What a difference a year makes.

一年之隔，天翻地覆。

Last January, as Donald Trump stormed back into the White House, spoiling for a trade war and backed by an army of credentialed China hawks, it seemed a pretty safe bet that his return would mean an escalation of America’s great power rivalry with Beijing, what foreign-policy people had long since taken to calling, loosely, the New Cold War.

去年1月，特朗普强势重返白宫，蓄势打响贸易战，身后还有一众自身对华强硬派撑腰。彼时，外界几乎笃定，他的回归必将让美国与中国这两个大国的对抗再度升级——这场对抗，早已被外交政策人士笼统地称作“新冷战”。

In 2026, the country is in a remarkably different place geopolitically. China may loom in the background, but in the foreground we’ve had an unlawful military operation in Venezuela, an explicit play to take over Greenland and bully Europe, and threats against hostile governments in Cuba and Iran. A year of hostility toward Canada has driven that country into China’s arms — our brotherly neighbor and most loyal ally breaking formation with us and striking an electric vehicle trade deal that looks like such a departure, it’s been described as “making China great again.”

而2026年，美国的地缘政治处境已然天差地别。中国或许仍隐于幕后，但台前的美国，一边在委内瑞拉开展非法军事行动，一边公然企图接管格陵兰岛、威逼欧洲，还对古巴、伊朗等敌对国家发出威胁。对加拿大长达一年的敌对态度更是将这个邻国推向了中国的怀抱——这位曾与我们情同手足、最忠诚的盟友竟与美国分道扬镳，还与中国签署了堪称“让中国再次伟大”的电动汽车贸易协定。

Some of these actions may be motivated by great power rivalry. In others, perhaps, history is intervening and scrambling grand plans, and in still others we may be seeing the consequences of sheer diplomatic incompetence and shortsighted bluster. But another possibility is in the mix, too: that we are entering a new phase of a new cold war, one in which other global priorities have displaced a bipartisan Beltway obsession after more than a decade of steadily escalating conflict with the world’s other leading power.

这些举动，有些或许是出于大国对抗的考量；有些，或许是历史的介入打乱了宏伟规划；还有些，可能只是纯粹的外交失能与短视的虚张声势所致。但另一种可能性也同样存在：我们正步入新冷战的全新阶段，在与世界另一大国长达十余年的对抗持续升级后，其他全球优先事项已取代华盛顿两党对这一对抗的执念。

After first making an aggressive show on tariffs, the Trump administration has quickly retreated from the trade war, such that tariffs on China are now lower than those the U.S. imposed, for some reason, on India. The administration has also loosened artificial intelligence chip export restrictions that were imposed, nominally, on national security grounds. The National Security Strategy that inspired all the talk of a “Donroe Doctrine” relegated China to a secondary priority, devoting much more time to the homeland, the border and the culture wars of Western Europe.

特朗普政府起初强硬祭出关税大棒，却很快从贸易战中退缩，以至于如今美国对中国的关税竟低于美国莫名加征给印度的关税。政府还放宽了此前以国家安全为名设立的人工智能芯片出口限制。那份曾让“唐罗主义”成为热议话题的《国家安全战略》报告将中国降为次要议题，反而更多聚焦本土安全、边境问题以及西欧的文化战争。

If you’d like, you can divine a China logic behind the operation in Venezuela and the pursuit of Greenland. But when asked whether America’s unilateral action meant that China should feel empowered to move on Taiwan, Trump said casually that it was up to President Xi Jinping to decide. He struck a similar note when asked about the decision to open Canada to Chinese electric vehicles by Prime Minister Mark Carney, who this week delivered a stemwinder of a speech at Davos declaring the American-led rules-based liberal order — which he acknowledged was always partly a self-serving fiction — was dead. The speech earned a standing ovation. And when asked about Carney’s deal with Xi, Trump said it was a “good thing” that America’s nearest ally had instead made a deal with our longtime adversary. In fact, Trump added, “that’s what he should be doing.”

