Me: I'm 1.5-gen Chinese American who grew up in both countries. I am no geopolitical expert but I watch this from the middle since I know both countries well enough than most people who identify as solely Chinese or American. Here's my take.
A bit long, skip to the part where you are interested.
My Take on a Possible Taiwan Scenario:
No one is going to war — at least not until 2030s. Neither Washington nor Beijing wants an actual military confrontation right now, and not out of virtue. Two nuclear powers with economies wired together have no version of that war that ends well for the winner. Both are risk-averse incumbents protecting what they already hold — not the 1930s Germany or Japan type of power willing to bet their fate on a single surprise blow against a major power like the Blitzkrieg or Pearl Harbor. Both are trying to decouple from each other slowly, but for now can't completely.
History rhymes here. The US stayed out of World War II until Pearl Harbor, because an isolationist public wanted no part of it. My own read is that FDR, who understood the Axis had to be stopped, used the 1941 oil embargo as a bait to box Japan into corner — betting a Japanese strike would do what democracy couldn't and drag the public into the war, just like 911. I went to Yasukuni Shrine recently, (which 90% of Chinese tourist won't bother to go, especially the mainland Chinese due to the anti-Japanese sentiment). In that museum the Japanese stated that the ABCD (America, Britain, China, Dutch) encirclement were trying to choke Japan out of its oil supply given Japan received 80% of its oil supply from America to fuel its war machine in China, so there's no way Japan would gave up its conquest on China after 4 years right? Then Pearl Harbor happened, surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet then used those gap period to secure oil in SEA.
Beijing reads Taiwan the same way — as American bait — which is exactly why China is content to watch the US and NATO grind themselves down in Ukraine and the Middle East. It's doing what America did before 1941: staying out, letting rivals exhaust themselves, and waiting for the timing to suit it. Washington didn't move in 1937 when Japan invaded China, or in 1939 when Germany took Poland. It moved in 1941.
I don't think Xi is ready yet — China is still layering down the economic and financial infrastructure to decouple from the west, before any "reunification of the motherland," or "invasion of Taiwan," depending whether it is Chinese or American propaganda, which I am being subjected to when I was growing up, both are liars anyway. Also unlike the Japanese situation, China doesn't need Taiwan for any critical resource for survival, so China can still wait for a while til 2030s, when China have more aircraft carriers to deny US access to the 1st island chain. Also, the recent purge in the PLA means the military isn't ready to fight a war for now.
My take on Taiwanese identity:
This is an unfinished business from the Chinese Civil War, which never formally ended: the CCP and the KMT never signed anything, so from Beijing's frame the war is merely paused. There's a reason why the Chinese military is called the People Liberation Army, for the last 70 years CCP still see Taiwan as the last piece of lost territory of China which require "liberation".
What most Westerners miss is that the KMT once had the mirror-image ambition. In the early 1960s, as the mainland collapsed into famine under the Great Leap Forward, Chiang Kai-shek's government drew up a real, secret plan — Project National Glory — to invade and retake it, complete with landing operations and dozens of combat scenarios. It went nowhere mainly because Washington, which armed Taiwan but only ever committed to defending the island, refused to back an offensive. Still, the KMT built its whole authoritarian identity around "recovering the mainland" and "liberating" the motherland — a dream that meant something to the roughly one-in-seven who had fled in 1949, but very little to the native Taiwanese majority, who never asked for the mission or the martial-law police state imposed to sustain it. That resentment is part of what drove Taiwan's democratization in the late 1980s, the rise of the DPP, and the gradual hardening of a distinct Taiwanese identity — the thing CCP hates most. Within the Taiwanese society, there's still resentment between KMT and DPP supporter among the older gen.
And now mainland China has decisively outgrown the island, there's a real tension in Taiwan's self-image. It presents itself to the world as a plucky, freedom-loving democracy standing against authoritarianism — yet it has never formally declared independence, its own constitution still notionally claims all of China, and most Taiwanese, in practice, prefer the ambiguous status quo to either unification or a genuine bid for statehood. The heroic framing and the cautious reality don't quite line up. Which isn't to deny the obvious: given the choice, most people on Taiwan would still rather keep things exactly as they are than "return to the motherland."
