Our partner, Xinhua China News Agency, recently shared a series of Instagram posts highlighting China’s development. What struck me was not just the content itself, but the sense of direction behind it—a country seemingly laser-focused, with long-term objectives and a clear orientation toward the future.
It’s something we are no longer used to seeing on our side of the world—and perhaps one of the underlying causes of the current erosion of democratic confidence in our societies.
Here, everything often feels urgent, improvised—built for “yesterday,” without a broader horizon. Long-term planning has taken a back seat in much of the West, as short-term political, financial, and technological pressures dominate decision-making. Even recent efforts, such as the renewed push to the moon, seem, at times, driven more by geopolitical competition than by a shared long-term vision.
And since we’ve lost the ability to think and act collectively over the long term, we struggle to recognize it when we see it elsewhere. Over the past 40 years, China has pursued a sustained path of development, lifting living standards for over a billion people and advancing in a wide range of fields. Whatever one thinks of its system or its contradictions, the continuity of direction is difficult to ignore. Take, for example, data like the following:
185 million cross-border trips in Q1 2026, up 13.5% year on year
12.67 million new urban jobs created in 2025
26,000 new enterprises registered per day
70,392 new foreign-funded companies (+19.1%)
16.52 million new energy vehicles produced (+25.1%)
Carbon emissions per unit of GDP down 5%
It’s possible that, when we encounter this kind of data, our internal “propaganda alarm” is triggered. We’ve been conditioned to distrust certain narratives—and in doing so, we risk overlooking what these figures actually represent: the scale of coordination, the depth of planning, and the sustained effort of millions of people.
More concerning, perhaps, is a broader shift in mindset. We seem to have lost some of our collective willingness to challenge ourselves—to ask what we are building together. When was the last time you felt genuine pride in the direction our societies are taking? When did you last feel part of a shared project advancing something larger than individual or short-term interests?
This is not to suggest that China is without serious problems—it clearly is. The more difficult question is whether we, in the West, have diminished our own capacity to imagine and pursue long-term transformation.
Historically, many of our most significant transformations—from the French Revolution to World War II—have emerged through rupture, violence, and upheaval. And current conflicts, from Ukraine to Gaza, suggest that this pattern has not entirely disappeared.
But must large-scale transformation always be born of crisis? Or have we, over time, lost the ability to build the future deliberately and collectively?
What became of “cathedral thinking”—the long-term, generational mindset of medieval builders who worked toward outcomes they would never see completed? A way of thinking that privileges 10–20 year horizons over quarterly returns, and shared ambition over immediate gain.
To be clear, this is not about reinforcing a simplistic West-versus-China dichotomy—that frame already constrains how we think.
The deeper question is whether we can recover a sense of shared purpose: the capacity to imagine a future worth building, and the discipline to work toward it over time.