若你愿意，可以从委内瑞拉军事行动和争夺格陵兰岛的行为中找寻背后针对中国的逻辑。但当被问及美国的单边行动是否会赋权中国采取行动解决台湾问题时，特朗普却轻描淡写地表示，这取决于习近平主席的决定。加拿大总理卡尼本周在达沃斯发表了慷慨激昂的演讲，宣称由美国主导、基于规则的自由国际秩序已然崩塌——他也坦言，这一秩序向来部分带有自利的虚假色彩——演讲赢得了全场起立鼓掌，当被问及卡尼批准中国电动汽车进入加拿大市场的决定时，特朗普也持类似论调。当被问及卡尼与习近平的协议时，特朗普称，美国最亲密的盟友转与长期对手达成协议是“好事”，还说：“这正是他该做的。”

Is this détente? Time will tell, but for now at least it marks a cool-down. And the story is bigger than our capricious president and his eternal desire to mesmerize us with surprise shows of smash-and-grab power. Over the last year, among foreign policy thinkers well outside of Trump’s orbit, there has been what the China commentators Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo identified as a “vibe shift,” with an intuitive rivalry with the world’s other great power giving way to a complicated tangle of attitudes held together by simple awe. For a long time, American thinking about China was driven by hawks who insisted that the rival must be defeated, however defeat was defined. That perspective is still common; in fact, just last week, the China scholar Leland Miller, who recently served on Congress’s U.S.-China commission, described the possibility that the Chinese would cure cancer as a “nightmare scenario.” But what had been a broad consensus has fractured, with many more policy wonks beginning to ask instead whether we might ever catch up, and contemplating the possibility that, while the future is enormously uncertain, the answer may well be no.

这算是和解吗？答案尚待时间检验，但至少目前它标志着局势降温。而这一转变的背后，远不止我们这位反复无常的总统，以及他总想用巧取豪夺的强权戏码博取关注的执念。过去一年，在特朗普阵营之外的外交政策研究者中，出现了中国问题评论员金玉米(Jeremy Goldkorn)与郭怡广(Kaiser Kuo)所言的“氛围转向”：昔日对另一个世界大国的本能对抗，正让位于一种由纯粹敬畏维系的复杂心态纠葛。长期以来，美国的对华认知被强硬派主导，他们坚称必须击败这个对手，无论“击败”的定义为何。如今这一观点仍十分普遍，事实上，就在上周，刚在美国国会美中经济与安全审查委员会任职的中国问题学者利兰·米勒甚至将中国可能攻克癌症的前景形容为“噩梦场景”。但曾经的广泛共识已然破裂，越来越多的政策专家开始反思：我们是否还有机会迎头赶上？他们也开始正视一种可能性——尽管未来充满未知，但答案很可能是否定的。

You may already know the broad outlines on green tech: China is now installing roughly two-thirds of the world’s new wind and solar capacity each year, manufacturing inputs to the green transition at such scale and driving down the cost of such components so quickly that the developing world is now rushing to buy them at breathtaking speed. China manufactures 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and in 2024 installed nearly 20 times as much wind power as the world’s second largest installer; it commands more than 70 percent of global production for E.V.s; and, despite relatively good news in the battery sector for the United States, China produces approximately 90 percent of that global market, too. If you measure the progress of civilization by its electricity production, then China is racing well ahead of the rest of the world.

你或许早已了解绿色科技领域的整体态势：如今中国每年新增的风电、光伏装机容量约占全球总量的三分之二；它对绿色转型所需的制造投入规模如此之大，且相关组件成本下降如此之快，使得发展中国家正以惊人的速度争相采购。中国的风力发电机产量占全球60%，2024年风电装机量接近全球第二的20倍；电动汽车全球产能占比超70%；即便美国在电池领域传来相对积极的消息，中国仍占据着全球约90%的电池市场份额。若以发电量��量人类文明的发展进程，那么中国正遥遥领先于世界其他地区。

American hawks, eying the future of warfare, often complain about the disparity in drone manufacturing, with China producing about 70 percent of the world’s commercial drones and, according to American defense analysts, superior military versions as well. (The Times’s recent editorial series Overmatched is a very good showcase of these anxieties.) The gap in robotics is another sore spot, with China installing almost nine times as many robots as the United States did in 2024. China has much less military experience than America does, as critics of American military adventuring like to point out. But just last year the United States failed to achieve real victory against the Houthis (though the defeat was often downplayed), and periodically, we hear about military planning exercises, which suggest that the Pentagon cannot find a way, even in a war game, to prevail in a conflict over Taiwan.