My take on CCP Popularity:
Why the CCP's support base is real, not just propaganda-manufactured. A lot of Westerners assumes Chinese public support for the CCP is coerced or fabricated. From what I've seen personally, it's often genuine — especially in coastal cities, where urban hukou holders captured most of the gains from market reform. I've met mainland Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution's horrors but still credit the Party, because the same system that inflicted that also delivered the wealth that came after. That's not blind loyalty; it's a real generational bargain, and dismissing it as brainwashing misses why it holds. No one is interested in democracy when they have a pocket full of money.
Who actually complains the loudest, and why it's not who you'd expect. The loudest anti-Xi voices tend to be two groups: 60% of Hong Kongers (some with legitimate grievances due to the cultural crash between Cantonese and Mandarin, similar to the dynamics between anglophone and francophone in Quebec, and some are just dumb and brainwash by Western media have no critical thinking skills at all), and low level CCP members or party-connected families who fell out of favor during Xi era and relocated to Five Eyes countries to enjoy the "free market capitalism" their money — often acquired through corruption — now buys them. Bo Xilai's son, Bo Guagua, is a good example: he's been living in Toronto for years, and there's essentially no path back to China for him, at least not while Xi is in power — though I'd guess Xi's motive for going after the Bo family wasn't purely about the corruption charge but rather than power struggle.
Another big group of mainland Chinese who complained the most are the one from economically impoverished from Northeast, Henan and some inland provinces. Northeast is the base for Falun Gong and Henan is the base for Christian. People from economically improvished region often need religions or cults to numb themselves to escape reality.
You see similar dynamic in America, MAGA Chrisitan nationalist redneck from the midwest and the south vs the coastal globalist elites in NY and CA. When I met people from MAGA redneck states tell me how Latinos are invading America or woke Karen from NY telling me why I need to support BLM because I am a POC, their brains are running in a different galaxy, even though they are both white Americans. In China you met people little red pinks from coastal wealthy families with big business who tell me without CCP there will be no new China but also son of CCP officials from inland provinces but who hate Xi then decided to move to the one of the five eyes country. Again they are both mainland Chinese, but their brains are running in a different galaxy too.
My take on Xi:
Good:
The anti-corruption campaign since Xi came to power: real, but also a factional weapon. Xi's anti-corruption drive has done genuine work cleaning up a system where graft was close to unchecked in the 1990s and 2000s. But it's also become a tool official use against rivals during promotion cycles — investigations often track political need as much as actual wrongdoing. Both things are true at once, and it's still a clear improvement on the earlier era of near-zero internal oversight, a time where corruption is rampant. I personally think Xi deserve credits for solving the corruption issues within the party.
Xi as a strategist against Trump — and the case for why time horizon matters. Whatever else you think of him, Xi is playing a long game against a structurally different opponent. Since the 2018 constitutional change removed term limits, he can plan in decades; any US president is negotiating on a four-year clock, functionally a fixed-term contract. That asymmetry shapes how seriously Beijing can afford to treat any single administration's tough talk — a permanent leader has less reason to overreact to a temporary one's posturing. (The fair counter, worth holding alongside this: Xi's own legitimacy is tied tightly to delivering growth and elite consensus, and unlike a term-limited leader he has no clean exit if things go wrong — indefinite tenure cuts both ways, and he will probably be president for life anyway since he is in classic dictator dillema)
Bad:
Xi didn't grew up in an era of market economy unlike the younger gen Chinese, his economic view is a bit stuck in the era of command economy and it shows — there's still too much state-directed capital allocation, with real waste, especially in the Northeast's old industrial base. The current premier, Li Qiang, has more room to push restructuring than his predecessor did, mainly because Xi trusts him personally, unlike the previous premier who Xi hated and then got a "heart attack" unfortunately. I think the current premier understand the concept of market economy better than Xi or the previous premier.
Civil liberty or freedom of speech in general. Nah I don't wanna talk too much about it.
My take on Iran War and how it accelerate petrodollar-to-petroyuan shift and its impact on American Economy
Xi is trying to build a system independent of the petrodollar, and the Iran war has accelerated that process further than most people realize. The US and Israel struck Iran starting February 28, 2026, killing Khamenei, explicitly aiming at regime change — but as of this month, the regime has survived, emerging (per recent reporting) more hardline, not less. That failure matters economically: Gulf states won't treat America as their sole financial backstop if Washington can't even topple the regime next door, so they need China as a hedge to keep their economies running.
