America is in a very Chinese time of its life. A Confucian proverb places our situation nicely: “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” We are big. Obese, even. But we are young.
Our fragile little republic, the project conceived of protest and uprootedness, indeed tops the charts on GDP and foreign hegemony. It has gained back traction lost to the throes of national dementia, especially abroad. Refocusing domestic infrastructure may even end the ridiculous four decade-long offshoring policy that pampered, ironically, “capital-light” investments in tech and enabled a plague of HR roles to mediate where mediation was fruitless.
Yet we are damn close to becoming the “small man” to those (still) unanswered issues. Our flashy democratic apparatus would rust in due time, and from our crumbling national industry and morale (the AI bubble exempted), we would look to the political tools of old.
President Trump need not read The Analects to assume the strategy of a state in crisis. He obviously hasn’t. In wake of foreign incursion, he looks to Stephen Miller, then perhaps to Grok, and to The Poison, the candy that has been kept from view of a glucose-deficient RFK, and with all options exhausted — to the “other”: China. And on the heels of Steve Bannon’s pythian vision of a third term, a giddy tripartite oil rapport between Beijing, New Delhi and Moscow plus the almost definite arrival of a socialist, nepo theatre-kid in Gracie Mansion (everyone’s favorite paradox), he wonders whether the enemy going on four millennia of survival might have the winning dogma that his nation learned to spite.
So it’s only rational for Trump to see China and to learn, not scowl. Not now, but “fairly early next year,” the President may very well frolic through the mainland’s “Beverly Hills” of Jade Spring Hill in the first diplomatic hookup since he and Xi Jinping flirted with powersharing in 2017. With the chairman and a non-alcoholic Tsingtao in either hand, the ephemeral questions — how a man can unilaterally drag private shares into state ownership, wrest dissident hooligans out of air channels and supplant the collectivist mindset into the minds of a people who own golden retrievers — will rouse meaningful inspiration for an America living (or embodying?) the “Chinese Century.”
The media will get none of the homoeroticism and comradery, to my personal dismay, but an inevitable tariff detente that will talk both down off their rockers. It will further validate the tripolar power system, including Russia’s role, and inspire Trump with exposure to the dynastic mindset. Temu will be cheap again, but we won’t feel like billionaires.
In the same way US leadership paces against Xi’s bid for his own “Chinese Century,” a shallow promise from a man who seeks to reach 150, could we even preclude a similar gambit by Day Hall, battered by its own domestic troubles? Does the administration, which by Martha’s love for wokeisms, the revival of violent disruption to gutted budgets, fell to the plague of overbureaucratization, even seek to repair its foundations from within? Let us just ask: is the sky red? (Maybe!)
No — to pine for the slow, democratic consensus has proven too dangerous for the University held in financial and political limbo. The past half-decade has seen the gap widen further between student agency and the Code of Conduct than since the divisions of the sixties; and similarly between Ithaca and Washington. Kotlikoff would much prefer a return to centralization, to hand-me-down policy and the administrative monolith, over the wants of small political factions. A dismissal of academic liberty with respect to Cheyfitz and a $11 million cut from my college amount to nothing in the decade of university closures. The fiefs would much rather send a check to Qatar and Christmas cards of desperation to the Class of ’84 than face the music. (TLDR: Qatar’s pie chart segment in the FY25 expense budget trumps your “Repairs and Maintenance” 2.1 percent to 1.3 percent).
And if I were Marla Love, I’d lose it all for a plane, too.
If we suspect Trump might fawn over the state capitalism and single-party order of Chinese society, so too might Senior Leadership not just settle, but grow in harmony with the new order: a balance of intangible campus power at the whim of the State’s levers, all dictated by a contagious, universal nationalism.
Everywhere, campus security cameras, growing in number and capacity, placate tedious oversight procedures. They’re everywhere, big and small, single to multi-camera, and you — the innocent — will get a record regardless. Properties are up for sale, and the Big Red state wants no oversight to fix its deficit beyond gross overadmittance of Freshmen and a deal with the White House. Massive infrastructure deficits mimic the loose ends of China’s widespread yet shoddy Belt and Road Initiative; Field Hockey was left to temporary training quarters until long-awaited construction of their field, our History and Government academics forced into the basements of Old Stone Row. The (Little Red) playbook, growing near to the heart of federal democracy, infects its campuses too.
Much like Taiwan, we find ourselves under charge of two systems and one state. But like her troubles, those systems are not so dissimilar, and both swindle her people's freedoms.
It is always Confucius’ world, and soon to be China’s with each passing day. But we don’t have to heed its despotism. The campus government is faraway; our national government, further. I say, let them both be sore to discover our want of liberties is not so transient. If the administration wants to separate itself from the government — and perhaps clean-ship while it's at it — the “little man” must look from within, not copy the gilded patrimonial regime.
Francis Xavier Jaso '28 is an Opinion Columnist and a Government and Economics student in the College of Arts & Sciences. His fortnightly column “A Contrarian’s Calamity” defies normative, dysfunctional campus discourse in the name of reason, hedonism, and most notably, satire. He can be reached at fjaso@cornellsun.com.
