Chinese Media Suggests Americans Need to Work Harder

A Chinese state newspaper has mocked American media and politicians’ talk of the U.S. helping China with favorable trade deals, saying that Washington has played no role in the economic rise of the country. If anything, American workers should learn from their Chinese counterparts to work harder.

Global Times is an English-speaking Chinese newspaper published by the propaganda department of the ruling Communist Party, but it does not always reflect the party’s official policy. The paper wrote the article as a direct response to a piece from POLITICO. Newsweek has contacted the Global Times by email on Monday.

The POLITICO article, published last week, mentioned the recent election in Green Charter Township, Michigan. There, voters rejected five local Republican officials “who had backed tax breaks for a multibillion-dollar battery parts plant tied to a Chinese company,” POLITICO wrote. It added that the election’s results were a sign that Americans don’t want the U.S. to help China.

People wait to speak with prospective employers during a City of Los Angeles careers fair on November 2, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. Chinese state newspaper “The Global Times” wrote that Americans should be inspired by Chinese workers and “work twice as hard.”
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

The Global Times newspaper wrote in reply that China was helping the people of Green Charter Township by “creating more than 2,000 jobs in this economically depressed region.”

The newspaper added how China’s economic advances cannot be reversed if the U.S. refuses to cooperate with the country: “China already possesses top-tier technology and high-quality production capacity in electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and various manufacturing aspects.”

The Global Times said that mutual investment helps both countries, and not only China. It then invited Chinese workers to take “a top-down look at those on the verge of falling into the sunset industry in the U.S.”

What follows is the newspaper’s encouragement for American workers to be more like Chinese workers if they no longer want Beijing’s investment.

“Work twice as hard,” the first instruction reads. “Exert double the effort. Surpass rivals through learning, rather than discussing who helped who,” the article adds. A final line closes the article, saying: “Americans are no longer qualified to view China with a benefactor mentality.”

Despite the confidence expressed in this piece, the Chinese economy has been struggling in the past couple of years as the country’s housing market—which has driven its explosive growth in the past few decades—has been facing a drastic slowdown.

No matter how hard the Chinese work, the country faces a much-slower growth pace than in past decades.

“The housing market crisis is not the only factor, there are a lot of things that are contributing to a much more pedestrian growth rate in the next 10 to 20 years. I call them the seven Ds,” George Magnus, once chief economist of UBS and now an associate at the China Centre at the University of Oxford in the U.K., told Newsweek.

“The debt, in which the housing market obviously is included. Demographics, with the Chinese population rapidly aging. Dynamism, with which I mean that productivity isn’t really firing any more because reform in this direction hasn’t happened. Decoupling and de-risking, which is a bit constraint on China’s ability to develop the new economy and technology. Directive, the government has become more controlling. And shortage of demand,” he added.

“This idea of China becoming the world’s biggest economy may not happen, actually,” Magnus said.