China Is Feeling Strong and Senses an American Retreat

Beijing is using its messaging tools to show off its prowess at building infrastructure and project power, taking advantage of what it says is “deep anxiety” in U.S. policies.

When the world’s tallest bridge opened in China’s Guizhou Province in September, a state-run political talk show filmed an episode from its summit to showcase what it called “the remarkable story of China’s path to modernization.”

A Canadian influencer on the panel marveled, “You have projects like this the West could only dream of.”

CNN and NBC broadcast segments of their own about the bridge, which stands roughly 200 stories above a river. So did Matt Walsh, a right-wing commentator. “Why aren’t we building stuff like this any more?” he asked on his show on YouTube. He lamented that America had “lost the will and desire to do great things.”

It would be a mistake to brush off the story of the Guizhou bridge as simply a victory of Chinese propaganda. The reactions to the bridge point to something deeper than admiration for Chinese infrastructure: a widening imbalance between the self-images of the world’s two largest powers.

China has been buoyed this year by a surge of confidence, convinced that its governance model is ascendant and its rise inevitable. That confidence often overlooks serious vulnerabilities: a slowing economy, a deepening housing crisis and falling birthrates.

The United States, meanwhile, has taken a different tone — one that China experts say exhibits defeatism. President Trump’s national security strategy, released this month, frames China more as a business competitor than as a rival for military, technological and ideological power. That is a shift from the views of prior administrations, including Mr. Trump’s own in his first term. Chinese analysts have interpreted the new strategy as evidence of American retreat.

The document describes China as a “near peer.” It downplays Beijing’s military and technological strengths and reframes the relationship largely in commercial terms — a striking position when China sees itself advancing on every front.

An official Chinese commentary published by the Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy Studies Center argued that the “near peer” phrasing reflects “deep anxiety” within America’s decision-making establishment and amounts to a “painful” acknowledgment that earlier U.S. strategies have failed.

Similarly, Mr. Trump reversed Washington policy this month when he allowed the Silicon Valley giant Nvidia to sell advanced semiconductors to China, as long as the company shares the proceeds with the U.S. government. The move, in effect, cast competition with China as a losing battle best managed through short-term commercial transactions.

A danger is that Mr. Trump, by downplaying the geopolitical rivalry with China, could give license to pessimism about America’s place in the world.

The gap in superpower perception — overconfidence in the rising power and defeatism in the incumbent — could destabilize U.S.-Chinese relations. It makes it less likely the two sides can view each other’s strengths with clear eyes and heightens the risk of strategic miscalculation.

“Scholars of international relations have long argued that overconfidence and false optimism can intensify conflicts and even contribute to the outbreak of wars,” said Haifeng Huang, a political scientist at Ohio State University. He pointed to how China’s belligerent brand of wolf-warrior diplomacy has alienated key trading partners, including Australia and the European Union. He cited Russia’s underestimation of the challenges it faced when it invaded Ukraine as another example of the perils of geopolitical hubris.

In recent years, the triumphant narrative that China has cultivated in its propaganda has taken root at home and echoed abroad.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, global views of China dipped to their lowest in decades. But the Chinese public, its information filtered by a tightly controlled media, consistently overestimated the country’s international standing, according to two surveys conducted by Mr. Huang. The surveys showed that Chinese people believed that China was admired and endorsed far more widely around the world than Pew Research Center and Gallup surveys indicated.

Beijing could not prevent a crisis of confidence in 2023 and 2024 after it ended its strict Covid policies. The housing market crashed, youth unemployment surged and consumer sentiment plunged. A slump in confidence, largely driven by the decline in real estate values, continues to hang over China’s economy.

But 2025 began differently. In January, DeepSeek announced a big advance in artificial intelligence and became a catalyst for a wave of technological confidence in China.

Over the past two months, I’ve interviewed more than a dozen Chinese tech executives and investors. They said they felt more optimistic than at any point in the previous four years, even as they acknowledged that the wider economy was sluggish and that intense domestic competition was eroding their profit margins.

Market sentiment has shifted, too. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng stock index, heavily weighted toward Chinese companies, is up about 25 percent this year, compared with 16 percent for the S&P 500. The founder of a Shanghai-based A.I. start-up told me that major banks were so busy working on initial public offerings that it had become difficult to get meetings with their senior executives. A year ago, the banks were asking to see him.

China’s confidence is magnified by the acclaim it receives from abroad. Western influencers routinely post videos of China’s megaprojects — from high-speed rail hubs to astonishing urban skylines — that feed a narrative of Chinese competence. American commentators gush at China’s tech and manufacturing advances. State media eagerly amplifies these voices as proof that the world views China as the standard-bearer of modern development.

The scholar Zhang Weiwei, whose political talk show featured the opening of the Guizhou bridge, has advised top leaders on how to shape China’s messaging abroad. In July, he devoted an episode to praising what he called the “wise Americans” who, in his telling, have begun to acknowledge China’s rise and America’s decline.

“Since Trump’s return to the White House,” he said, “more Western voices have been reflecting on what the U.S. has done wrong and what China has done right. Their conclusion: America’s problems are intractable.”

Chinese state media also widely reported a Pew survey showing that views of the United States have worsened this year in 10 high-income countries while views of China have improved.

American elites who visit China typically stay at high-end hotels, visit companies that are making money and meet with officials who have survived under the iron rule of Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. A Hong Kong-based economist I interviewed, requesting anonymity because Beijing had warned the person not to speak ill of the economy, said visitors rarely got to meet with people who had lost their businesses or been detained under Mr. Xi. Americans also rarely encounter ordinary Chinese who face economic pressures that might feel familiar.

China’s advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and manufacturing pose real challenges for the United States. But the larger risk is the extent to which the American psyche internalizes a Beijing-driven narrative of U.S. decline, often without understanding China’s own weaknesses.

What worries some observers most is not China’s rising confidence but what they say is America’s diminishing faith in its own abilities. To Jianying Zha, a writer in New York City who has chronicled Chinese politics for decades, that shift is the real strategic danger.

“America’s greatest enemy is itself — losing faith in its core values and its fighting spirit,” she told me. “That’s exactly what plays into China’s ancient art of war: defeating you without waging war, because you’ll defeat yourself.”

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