着眼于未来战争形态的美国强硬派常对美中无人机制造的差距表示忧虑——中国的商用无人机产量占全球约70%，美国防务分析人士称，中国的军用无人机性能也更胜一筹（《纽约时报》近期推出的《实力悬殊》系列社论，便充分展现了这种焦虑。）机器人领域的差距同样是痛点，2024年中国的工业机器人装机量几乎是美国的九倍。正如批评美国军事冒险主义的人士所言，中国的军事经验远不如美国丰富。但就在去年，美国对胡塞武装的军事行动未能取得真正胜利（尽管这场失利常被轻描淡写）；而我们时常听闻，五角大楼的兵棋推演显示，即便是在模拟场景中，美军也找不到在台海冲突中取胜的办法。

Every China watcher has a favorite talking point. A year ago you heard economic patriots emphasizing the American advantage in A.I., but China seems to have effortlessly almost eliminated it: Last fall, Jensen Huang of the American chip powerhouse Nvidia said that China was poised to win the A.I. race, before softening his official position. Chinese companies ran nearly one third of all clinical trials in 2024, up from 5 percent just a decade ago, and the total value of drugs licensed globally from China has grown 15-fold in just the last five years.

每位中国问题观察家都有自己热衷的观点。一年前，经济爱国者还在强调美国在人工智能领域的优势，但如今中国似乎已轻松抹平了差距：去年秋天，美国芯片巨头英伟达的黄仁勋曾直言，中国注定会赢得人工智能竞赛，随后才淡化了自己的正式表态。2024年，中国企业开展的临床试验占全球总量的近三分之一，而十年前这一比例仅为5%；过去五年，中国药企向全球授权的药品总价值增长了15倍。

There are those who fret over China’s massive research and R&D spending, and its new appeal for international researchers and its rapidly growing share of top scientific publications. A certain kind of hardware geek likes to highlight the Chinese advantage in shipbuilding: By tonnage, more commercial vessels were built by China’s state-owned Shipbuilding Corporation in 2024 than the United States has managed to construct in total in the 80 years since the end of World War II.

有人为中国巨额的研发投入、对国际科研人才的全新吸引力，以及在顶级科学期刊发表论文占比的快速提升而忧心。不少硬件极客则格外关注中国在造船领域的优势：按吨位计算，2024年中国国有船舶集团建造的商用船舶总量已超过美国自二战结束80年来建造的总和。

And then there is the country’s astonishing pace of urbanization, with the number of people in Chinese cities more than doubling — from 450 million to over 900 million — just since 2000. If you worry over our housing crisis, and especially if you blame the slowdown in American construction for it, you may be startled to hear that more than two-thirds of all Chinese housing has been built since the turn of the millennium — and that more than 90 percent of Chinese own their own homes.

此外，中国的城市化进程也堪称惊人：2000年至今，中国城镇人口从4.5亿激增至9亿以上，翻了一倍多。如果你为美国的住房危机感到焦虑，尤其将其归咎于美国建筑行业发展放缓，那么听到下面的数据或许会深感震惊：中国超三分之二的住房都是2000年之后建成的，且中国的住房自有率超90%。

Maybe the built environment offers the most obvious contrast: all those high-speed rail lines, miles-long bridges and elevated roadways snaking through skyscraper cities. And a kind of latent China envy has animated much of the liberal reform movement known as “abundance.” The law professor David Schleicher has been a central figure in the academic wing of that intellectual coalition; when he was asked what kinds of infrastructure projects might excite enough American popular enthusiasm to justify federal exemptions from the country’s restrictive regulatory and bureaucratic culture, he answered, “Think of whatever China’s doing, and then imagine it on an American scale: a giant new subway system, a new big highway, a big transmission system, big pipelines.”

