The Chinese leadership realized one doesn't exclude the other.

Also, a leadership that is so enormously autocratic simply has to juggle fewer balls at the same time.

What you said about "next fiscal quarter" is exactly right, and goes along with us (in the US) only thinking politically in 4 year cycles... which means on average we are thinking only 2 years ahead.

China is the master of the long-game. It's shortest cycles are 5 year tactical plans. Their strategic plans go far beyond.

I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job; only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead (religion does too).

If the US can't think that far ahead for the same reasons as China, maybe we need to find things we care about long term and tie economic development to that (family, religion, and even our potential extreme longevity).

China had an enermous corruption problem, what are you talking about? Xi has been on an anti-corruption campagin since 2012 and they are just getting rid of top leaders like just last month. And I am sure his "anti-corruption" campaign is totally not ignoring some aspects.

While Trump might be an outlier in how obvious the grift is, that doesn't make China suddenly the good guys who only care about their country or the people when they are not busy bulldozing them into drains like they did in 1995.

The Chinese desire to raise China to global dominance is exactly a concern w/ status and wealth. It's naive to think that America and China are any different in the degree to which leadership is driven by these concerns. One simply hopes that the facts-on-the-ground (i.e. geography) structures this pursuit in such a way to provide peace and prosperity to normal people.

America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this.

China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale.

Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth.

Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.

Luckily for the rest of the world, your elites have made that mistake.

I have found Chinese quality control to be quite good in my daily life here.

Or was that your point?

yea history always repeats in patterns and nothing new ever happens.

The mass media loves to talk about ANYTHING besides the ongoing decay of the west, largely facilitated by it's own ineptitude at the game it designed. We're losing because we outsourced everything for short term gains and have let supercorps run completely without oversight, buying each other left and right, until every "American" product left is owned by one of four conglomorates, and none of them know what they actually do anymore and the only way they can keep "growing" is by cutting costs to the bone.

Why do you say that?

The belief that autocracies will inevitably fall (or perhaps that "the arc of history bends towards justice") is hopelessly naive. Technology is a force multiplier with the power to entrench autocracy, forever.