[U]nhappily, we must take responsibility for our own failures. The Chinese have developed a nation of producers; we are a nation of consumers. China is a nation of engineers, the United States a nation of lawyers. The Chinese willingly sacrifice today for tomorrow; we sacrifice tomorrow for today.
There are disturbing signs that the Chinese have deliberately engaged in the economic conquest of America. I cannot prove this, it cannot be documented. I can only cite scraps of evidence- a whispered word here, a secret CIA account there, knowing looks on the faces of Chinese leaders who I have questioned.
Every economic move China has made […] has been carefully controlled, directed and orchestrated by the government. How should we respond? It seems to me that we must mobilize our economic forces again. We must restructure our industrial and technological apparatus.
The passage above was written almost 40 years ago. Naturally, it was not originally about China. It comes from Jack Anderson’s 1988 warning about Japan’s rise, with only the proper nouns changed.
It’s almost eerie how easily 1980s Japan panic language tracks contemporary China discourse. Market competition is portrayed as concealing state-directed conquest. The rising Asian industrial power is described as technically brilliant, strategically patient, and nationally disciplined. Its competence is felt as American decline.
For Americans who don’t remember the 1980s, it may be jarring even hearing post-war Japan described with such hostility. Japan today is usually imagined less as an economic predator than as an aging ally and cultural export powerhouse.
But Anderson’s article was hardly an outlier. Across the political spectrum, Japan was regularly portrayed not simply as a competitor, but as an economic conqueror. Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale warned that American children might be left to “sweep up around Japanese computers” if the country did not force Japan to open its markets. Alarms were raised about trade deficits and direct investment in the United States.
In another complaint that could be dropped almost unchanged into today’s China discourse, a 1985 New York Times article, “The Danger From Japan,” quoted the head of Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment on Japan’s technical advantage at America’s expense:
They are ahead of us in productivity in automobiles, in steel, in robotics. We are ahead in fundamental research, but they get all our science papers and research, and they add to that their mastery of ‘process technology,’ translating fundamental research into the making of things. They recruit their managers from the factory floor; we get ours out of law schools.
The discourse was framed as economic, technological, and geopolitical, but the anxiety was always racially tinged – another reason it transfers so easily to China. At times this was explicit, such as when Gore Vidal urged the United States to unite with the Soviet Union against a “highly centralized Asiatic world” dominated by a “Sino-Japanese axis.”
Among the public, the racial consequences were real. The Cato Institute noted that reported incidents of violence against Asians jumped 62 percent between 1985 and 1986, with Asians accounting for half of all racial incidents in Los Angeles and nearly a third in Boston. The most infamous case was Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man in Detroit beaten to death in an act of misguided retribution by two White autoworkers who blamed Japan for lost jobs.
Of course, 1980s Japan and 2026 China are far from the same, and that’s the point. Japan was, and remains, a democratic U.S. ally: demilitarized after World War II, integrated into the American security system, and broadly aligned with the liberal international order. China is a vast, centrally governed, single-party nation with a rapidly growing military. It is increasingly confident in using its market and diplomatic power to influence others, and at the same time, actively participates in international systems to promote its vision of order emphasizing inviolable state sovereignty and non-interference.
This is why the familiarity of the language in Anderson’s piece is important. Today’s fears about China aren’t simply recycled Japan panic. China poses real and unique challenges, from cybersecurity and supply chains to human rights. The point is that the language of threat migrated so easily across such different situations because it was never solely about the foreign country.
It was, and is, also about the United States itself. Its fears of decline, deindustrialization, loss of technical competence, and uncertainty about whether the country still knows how to build the future. What captures U.S. attention is not just that another country appears strong, but that they appear strong in precisely the ways Americans fear their country has become weak. Such discourse ascribes the rival power with a superhuman (almost inhuman) command of the virtues we fear we’ve lost: productivity, ingenuity, discipline, and a willingness to sacrifice for the future.
During U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent trip to China, Xi Jinping asked whether the United States and China could “overcome the Thucydides Trap,” referring to the heightened risk of war when an established power feels threatened by an emerging one. It was encouraging to see acknowledgment that the psychology of rivalry can itself become dangerous, and open recognition that a military conflict between the United States and China would be catastrophic.
The Thucydides Trap is often invoked as a warning that conflict can arise not only from an ascendant power’s ambitions, but from the established power’s reaction to them. Threat perception is rarely a purely objective reading of the other side. American anxiety over Japan’s rise in the 1980s, or China’s rise today, does not by itself prove that either country is trying, or able, to displace the United States.
American anxiety, of course, is not the only potential source of conflict. China has its own ambitions, red lines, grievances, and domestic political pressures, all unfolding within a shifting global order. It is a vast and varied nation with its own history, contradictions, and internal challenges. The task for the United States is to avoid reducing China to a caricature as a foil for its own fears, and to develop the insight needed to understand what China is actually doing, and what can be done about it.
The Japan panic now looks overwrought because time has stripped away its urgency and exposed how much projection it contained. Some of today’s China rhetoric may well look similarly inflated 40 years from now. The immediate question is whether the anxiety of decline is already clouding U.S. judgment: not only increasing the risk of conflict, but also leading to missed solutions and opportunities that China’s rise may make possible.