takes a bribe; someone gets convicted of a crime he or she did not commit; public money gets wasted that should have gone for a new bridge, a new school, or pathbreaking research; many young people drop out of school; young women get pregnant without committed fathers; and people unfairly lose their jobs or their houses. The cynic says, “Look at the gap between our ideals and our reality. Any talk of American greatness is a lie.” The partisan says, “Ignore the gap. We’re still ‘exceptional.’” Our view is that the gaps do matter, and this book will have a lot to say about them. But America is not defined by its gaps. Our greatness as a country—what truly defines us—is and always has been our never-ending effort to close these gaps, our constant struggle to form a more perfect union. The gaps simply show us the work we still have to do.

To repeat: Our problem is not China, and our solution is not China. Our problem is us—what we are doing and not doing, how our political system is functioning and not functioning, which values we are and are not living by. And our solution is us—the people, the society, and the government that we used to be, and can be again. That is why this book is meant as both a wake-up call and a pep talk—unstinting in its critique of where we are and unwavering in its optimism about what we can achieve if we act together.

TWO

Ignoring Our Problems

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

—Evolutionary theory

We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.

—Georgi Arbatov, Soviet expert on the United States, speaking at the end of the Cold War

It all seems so obvious now, but on the historic day when the Berlin Wall was cracked open—November 11, 1989—no