Haunted by Its Own Reflection
The West's Irrational Fear of China
When Washington snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas in a theatrical display of extra‑territorial power on 3 January 2026, a familiar chorus erupted across Western media. Commentators, officials and think‑tank celebrities rushed to declare that this brazen abduction would surely embolden Beijing to “do the same” to Taiwan. One act was presented as precedent, the other as prophecy. The analogy was not only ignorant; it was revealing.
To fuse an unlawful regime‑change operation in Latin America with Beijing’s long‑standing claim over Taiwan is to collapse history, legality and context into a single, crumpled caricature. It is like confusing a burglary with a bitter inheritance dispute simply because both take place in a house. The comparison says almost nothing about China. It speaks volumes about the West.
For decades, Western elites have stared into a mirror and mistaken their own reflection for the rest of the world. Now, as China grows more confident, that reflection is starting to frighten them. The real threat for the West is not what China is, but what the West sees when it looks in the mirror.
The Poverty of Analogy
Let’s linger on the Taiwan–Caracas conflation because it exposes a chronic intellectual laziness. What happened in Venezuela was an extra‑territorial intervention by a distant power that has long treated the Western hemisphere as its backyard. What may happen around Taiwan, by contrast, is entangled with a century of civil war, foreign occupation, broken promises, and a contested but continuous claim of statehood that Beijing has never relinquished.
One episode is an act of regime change against a government the US does not like and whose oil resources it covets. The other, in Beijing’s strategic lexicon, is about completing a civilisational jigsaw it regards as unfinished since the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent civil war. One fits within the Western habit of expeditionary force and ideological evangelism. The other arises from an entirely different political genealogy: the anxiety of fragmentation, the trauma of dynastic collapse, and the determination to prevent the country from being carved up again.
We might object to either or both sets of intentions. But that is not the point. The point is that they are not equivalent. Treating every potential use of force as interchangeable—whether in Panama, Iraq, Kosovo, Crimea, Gaza, Hong Kong or Taiwan—only tells us that Western strategists see the world through a single lens: their own. Whatever the geography, the script is the same: an ambitious power seeks to impose its will, expand its influence, and secure dominance. This is projection masquerading as analysis.
The Habit of Dominance
The modern Western worldview grew up inside what I have called industrial economism: a civilisation organised as a factory‑market, powered by extraction, competition and growth as an end in itself. Under this paradigm, states behave like corporate predators. They compete for markets, resources and labour. They project military force to protect supply chains and suppress defiance. They justify this behaviour through universalist doctrines—“civilisation”, “development”, “democracy”, “freedom”, “rules‑based order”—each conveniently aligned with their own interests.
It is hardly surprising that a civilisation raised on empire, gunboat diplomacy, coups, structural adjustment programmes, drone strikes, and sanctions finds it almost impossible to imagine any other grammar of power. When you have spent centuries sailing out of your own port to remake other peoples’ worlds, you expect everyone else to do the same once they have enough ships.
So when Western media and politicians look at China they instinctively search for the familiar: the colonies, the global garrisons, the colour‑revolutions‑in‑reverse. Failing to find exact replicas, they construct them anyway, often by distorting what is there. The Belt and Road Initiative becomes a sinister plot for “debt trap diplomacy” while Western financial institutions—whose conditions have stripped sovereignty from dozens of nations—are framed as “development partners”. A Chinese telecommunications firm becomes a stalking horse for totalitarian surveillance while Silicon Valley’s unrivalled data extraction is reframed as “innovation”.
What if China is not a latecomer empire playing catch‑up in the Western game at all? What if this insistence on reading Beijing through the lens of London and Washington is the first, and most dangerous, category error?
China’s Different Inheritance
Those who accuse any such argument of “romanticising” China miss the mark. China is not morally superior to the West. It is, however, differently formed.
For most of recorded history, China was less a nation‑state than a civilisational basin—a vast cultural ecosystem bound by language, bureaucracy, cosmology, kinship and ritual, more than by flags and frontiers. Its central strategic nightmare has not been how to project power across oceans but how to stop the centre from collapsing and the periphery from peeling away. Where Europe spent centuries sending its adventurers outward, China was repeatedly forced to turn inward—managing famine, rebellion, invasion, fragmentation, and the ever‑present fear of another dynastic implosion.
The modern Chinese state emerged from a century in which its territory was carved up, its ports occupied, its people humiliated, and its institutions broken. Whether one endorses the Communist Party’s subsequent path or not, it is impossible to understand contemporary Chinese statecraft without acknowledging that it is infused with a determination: never to be humiliated again. Never again a divided, helpless, semi‑colonial China. This inheritance nurtures a strategic instinct that is structurally, not ethically, distinct from Western imperial habits. Beijing is more preoccupied with internal cohesion than overseas bases; more attuned to the slow accumulation of advantage than to theatrical shock‑and‑awe; more disposed towards patient positioning than to spectacular victory.
None of this makes China benign. It does make it different. When Western analysts insist on forcing Chinese behaviour into Western categories of empire and hegemony, they do not illuminate China. They merely redraw their own past over someone else’s present.
Alarm as Displacement
Why then is the “China threat” narrative so potent, particularly in Washington, London, Canberra and parts of Brussels? Why does every Chinese infrastructure project, space launch, or naval exercise provoke not just concern but existential dread? Because China has become a screen onto which the West projects its own unease.
