Hong Kong people love to travel. They rack up frequent-flyer miles across the globe. Yet their grasp of history often stays shallow. Take Japan: many visit several times a year but have never heard of the "Black Ships" incident or the Meiji Restoration. Take the United States: tourists know Times Square by heart but draw a blank on the Mayflower or the War of Independence.
America just turned 250. The July 4 festivities lacked any of the heroic swagger of Born on the Fourth of July. Division and polarization filled the void instead. Trump's image appeared everywhere among the anniversary merchandise, including a limited-edition passport bearing his portrait. The first time a sitting president's face has appeared on an American travel document.
Issuance stays limited, one may argue, and applicants must show up in Washington in person. Still, the level of personal cult on display has reached a historic high. A proposed $250 commemorative banknote featuring Trump also awaits congressional approval.
Trump's populist theatrics have infuriated elites on both coasts. On June 14, his birthday, he staged a pre-Independence Day spectacle at the White House. Workers built an octagonal cage on the lawn so MMA fighters could brawl inside it.
The New York Times ran a scathing commentary from journalist Goldberg titled "A Spectacle of American Decline." Its opening line hits hard: "Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way."
"Think of it," Goldberg continued, "On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena while capitulating to Iran. Mike Judge came close to imagining some elements of our debasement in his 2006 satire “Idiocracy,” which depicts a United States led by a professional wrestler whose middle name is Mountain Dew. But if “Idiocracy” captured something of the vibe of Donald Trump’s reign, it was both too early and too lighthearted to nail the sordid specifics, which on Sunday included the fighter Josh Hokit, standing in an octagonal cage wrapped in crypto ads, calling the former first lady Michelle Obama a man."
Americans have long boasted that their strength flows from having the world's best democratic system. Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously predicted in 1989 that history would end with American democracy triumphant. Even Fukuyama now admits the US system has problems. He worries America may hand its leadership position to China.
Maybe it's time to dig back into the history books. Did America's rise stem from superior institutions, or from overwhelming resource advantages?
In 1620, the Mayflower carried 102 English Puritans, craftsmen, fishermen, and indentured servants from Plymouth to North America. They signed the Mayflower Compact, embodying a spirit of self-governance and laying an early political foundation. The Mayflower gets all the fame, but its passengers weren't actually the first settlers. Thirteen years earlier, in 1607, the English had already planted Jamestown, the true first permanent settlement in North America.
From 1607 to 1733, waves of English settlers crossed the ocean armed with guns. They displaced and killed Native Americans along the way. Thirteen colonies took shape, including Virginia and Massachusetts. By 1775, these colonies, crushed under British taxation, launched the War of Independence. They defeated Britain and declared independence in 1776. The 1783 Treaty of Paris formally sealed the separation.
At its 1776 founding, the United States held just 13 original states, including New York and Virginia. Its territory covered roughly 800,000 square kilometers, clustered along the Atlantic coast. Today, US territory spans about 9.37 million square kilometers across 50 states. That's more than ten times its original size.
War, annexation, and purchase built this map. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, signed after defeating Britain, granted the US sovereignty over 2.3 million square kilometers, covering six Midwest states including Michigan. In 1803, the US purchased Louisiana and surrounding central territories from France, gaining another 2.6 million square kilometers.
In 1848, victory over Mexico brought the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This added 2.3 million square kilometers, including California and Nevada. In 1867, the US bought Alaska from Russia, adding another 1.5 million square kilometers. Then in 1898, it annexed Hawaii. The territorial map was essentially complete.
This rapid expansion was never peaceful. It was built on coercion, annexation, and war. Settlers carried guns far more advanced than anything indigenous peoples had. They rode across the land, seizing homes that were never theirs.
By 1898, when US territorial expansion was essentially complete, China was living through the twilight of the Qing dynasty. The US held vast land but a thin population: 9.36 million square kilometers with only 74.4 million people. China controlled roughly similar land, around 9.6 million square kilometers, but packed in about 400 million people. Per capita arable land in the US reached about 30 mu. China's figure ranged from just 1.4 to 3.95 mu. American farmland per person outstripped China's by 7.6 to 21.4 times. Agriculture and mining alone could make settlers rich, especially with slavery driving labor costs to near zero.
At the time, Chinese people called America "Gold Mountain," largely a nod to California's gold rush, and the nickname wasn't far off the mark.
Institutions matter when comparing national development. But natural conditions matter just as much. The US enjoyed exceptional geography, sitting isolated overseas, far from the devastation both World Wars inflicted on other nations. That geographic edge fueled America's rapid rise.
China faced a starkly different hand. It lacked natural resources and sat surrounded by powerful neighbors, making development an uphill climb. The US took 250 years to reach its current scale. The People's Republic of China, founded in 1949, has taken just 77 years to reach about 70% of US GDP in nominal terms. Measured by purchasing power parity, it actually surpassed the US back in 2014. Pulling this off with far fewer resources shows just how steep China's climb really was.
The East is rising, the West declining. The United States, a nation built on colonialism and war, is sliding toward decline amid deep internal division. China, meanwhile, is rising fast. That contrast points to a clear institutional advantage on China's side.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
Everyone wants to succeed. Parents naturally hope their children will excel. They push hard to get their kids into elite schools and into medical school at university, believing this is a straight path through life. But this often misses the point entirely.
