EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The death of economist Gao Shanwen in July 2026 has prompted an unusually candid public conversation in China about the country’s economic direction. That debate is a symptom of something larger than one man’s legacy: a reweighting, not an abandonment, of the integrationist paradigm that guided China’s rise for four decades. That paradigm, built on integration, open markets, and export-led growth, was optimal for a world that actively wanted China inside the system, a world shaped by Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Yet, history never ended. That accommodating world has become increasingly hostile since roughly 2011. The turn is not China’s alone; the United States is executing a mirror-image move toward self-reliance and economic nationalism, and the two powers now reinforce one another in a classic security dilemma. Artificial intelligence is the sharpest example of the fracture. Consistent with Karl Polanyi’s “double movement,” the present moment looks less like an aberration than a secular rebalancing within the long arc of history: a change of seasons that demands a whole-of-nation response, spanning economics, technology, finance, diplomacy, and defense, from a rising China and from the incumbent power alike.
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