或许建成环境提供了最鲜明的对比：那些高铁线路、绵延数公里的大桥、高架道路在摩天大楼林立的城市中蜿蜒穿行。而某种潜藏的羡慕中国的情绪也推动了名为“丰裕派”的自由派改革运动。法学教授戴维·施莱歇尔是这场思潮的学术阵营核心人物，当被问及哪些基建项目能唤起美国民众足够的热情，让联邦政府得到正当理由去突破严苛的监管与官僚体系文化时，他答道：“想想中国在做的任何事，然后想象将其搬到美国的规模：大型新地铁系统、大型高速公路、大型输电网络、大型管道。”

The economic historian Adam Tooze likes to talk about the coming of a second China shock, an inverse of the first, this time with Westerners begging to be integrated into Chinese supply chains. But we may already be living through a different kind of shock, a decade long, in which American wonks and policymakers hardly know what sense to make of a rival power rising so suddenly. And seeming to humiliate the American imperium along the way.

经济史学家亚当·图兹经常谈及第二次中国冲击的到来——与第一次冲击形成鲜明反差，这一次是西方迫切希望融入中国的供应链。但我们或许正经历着另一种冲击：长达十年的迷茫期，美国政策制定者们对崛起如此迅猛的竞争对手束手无策，更目睹其在崛起过程中不断羞辱美国霸权。

In certain ways, this shock blinds us to the shortcomings of any “Chinese century” thesis. And however futuristic the cityscapes of the Pearl River Delta look, those shortcomings are many. Ironically, the American vibe shift on China is that it has taken hold just as the Chinese future has begun to look more uncertain, too.

在某些方面，这场冲击也让我们忽视了“中国世纪”论调的种种缺陷。即便珠江三角洲的城市天际线看似充满未来感，中国发展背后的问题也数不胜数。颇具讽刺意味的是，就在美国对华心态发生转变之际，中国的未来也开始充满变数。

In the big picture, China’s population is already shrinking, with recently released data showing truly shocking declines in the birthrate and some longer-term projections suggesting that by the end of the century it may not even be much larger than that of America. As the economics commentator Noah Smith suggested in response, China may have already peaked — not just for population but for “the robots, the electric cars, the bullet trains, the air taxis, the buildings covered in LEDs, the bubble tea chains and the fast fashion and the pay-with-your-face apps and Xi Jinping’s stupid book in every office.”

从宏观角度来看，中国人口已呈萎缩态势，近期公布的数据显示，生育率降幅触目惊心，一些长期预测甚至指出，本世纪末中国人口规模甚至可能仅略高于美国。经济评论员诺亚·史密斯就此声称，中国或许已经迎来了发展峰值——不仅是在人口方面，更体现在“机器人、电动汽车、高铁、空中出租车、满是LED屏的建筑、珍珠奶茶连锁店、快时尚、刷脸支付应用，以及每个办公室都摆着习近平那本愚蠢书籍”的繁荣景象上。

The Chinese economy may still be growing faster than the American one, and though nominal U.S. gross domestic product is higher, certain adjustments can make China’s economy rate out as larger. But China is growing much more slowly than it used to, even according to official data, with less official estimates looking considerably bleaker, and many structural problems obvious to observers both domestic and foreign. Progress in high-tech industries has not produced windfall profits but something like the opposite, with competition producing bankruptcies alongside innovation and shrinking margins even for surviving firms. The youth unemployment rate is terrifically high, and young Chinese adults do not seem to be ecstatic future-forward hustlers, exactly. Instead, they’re exhibiting the same Gen Z patterns familiar in the United States and across Western Europe: exhaustion, nostalgia, frustration and despair.