The mechanism is straightforward. When China floods the world with goods, the Gulf states need yuan to buy them, and there aren't many alternatives — that demand is what creates a partial, functional petroyuan system. And this isn't hypothetical anymore: Iran has reportedly moved close to full yuan settlement for its oil exports to China, Saudi Arabia signed a currency swap deal with Beijing, the UAE formally left OPEC in May 2026 and has floated shifting its own oil sales to yuan, and China's cross-border yuan payment system has been clearing record volumes. The war accelerated exactly the dynamic I'd have predicted anyway.
I still call it "partial," though, because the yuan isn't a free-flow capital currency, even as China tries to transition it toward one — and the mainstream analyst view backs that caution up: China's capital account isn't open, Gulf security still runs through Washington rather than Beijing, and most forecasts see a partially multipolar currency system emerging rather than a changing of the guard. The US dollar will stay the global reserve currency for at least the next decade. But reduced dollar demand at the margins still matters: it pushes toward higher interest rates alongside an oversupply of dollars, and that combination pushes the US toward stagflation.
That's also no longer just a forecast — it's the live debate in US economic commentary right now. As of mid-2026, inflation is running above 3.5%, unemployment sits around 4.2% and rising, tariffs are pushing costs through with a lag, and the Fed is stuck holding rates near 3.5–3.75% because cutting risks reigniting inflation while holding risks growth. Economists are already using the term "stagflation-lite" to describe it. The mechanism — reduced dollar demand colliding with dollar oversupply which originated from Fed injecting cash into the system during Covid — isn't speculative anymore; it's the dominant story in American financial commentary today, and Gen Z Americans are suffering from it which lead to the rise of ultra right and left politics in America.
My take on US strategic miscalculation on China:
1. 9/11 is the anamoly
People forget: in early 2001 the Bush admin was already pointing the US at China as the next rival — "strategic competitor" language, the Hainan spy-plane standoff, the whole vibe. Then 19 guys with box cutters rerouted American grand strategy for 20 years. Bin Laden was a genuine anomaly — one non-state actor who bent a superpower's entire focus onto Afghanistan and Iraq. Beijing knew exactly what it got: at the 2002 Party Congress they literally named it a "period of strategic opportunity" — a window to develop hard while the US looked away. And China used it well. Roughly $8 trillion of American money went into the post-9/11 wars (Brown University's Costs of War estimate) while China grew ~10%/yr for a generation and slid into the WTO in Dec 2001, after the Chinese offer "condolence" to America, saying China will stand with America to fight Islamic terrorism. Then Bush be like: aww the Chinese are the "good guys", time to give the Chinese WTO membership. After a phone call from Jiang Zemin to Bush, 4 months later China got the deal of the century, then it turn into the economic miracle story of China.
Could the US have strangled China's rise with sanctions if 9/11 never happened? Probably. The War on Terror cost America its two decades of maximum leverage, and China spent those exact decades getting strong enough that today's contest is a contest. (And no, that 10% run isn't coming back. Same growth rate at today's size = a bubble looking for a pin.)
2. The bad China commentary.
Gordon Chang literally wrote The Coming Collapse of China in 2001 and has been wrong in the same direction for 25 years — the track record is the verdict), and the peaking-power alarmists (the Beckley/Brands "danger zone" thesis — serious, but leans on shaky assumptions). And the trap I want to flag: judging any of these people by their ancestry — "they look Chinese so they must get it". The real test is boring: do they read the primary sources, and does their record survive contact with reality? Plenty of famous "China experts" can't read Chinese. These people basically buy China's time to develop itself and now directly challenge the United States.
Chinese dissidents is part of the issue too, they are just a small minority group in China, however the American media amplify their voices and cause American society believe Chinese people will overthrow the CCP. The strategic goal of United States is using Chinese dissidents in CIA anti-Chinese propaganda to defeat China ideologicaly, just like the case of Soviet Union. However with the internet firewall in place, the Chinese population won't be brainwash by CIA propaganda, but exclusively by CCP propaganda. In fact, America as a country have fallen victim of CIA anti-Chinese propaganda as the political elites and the broader American society have actually believe the "China will collapse" or "Chinese people will overthrow CCP", these kind of rhetorics cause America to miss the best strategic opportunity gap to suppress China economic growth and now China is a direct competitor to the US.
Feel free to ask me any questions related to the US China geopolitical rivalry.