Since entering the workforce, I've met many successful people. I always chat with them and probe one question: How did they succeed? Having attended a prestigious school is usually not the real answer.
I have long been fascinated by history and politics, especially the secrets behind the success of political parties and nations. Back in secondary school, one puzzle already caught my attention. The Kuomintang launched two campaigns trying to wipe out the Communists. The Chinese Party of China (CPC) endured the brutal Long March, a trek across thousands of miles that left only 50,000 survivors fleeing into the mountains. Yet by 1949, the Communists had won the civil war, seized power, and unified China. That outcome seemed almost unbelievable, and it left me wondering how the Party fought and won so effectively.
After entering university, I watched China swing from the extreme leftism of the Cultural Revolution to a complete reversal under Reform and Opening Up. At first, this looked erratic and unpredictable. But tracing the Party's trajectory more closely changed my view.
I came to see an extraordinarily strong capacity to learn, to admit mistakes, and to pivot when needed. During university, I wrote a short thesis on exactly this: how the Chinese Communist Party engages in systematic learning.
In recent years, I've been even more astonished. I never imagined China could take the lead over the United States in new energy, electric vehicles, and even cutting-edge technology such as hypersonic missiles and sixth-generation fighter jets. More striking still, the United States launched trade and tech wars against China twice, in 2018 and again in 2025, and both times came away empty-handed.
This pushed me to ask why the Chinese Communist Party possesses such a powerful ability to advance against the wind. These are questions that define our era.
Anti-China sentiment still dominates Western discourse, yet wave after wave of serious China research keeps surfacing underneath it. Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London recently released her latest book, The Common Good Economy: A New Compass. In it, she acknowledges that China has outperformed the West, describing it as a form of co-creation between government and people with Chinese characteristics.
Mazzucato clearly is not fond of China's political system, yet she cannot deny its capacity to get things done. She notes that China is the only country seriously tackling poverty, hunger, and climate change on a large scale.
Mazzucato points to considerable hypocrisy in the West, which talks about these grand goals but never examines what China has actually accomplished. On hunger, poverty, and climate action, she says, China leads the world in practice, not merely in rhetoric.
Mazzucato adds that a key feature of China's approach is genuine collaboration between government and people. The two sides co-create and participate together, rather than the government simply issuing directives from above. She contrasts this with so-called democracies that talk about serving the people.
In practice, she argues, those governments fail to serve their people and certainly do not work alongside them. Her critique essentially amounts to this: Western nations talk the talk, while China delivers results.
Another prominent Russian figure, Alexander Bastrykin, has also weighed in on China. The 73-year-old Bastrykin is a university classmate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and chairman of Russia's Investigative Committee, often dubbed "Russia's FBI." Speaking recently at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, he bluntly stated that Russia is now in crisis, lacking clear ideological guidance.
Bastrykin recalled that Soviet children grew up steeped in Soviet patriotism, and it was precisely this that allowed the Soviet Union to win the Great Patriotic War. Today, he argued, Russians, especially younger generations who never experienced the Soviet era, simply do not know where Russia is headed or what they are supposed to be striving for.
The root cause of this confusion, Bastrykin said, is that Russia lacks an ideology of its own. In other words, Russia has lost its soul.
Bastrykin called on Russia to learn from China's experience. He argued that China's ability to develop at a pace far exceeding the norm stems from having fundamentally established its own ideology, with the goal of building a strong socialist nation.
He then turned pointedly critical. "And what about Russia? What exactly are we building? Capitalism?" he asked angrily. "I honestly do not understand what we are building here. It is just a market economy, nothing more. There is no ideology whatsoever behind it."
Many people may not realize that as a major power, Russia's constitution does not lay out any national goal. In 1993, under Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin, Article 13 of the Russian Federal Constitution stated in black and white that the Russian Federation recognizes ideological diversity and a multi-party system. No ideology may be established as a state or mandatory ideology. Under the guidance of Western advisors at the time, Russia legally castrated its own ideology, primarily to prevent any return of communism. This has since left it a nation that has lost its spirit.
President Xi Jinping recently stated at an assembly marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party: "One must have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve success." He called on the Party to fulfill its mission on this new journey in the new era. He urged all Party members to strengthen their resolve, continue striving without pause, and keep creating new achievements worthy of the times and the people.
A Russian official spoke of China's ideology. A British scholar spoke of China's execution capability. President Xi's eight-character phrase, "One must have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve success," sums up both issues. China has set its sights firmly on building a strong, modern socialist nation, with a clear ideological goal. It also possesses formidable execution capability, underpinned by a stable political system under Communist Party leadership that enables sustained, continuous effort.
It’s always easier said than done. A child who sets clear goals and works diligently toward them stands a good chance of success. But that is not achieved simply by attending endless tutoring classes or getting into a famous school. That is not how these eight characters are truly fulfilled.
Many parents themselves drift through life without direction, so how can they expect their children to set ambitious goals? If parents spend their time gaming and traveling, how can they expect their children to study diligently? Everything must be learned from those who have truly succeeded, starting with leading by example.
Lo Wing-hung