中国经济增速或许仍高于美国，尽管美国的名义国内生产总值更高，但经特定口径调整后，中国经济总量可能更大。但即便是根据官方数据，中国的增速也远不如从前，不那么官方的预估则更为惨淡，诸多结构性问题对国内外观察者而言都显而易见。高科技产业的发展并未带来暴利，反而呈现相反态势：市场竞争在催生创新的同时，也引发了企业破产潮，即便是存活下来的企业，利润空间也在不断萎缩。中国的青年失业率居高不下，中国年轻一代似乎并非充满激情的未来开拓者，反而呈现出与美国及西欧Z世代相似的状态：身心俱疲、沉溺怀旧、满心沮丧、陷入绝望。

And there are some intuitive explanations for the spectacular scale of Chinese infrastructure buildout that do not credit some unique Chinese advantage, cultural or otherwise. About 15 years ago China reached roughly the per capita G.D.P. threshold that the United States hit in the 1960s, during the buildout of the interstate highway system, when American know-how and state capacity made its imperious engineering the envy of the world.

对于中国基建的大规模落地，其实有一些直观的解释，无需归因于中国在文化或其他方面的独特优势。大约15年前，中国的人均国内生产总值达到了美国上世纪60年代的水平——那个时候，美国正大力建设州际高速公路系统，美国的技术实力与国家治理能力，令其宏伟的工程建设成为世界艳羡的对象。

I don’t pretend to know how it will all shake out, on the global stage or even in the halls of Washington think tanks. But after a decade of steady intensification, America’s story of its rivalry with China has taken a turn, with Beltway hysteria giving way to something more subdued, uncertain, even insecure.

我不敢妄言全球舞台乃至华盛顿智库内部的局势将如何演变。但经过十年的持续升温，美国关于中美竞争的叙事已悄然转向，华盛顿曾有的歇斯底里正被一种更为克制、充满不确定性甚至不安的情绪取代。

Two decades ago, many Americans assumed that the Beijing model could not sustain a challenge to American hegemony without collapsing under its internal contradictions and shortcomings. One decade ago, China hawks began to fret that much more needed to be done to box out the rising power. And though it still isn’t consensus and there is still plenty of competitive hysteria, over the last year we’ve begun to hear many more wondering whether the race has already been lost.

20年前，许多美国人认为，北京模式的内在矛盾与缺陷终将使其崩塌，无法对美国霸权构成持久挑战。10年前，对华强硬派开始忧心，美国需要采取更多行动，遏制这个崛起的大国。尽管如今尚未形成共识，竞争带来的歇斯底里仍大量存在，但过去一年，越来越多声音开始质疑这场竞赛是否早就是败局已定。

This shift is pretty disorienting for a country as cocky as this one, as Kuo wrote recently in the Ideas Letter, in an essay he called “The Great Reckoning.” “We have witnessed not merely the rise of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought — about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself,” he wrote. “We simply haven’t yet found the intellectual courage to face it.”

正如郭怡广近期在《思想通讯》(Ideas Letter)中的一篇题为《大反思》(The Great Rechoning)的文章中所言，对于美国这样一个向来自负的国家而言，这一转变令人困惑。他写道：“我们见证的，不仅是另一个大国的崛起，更是对西方思想中根深蒂固的假设——关于发展、政治制度乃至文明成就本身——的根本性挑战，”他写道。“我们只是尚未拥有直面这一现实的思想勇气。”

Or perhaps we are just now beginning to — some growing fatalistic, others envisioning a world defined less by imperial rivalry than by balance, others by lashing out against old allies and former adversaries in a desperate performance of strength against those we remain confident we can intimidate and overwhelm.

或许，我们如今才刚刚开始直面这一现实——有人愈发陷入宿命论，有人憧憬一个不再由霸权对抗主导、而是趋于平衡的世界，还有人通过向老牌盟友与昔日对手发难，在那些我们仍确信能够威慑压倒的对象面前，上演绝望的强权表演。