The long boom of industrial economism is stalling. Economic growth in many Western states is anaemic or skewed to such an extent that it enriches a thin stratum of society while hollowing out the middle classes. Technological leadership—once unchallenged—is now contested in fields from 5G and quantum [technologies] to electric vehicles and renewable energy. Political systems display visible decay: polarisation, institutional capture, performative legislatures unable to solve even basic problems like cost of living and immigration. Moral authority—so loudly proclaimed during the late twentieth century—has been eroded by the hypocrisies of endless wars, double standards on human rights, and the weaponisation of “rules” that appear curiously flexible for friends and rigid for rivals.
In this context, China’s rise is not simply another geopolitical event. It functions as a catalyst for Western self‑doubt. It whispers an intolerable question: what if we are no longer the axis around which history turns?
Rather than hear that question, many Western [advocates of the current order] prefer a more comforting story: China is the villain; we are the guardians; history is once again a morality play, and our travails are caused not by internal decay but by an external ogre. Anxiety about industrial decline is framed as “resilience” against Chinese competition. Worries about artificial intelligence become fears of “digital authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics”. Fissures within Western societies are blamed on Chinese “influence operations”.
The more the Western model wobbles, the more China is cast as both cause and justification. Defence budgets swell. Alliances are re‑branded. Trade and technology become weapons. None of this requires serious self‑examination. If China is the problem, then Western societies need only “stand firm”, “decouple”, “derisk”, and “push back”. Introspection is replaced by mobilisation.
In that sense, the China threat narrative functions as a displacement mechanism—a way of avoiding the deeper reckoning with an industrial paradigm that has exhausted both the planet and the legitimacy of those who benefit from it.
Information Without Understanding
It would be convenient to say that Western misreadings of China are caused by ignorance. But that is only half‑true. There is no shortage of information about China. Diplomats, scholars, journalists, business leaders, and millions of Chinese citizens abroad offer a continuous stream of data and interpretation. The deeper problem is a refusal to let alternative categories of thought genuinely unsettle Western assumptions.
To grasp China on its own terms demands an unusual humility: that Western concepts—of sovereignty, security, democracy, and power—might not be universal yardsticks but local inventions; that other civilisations own equally coherent but different grammars of order and justice; that history did not begin with the Treaty of Westphalia, the Enlightenment, or Bretton Woods.
Such humility is in short supply. It would require Western institutions to admit that they have been exporting a parochial worldview disguised as common sense. It would invite citizens in Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere to ask if their own societies’ malaise stems less from external adversaries and more from the contradictions of industrial economism itself.
Far easier, then, to treat misunderstanding as an intelligence issue—more satellites, more analysts, more “China hands”—than as a philosophical failing. Yet history suggests that empires rarely fall because they lack facts. They fall because they cannot interpret reality in a way that allows them to adapt. When an empire loses the capacity to see the world except as an echo of itself, it is already in decline.
The Self‑Fulfilling Prophecy
This brings us back to the mirror. Persistent misreading is not a harmless academic error. It can crystallise into doctrine, budgets and battle plans. If Western governments remain convinced that China must be seeking global dominance because that is what they would do in Beijing’s place, policy will be designed to block, encircle and punish an imagined aggressor. Beijing, in turn, interprets that encirclement as confirmation of Western hostility and accelerates its own defensive build‑up. What began as a distortion of perception becomes a material reality: spiralling arms races, hardened alliances, severed supply chains, and the normalisation of war talk. The self‑fulfilling prophecy is complete.
Nobody can say with certainty how Chinese decision‑makers will respond to any particular crisis, including Taiwan. But one question can be asked with some confidence: how much of that response will be shaped not by intrinsic ambition but by the actions of others who have spent years treating China as an inevitable enemy? A West trapped in its own reflection risks conjuring the very conflict it fears.
Beyond Fear, Beyond Flattery
None of this implies that we should simply trust Beijing’s intentions, downplay its authoritarian tendencies, or ignore the experiences of those who feel threatened by Chinese power, whether in Asia, Africa, Europe or the Americas. People on China’s periphery, and within China itself, have every right to interrogate the uses of that power.
The challenge is different. It is to step outside the either/or reflex: China as monstrous adversary or enlightened saviour. Both are caricatures. Both absolve us of the harder work: learning to inhabit a world in which different civilisational projects coexist, collide, and sometimes cooperate without any single one owning the script.
This demands more from Western societies than diplomatic resets or trade recalibrations. It requires a deep shift in consciousness—away from industrial economism’s obsession with control, rivalry and extraction, towards a more ecological sensibility in which power is understood as relationship, not just domination.
In such a world, leadership stops being synonymous with military reach or GDP and becomes a collective practice: communities, movements, cities, cultures coming together to improve the human condition in ways that do not require an enemy to justify themselves. China’s rise would then be one factor in a complex planetary transformation, not the looming catastrophe through which all other issues must be filtered.
Seeing Past the Shadow
The West’s darkest fear is not that China will become what the West once was. Its darkest fear is that China will reveal what the West has become: a civilisation so attached to its own myth of moral centrality that it cannot recognise itself in the mirror—only monsters.
If Beijing’s ascent precipitates a genuine reckoning with Western histories of violence, hypocrisy and exploitation, it may yet prove to be a gift. If, instead, it is used to fortify denial, militarise identity and feed industrial economism’s last, frantic growth spurt through war preparation, then the shadow we project onto China may consume us all.
The question facing Western societies is therefore not, “What will China do next?” That is only partly knowable, and largely beyond their control. The more urgent question lies closer to home: when we look at China and tremble, are we prepared to ask what, exactly, we are so afraid of—and why the face in the mirror looks increasingly unfamiliar, even to us?