US vs China: What People Expect From Government

A Chinese author on the Q&A platform Zhihu has offered an answer to the question “What is the most essential difference between China and the United States?” that avoids the usual institutional checklist. The difference, the author argues, lies in what citizens of each country expect from their government — and whom they instinctively turn to when trouble hits.

The author’s core claim: Chinese people have long been accustomed to a unified, vertically administered “big government” that registers every household and takes direct responsibility for each citizen. Americans, by contrast, tend to see government as a provider of taxation, policing and national defense — and would prefer it stay out of everything else. Neither mindset is abstract; both are habits left by historical paths.

An administrative habit left by the commandery system

The author starts with history. China’s territorial expansion, he writes, was mainly the expansion of the vertical commandery-and-county system; frontier regions under loose control were often unstable or stabilized late, but once absorbed into the commandery system, national identity became firmly rooted. The resulting habit: Chinese people pursue unity with intensity, and increasingly reject any partition of territory already organized under that system.

In contemporary terms, the author says, Chinese people may demand far more of the central government than Americans demand of the federal government — even more than Americans demand of state governments. People don’t merely accept big government; they expect it to take charge.

Who gets blamed when things go wrong

The author offers a comparison: during the 2022 lockdowns, people in Xi’an directed more blame at provincial and municipal authorities, while Shanghai residents aimed more criticism at the national level — but overall, Chinese people habitually blame “China” when things go wrong. In the US, by contrast, some homeless people with only a few years to live rarely complain, because they don’t see themselves as ordinary citizens in need of state care, but as potential millionaires who simply haven’t succeeded yet — or who gambled at a key moment and lost, and accept the loss.

The comparison is not rigorous, but it points to a difference: one side treats a safety net as government’s duty, the other treats risk as an individual choice. Writing in the first person, the author says he does not want to be a secure citizen under state care, which he calls humiliating and dulling; he would rather have a challenging life than a guaranteed existence.

Wary of government, or chasing the state payroll

The author traces Western wariness of government to a history in which government mainly collected taxes and provided security. The modern demand, he says, is for government to do less — ideally nothing — and but for the risk of interstate war, many would embrace anarchism.

China is different. The author argues that China’s government took shape before historical memory had clarified, and that the Chinese pursuit of state salaries, stable national guarantees, political status and social rank is bone-deep. China’s gentry, he writes, did not fight their way up from a social jungle but rose through a political one by succeeding in study and entering office.

A lens worth pressing on

The author acknowledges that enthusiasm for unified administration varies by region, and criticizes a mindset he calls “reverse racism”: demanding both freedom and guarantees, rejecting oversight while insisting it be done well. What he genuinely admires, he says, is the adventurous American who accepts the consequences of a gamble — not the pseudo-American spirit that imports the mentality of a safety-net government.

Reducing the two countries’ differences to “expectations of government” is of course only one lens; it cannot explain all of institutions, economics and society. But it raises a hard question: when you run into trouble, who do you assume should catch you — and how much freedom are you willing to give up for that? The answer may say more than any institutional label.