Absolute power with absolute faith. Beijing’s single-minded, long-term race to win the future, and the Western loss of religion and contemporary belief in the moment. Some long-term considerations on the eve of Trump’s visit to Beijing.
US President Donald Trump will travel to China in a few days, possibly seeking a temporary fix or respite amid a very complicated situation with no short-term solutions. Still, just because of this, it might be useful to think a little about the big background.
Two religious traditions in the Mediterranean and in China fundamentally set the two worlds apart for millennia.
Mediterranean:
In the Mediterranean in the first centuries A.D., Christianity, born from the synthesis of Jewish monotheism and Greek hyper-rationalism, was unconditional and absolutist. It presented its absolute truth in the transcendent and metaphysical. It believes that there is a total veracity beyond practical contingency.
It established a division between the world of today, which must be managed practically, based on the moment, conditioned by differences of opinions and separations of powers, and the hereafter, which belongs entirely to God and the absolute.
Knowledge was similarly split. Practical knowledge is subject to mistakes and errors and thus can and should be corrected quickly. However, in religion, errors are and should be impossible, unforgivable, to be purged and incinerated by earthly and eternal hellish fire.
China:
In China, it’s almost the opposite — religion or religions are not absolute or absolutist. They are a connection with the spiritual, which is nonetheless intertwined with reality. There is a kind of ancient animism (for lack of better words) — the spirits of rivers, of mountains — that carries over into local Buddhism, which is less metaphysical than its Indian forefather. The Chinese Buddha is seated, fat, bald, and smiling. The Indian one is expressionless, with a fancy hairdo, standing motionless in an acrobatic position impossible for the average man.
Even the Western religions — the Zoroastrian faith, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — which arrived in China gradually between the 6th and 9th centuries, did not impose their dominance. They coexisted with one another, managed by the political authority.
Ordinary people engage in a long-standing practice of asking the same favor of various religions, going from temple to temple, as one might consult different doctors, without particular faith in any one of them. This practice would be considered impossible, heretical, and immoral in the monotheistic West.
Parallel to this religious practice is an absolute earthly power that does not share or parcel out its capacity for knowledge and control. It believes it can know and decide everything totally and definitively. The absolute is here on Earth, not in Heaven. Yet this absolute power believed that solutions had to be measured and gradual, that there was a middle ground (中庸之道) to be followed. Reason was not almighty, but partial and temporary.
Reasoning of God
The situation, however, begins to change in Europe perhaps from the 17th century onward. In Europe, faith in religion declined, and faith in human reason grew. It was a reason that would progressively conquer everything. It achieved unprecedented results.
- The discovery of a new continent (America) and new trade routes. It was the first time that one part of the world was directly connected to all the others. It was almost similar to colonizing Mars nowadays.
- Stellar technical, scientific, and material progress and prosperity for all humanity.
- The victory over natural limits, once considered impossible to challenge, such as the constraints on agricultural production that in the 19th century led to the belief that unchecked growth would lead to starvation, as Malthus argued.
The incredulity and surprise about the limits of scientific success found expression in the Frankenstein myth. The man who conquers death, more beautiful and stronger than anything else, is entirely a product of technology, born from death and thus soulless, without Heaven.
All these elements created an absolute faith in reason that replaced faith in God, leaving Europeans wandering in a world suddenly without metaphysics and thus devoid of complete truth and error.
This Western faith in reason was first viewed with skepticism in China until the 20th century. Then the utter defeat of Chinese forces at the hands of Western powers convinced the Chinese of their own absolute faith in reason, science, and technology.
This faith gradually propelled China into the past century’s gnoseological revolution, which now harnesses the full power of concentrating intellectual and material resources to drive unprecedented technological and industrial development.
China today monopolizes the production of rare earth elements and commands the most complete industrial supply chain. It is also on the verge of becoming an agricultural power, having been a net importer of food and agricultural products for 50 years. It is poised, thanks to technological investment, to become an exporter of food and agricultural goods within the next decade. (see https://www.thewirechina.com/2022/09/25/syngenta-seed-savior/ )
China believes and bets that, through the progressive and systematic conquest of all material foundations — primary and secondary industries — and, in the next step, agriculture, it will have a sufficient base to tackle even the final phase of total dominance: the space of software services, cyber, and artificial intelligence — areas where China is present, even if not yet dominant, as America is.
Complete global dominance could be a decade or two away.
Next decade?
The timeline for this program could be ten to twenty years. China has demonstrated its ability to sustain a long-term effort; however, there are both existential and material problems.
Materially, the state of its economy raises the question of whether the Chinese economy can continue on this path for 10 to 20 years, accumulating an ever-growing surplus with the rest of the world, without entering a destructive war. The trade surplus was $1.2 trillion in 2025, and debt could now be 3 to 5 times its GDP. It’s similarly unclear whether the internal deficit can be kept sustainable through a form of hidden taxation on private deposits.
