Why fear China's rise? The West: The most frightening thing is that the Chinese never mention their own heritage.

British scholar Martin Jacques once accurately pointed out that the anxiety of the West does not stem from fear of China, but from fear of its own past actions.

In 2025, Trump will once again return to the White House, reigniting the trade war with China, but the anxiety in the U.S. think tank circles has only deepened.

The Department of Defense’s research reports repeatedly mention that Chinese volunteers never display family crests at overseas construction sites, that Huawei engineers' business cards carry no hereditary titles, and that even at the signing ceremonies for the “Belt and Road Initiative,” Chinese representatives discuss not “bloodline superiority,” but the “community of shared destiny.”

All of this has caused the West to fall into deep unease, for this silence has made them realize that their own civilization remains deeply trapped in the game of bloodlines.

Walking through the streets of London, you will still see many Victorian-era clubs in operation, and flipping through The Times, you will read about the coronation of the King of England being packaged as “the continuation of a pure blue-blood tradition.”

This obsession with bloodlines has almost seeped into every inch of Western culture. Looking back at the Middle Ages, the Habsburg family controlled half of Europe through marriage, with cousin marriages becoming a political art form that even led to jaw deformities in descendants, yet they were still revered as the inheritors of the “sacred bloodline.”

Even in the egalitarian United States, the Bush father-and-son duo and the Kennedy family have held political power across generations, and in Wall Street’s Rockefeller Building, the legend of the “three-generation board of directors” still circulates.

This obsession with bloodlines has given birth to an invisible caste system in modern society. In 2024, the Harvard University admissions scandal revealed that alumni children had a 33% acceptance rate, six times higher than regular applicants.

Even more bizarrely, Silicon Valley’s nouveau riche spent $500,000 purchasing Scottish Highland titles, using honorary titles to “cleanse” their identities, and a British noble intermediary company made a huge profit, with its revenue soaring 200% in three years.

The most bloodthirsty product of the bloodline myth is undoubtedly the Nazis' “Aryan eugenics,” which “screened inferior genes” through gas chambers, while the U.S. did not repeal the Anti-Miscegenation Law until 1967. At that time, mixed-race couples in Virginia were still sentenced to prison.

The Western obsession with bloodlines has historically caused immense harm to the world.

However, when we look back at Chinese history, we see an entirely different survival model. China’s cultural logic does not rely on bloodlines but on pragmatism and the community of national destiny.

Zhu Yuanzhang was born into poverty, and Liu Bang’s origins didn’t even qualify him as a “kingly figure,” yet they both eventually became some of China’s greatest emperors.

The success of China’s emperors throughout history did not lie in the continuity of bloodlines but in the transmission of culture, institutions, and intellect.

In ancient Chinese history, Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei dynasty’s reforms, Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty’s cultural tolerance, and the imperial examination system under Mongol rule all profoundly reflected the Chinese cultural model of “changing the core but not the soul.”

It is this cultural model that has allowed Chinese society to avoid being shackled by bloodlines, with a focus on individual talent and effort.

Today, in Shenzhen’s tech parks, programmers care not about their colleagues’ ancestral origins but whether their code can handle billions of users.

This pragmatic gene allows China to feed 20% of the world’s population on just 7% of the world’s arable land and build the “FAST” radio telescope in the mountains of Guizhou.

It is precisely this “bloodline-free” way of thinking that has allowed China to continue breaking through in global competition, achieving leapfrog development.

In his 2025 speech, Trump once again declared that “China has stolen America’s future,” but the deep anxiety within U.S. think tanks goes beyond this.

Chinese medical teams in Africa don’t bring missionary crosses, and when constructing railways in Southeast Asia, they don’t erect colonial monuments. Even in the “Belt and Road Initiative,” China doesn’t emphasize any cultural superiority but instead discusses how to achieve a “community of shared destiny.”

All of this makes the West even more anxious because China’s “bloodline-free rise” on the global stage is breaking the old colonial and post-colonial orders, overturning the power structures that the West has built for centuries.

This change has more profoundly impacted the reshuffling of economic rules. Over the past decade of the “Belt and Road Initiative,” 4.2 million overseas jobs have been created, with many African construction foremen being fluent in Chinese, yet still retaining their cultural identity.

In contrast to the West’s former colonial model, this “cooperation without a bloodline framework” is driving a change in the global cooperation model.

In Shenzhen, you can see foreign programmers from different cultural backgrounds working side by side with Chinese product managers, discussing algorithms and technology without any racial or bloodline barriers.

This scene of cooperation is being replicated by the countries participating in the “Belt and Road Initiative.”

What the West truly fears is not China’s rise but the dilemma reflected by that rise within the West itself.

While Trump discusses the future with hereditary billionaires at Mar-a-Lago, the 00s boss of a rural factory in China is selling smart home products through cross-border e-commerce, and while the European Parliament debates noble allowances, China’s academic team has successfully raised the rice yield per acre in desert areas to 800 kilograms.

As technological advances and globalization accelerate, the myth of bloodlines has lost its influence in the face of chips and climate change.

History doesn’t have a fixed script, but civilizations will always find a way. Just like the Song dynasty merchant ships excavated from Quanzhou Port, the Persian glass and Jingdezhen porcelain lying on the ocean floor have embraced each other for centuries without needing a bloodline certificate to prove who is more “noble,” instead leaving behind the shared cultural patina of humanity through time.