“Do we want China to fail? Is that our policy now?”
I asked this very question at a gathering of economic policymakers a few years ago and the awkward silence in the room was deafening.

Perhaps your answer to this question is “yes”. Just understand and be honest about the implications of that, is all I’m saying.

Several reasonably plugged-in people came up to me afterwards and said “You know the answer to that question. Yes.”

Some people don’t like this start formulation, arguing that it misses important nuance. So I will rephrase it:

Past US policy was to encourage constructive economic reform in China and to mitigate the prospect of economic instability there. Is US policy now to retard China’s development and aggravate economic instability there?

That is actually the precise way that I phrased it at the conference.

I can tell you personally that all the questions I used to get from policymakers involved the former, and for the past several years (since around 2018) they almost all involve the latter.

I also think a lot of people who answer “I want China to succeed but the CCP to fail” aren’t being completely honest to themselves about the kind of China they could live with and not see as a threat, even if it weren’t ruled by the current regime.