(see https://www.appiainstitute.org/articles/china/a-tao-of-war-and-peace/ )
Over ten years, the Chinese surplus could grow to $3 trillions, and the internal deficit could reach six, seven, or even ten times GDP. It’s unclear whether China will manage to implement measures to stimulate internal demand that could offset these numbers. Internal demand may need divisive political reforms. These figures, on paper, appear unsustainable today — but, if considered alongside the shrewd adjustments China might devise, they might succeed.
The other problem is almost theological in nature. China’s historical equilibrium was one of absolutism of power combined with a non-absolutism of religion. Today, however, we have an absolutism of power — perhaps more absolute than at any point in Chinese history — combined with an absolutism of the new religion: rationalism, the belief that reason should defeat anything and everything.
Does this double absolutism not risk imploding? And does it not risk imploding, especially if, as we have seen, over the next ten years, it is combined with forms of unique material pressure?
Here, there is a short circuit of faith in reason, science, and development. In Europe, the story of Frankenstein at the beginning of the modern age shows deep-rooted doubts about faith in science and the lingering faith in religion. The absolute truth could not be of this world.
In China, without an ancient tradition of absolute religious answers, there is apparently no doubt about modern science. For instance, China is reportedly investing billions in developing a machine-human connection.
Charles Lieber, a former Harvard scientist, is now the architect of China’s push to ‘blur the distinction between electronics and the human brain.’ He is the founding director of i-BRAIN in Shenzhen. Beijing declared brain-computer interfaces a “national priority.” Lieber now has access to 2,000 primate cages, and the parent institutions operate with five-year budgets totaling roughly $2 billion.” (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/convicted-former-harvard-scientist-rebuilds-brain-computer-lab-china-2026-04-30/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=twitter )
The easy answer might be: no, this cannot be sustainable. That does not rule out the possibility that China will find a way to overcome these challenges. And this poses a problem for the West and the rest of the world — what to do and how to confront this Chinese challenge.
Modern Cathedrals?
Possibly, in some ways, the Western world had already faced an absolute religion with absolute power when the Ottomans vanquished Constantinople in 1453, monopolized trade with the Orient, and set out to conquer the whole Mediterranean.
Then, Europe was lucky enough to discover a new continent, uncharted sea routes, and new ways of thinking to beat the challenge.
Despite all that, it took centuries of wars that split Europe and ushered in a new set of Christianity, the reformed one. But still, the Ottomans were Muslims, children of the same Greek-Jewish tradition; they also claimed to be the heirs of the Roman empire.
Where is the new America now? The Chinese come from millennia of a very different history, despite a century of intense westernization. The result of the confrontation could be very different. The Chinese are taking it very seriously and preparing. Is America and Europe?
Michael Pillsbury makes a strong argument that China has a 100-year plan. Thus, he makes a strong case that the US should have a long-term plan too. But it’s not happening now.
The Church, in fact, has long-term plans that once led the whole Western world through some very difficult times.
As we saw, the West has operated under a dual system that, in any case, has had very earthly consequences. Short- and medium-term political decisions were in the hands of the ruler, while the religious authority set long-term trajectories. This dual management enabled the system to address both sudden occurrences and long-term challenges—the construction of churches that would last centuries. On average, a major Gothic cathedral took between 100 and 300 years to reach a substantially complete state, with smaller cathedrals sometimes finished in 50 to 100 years.
For example, Notre-Dame de Paris began in 1163 and was largely completed by 1345 — a total of about 182 years. Cologne Cathedral: begun in 1248 and completed in 1880 — over 600 years, though construction was halted for centuries in between. Milan Cathedral: begun in 1386 and largely completed in the 19th century — about 500 years. Canterbury Cathedral: construction and rebuilding spanned roughly 400 years.
These were part of Western long-term thinking: projects spanning centuries, not months or years. Religion served the West in long-term planning.
During the Cold War, both Western and Eastern Europe were driven by highly ideological (i.e., quasi-religious) motivations that sustained the struggle on both sides. Now the challenge from China is not religious or ideological either. But it faces long-term challenges. Now, more than ever, it needs long-term thinking, but perhaps of a new kind.
In the meantime, the West seems to have forgotten religion and long-term planning, trapped in the hallucinating ecstasy of the moment, made of drugs or of flipping through TikTok, Facebook, or X. But the moment doesn’t exist; it vanishes in the blink of an eye, especially if crashed by the determined organization of someone else, like China, who thinks in the long term in a crowd of modern cathedrals – towering skyscrapers, fast trains, colossal stations. They are often in sharp contrast with the poor lives of the people toiling in them. But it’s like the European Middle Ages, when starving, ragged peasants found respite and haven in the marble and gold of their extravagant churches. It eventually didn’t work for Europe; it eventually may not work for China, but perhaps all should prepare.
