Kaiser Kuo's challenge to the Western mindset

The closing event of China Week 2025 at King’s College London saw Kaiser Y Kuo, host of the influential Sinica Podcast, join Dr Elizabeth Ingleson to reflect on the intellectual, moral, and political implications of China’s rise.

What unfolded was a wide-ranging and deeply personal discussion that asked the audience to confront a fundamental question: how do we reckon with the scale and significance of China’s transformation?

Kuo’s recent essay, The Great Reckoning, served as the anchor for the evening. Originally published in The Ideas Letter, the piece is a call to abandon outdated mental models and confront the reality that China’s development challenges the very scaffolding of Western modernity. As Kuo put it, this is not a policy paper - it’s a psychological reckoning.

At the heart of Kuo’s argument is the idea that China’s rise forces a re-evaluation of what modernity means. The West, particularly the United States, has long assumed that liberal democracy, free markets, and individual rights are the universal path to progress. China’s model - state-led, technocratic, and infused with Confucian and Leninist elements - defies that assumption.

Kuo argued that China’s success is not merely economic. It is conceptual. It shows that a society can achieve innovation, infrastructure, and poverty alleviation without adhering to Western liberal norms. This, he suggested, is deeply unsettling for those who have built careers and ideologies around the presumed universality of the Western model.

Kuo did not shy away from the racial dimensions of this reckoning. He spoke candidly about the racialised backlash against China in the United States, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. He connected this to a broader crisis of white hegemony in America - a twilight moment, as he called it, where the country must confront its own decline and the rise of non-Western powers.

This reckoning, Kuo argued, is not just about China. It’s about the United States, and the West more broadly, coming to terms with its own internal crises - economic stagnation, political dysfunction, and a loss of faith in liberal institutions.

One of the most compelling analogies Kuo offered was between the reckoning with China and the climate crisis. Both, he argued, are situations where the facts are clear, the consequences are dire, and yet the response has been inadequate. China’s role in climate - both as the largest emitter and as the driver of cheap renewable energy - embodies this paradox.

Kuo addressed the question of whether China’s path is exceptional or replicable. He suggested that while China does not seek to export its model wholesale, it has nonetheless opened up a menu of options for the Global South. The idea that there is more than one path to modernity is itself revolutionary.

In response to audience questions, Kuo acknowledged his own ideological tensions. He still considers himself a liberal, but one in flux - grappling with the dissonance between his emotional commitments and the realities he observes. This personal reckoning mirrors the broader intellectual challenge he poses to the West.

This challenge is clear: we must confront our assumptions, re-evaluate our priorities, and accept that the world is changing in ways that defy our inherited frameworks. The reckoning is not optional. It is already underway.

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