The Trillion Dollar Mistake: How Three Presidents Bet on China's Collapse And Lost Everything

Описание: Based on Eric Li's book — Party Life: Chinese Governance and the World Beyond Liberalism (2023)
Get the book → https://a.co/d/0deZIvz9

🇨🇳 The Trillion Dollar Mistake: How the West Bet on China's Collapse And Lost

For thirty years, three American presidents — Clinton, Bush, and Obama — believed the same thing.
They called it Peaceful Evolution.
The theory was simple: flood China with capitalism, and democracy will follow.
Open the markets. Invite China into the WTO. And wait for the phone call.

That call never came.

Instead, China took the West's own tools — markets, capital, technology — and used them to build the greatest economic expansion in human history. 800 million people lifted out of poverty. 40,000 km of high-speed rail. A space station. A rover on Mars.

And not a single election.

In this episode, Eric Li reveals the intellectual failure at the heart of Western China policy — and why the most expensive strategic bet in modern history went catastrophically wrong.

In this episode, you'll learn:
🏛️ Why the Peaceful Evolution theory was flawed from the start
📜 How China's Century of Humiliation made democracy feel like a threat, not a gift
⚙️ Why China studied the Soviet collapse — and drew the opposite lesson from Washington
📊 How performance legitimacy replaced electoral legitimacy
🐉 Why China is a civilizational state — not just a country that failed to westernize
🌍 How China broke the West's monopoly on the idea of modernity

📺 This video is part of the Eric Li Series.
Watch the full playlist:    • Eric Li  

Disclaimer: This video reflects an independent interpretation of the ideas discussed in the book. It was created for learning and analysis, and is not reviewed or endorsed by the author. The narration uses AI-generated voice for clarity and consistency.