A Gen Z Guide to American Political Economy

 Everybody’s heard the rhetoric on U.S. China relations. They’ve heard politicians lambast China for a variety of human rights abuses and aggressively expanding their territory in the South China Sea. They’ve also heard legislators in the Democratic Party framing competition with China as a main reason to pass legislation such as the CHIPS Act (which incentivizes domestic semiconductor manufacturing). While it’s true that China poses a threat to the Post-WWII rules-based international world order, we should not be viewing this relationship with China as a looming catastrophe. In the authoritarianism-versus-democracy scenario that President Biden has laid out, there actually is a lot of hope for our relationship with China if you look at it through the lens of political economy. Before anybody can understand why there’s a positive path forward with U.S. and China relations, they need some background. Dr. Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins has studied corruption in many countries and ana...