Two Chinas inhabit the American imagination: One is a technology and manufacturing superpower poised to lead the world. The other is an economy that’s on the verge of collapse.

美国人的想象中有两个中国：一个是准备引领世界的科技和制造业超级大国，另一个是经济濒临崩溃的国家。

Each reflects a real aspect of China.

这两个都是中国真实面目的写照。

One China — let’s call it hopeful China — is defined by companies like the A.I. start-up DeepSeek, the electric vehicle giant BYD and the tech powerhouse Huawei. All are innovation leaders.

让我们把其中一个称为希望的中国，它由人工智能初创公司DeepSeek、电动汽车巨头比亚迪、强大的科技企业华为等公司代表，它们都是创新先锋。

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the Silicon Valley chip giant Nvidia, said China was “not behind” the United States in artificial intelligence development. Quite a few pundits have declared that China would dominate the 21st century.

硅谷芯片巨头英伟达的首席执行官黄仁勋说，中国在人工智能的发展方面“并不落后于”美国。不少权威人士断言，中国将主宰21世纪。

The other China — gloomy China — tells a different story: sluggish consumer spending, rising unemployment, a chronic housing crisis and a business community bracing for the impact of the trade war.

另一个是无望的中国，它讲述的故事截然不同：消费疲软、失业率攀升、旷日持久的房地产危机，以及为贸易战的冲击做准备的商界。

President Trump, as he tries to negotiate a resolution of a trade war, must reckon with both versions of America’s arch geopolitical rival.

随着美国总统特朗普试图通过谈判来解决贸易战，他必须对美国主要地缘政治对手的两个版本都有所估量。

The stakes have never been higher to understand China. It’s not enough to fear its successes, or take solace in its economic hardships. To know America’s biggest rival requires seeing how the two Chinas are able to coexist.

了解中国比以往任何时候都更重要。对中国的成功只是害怕，或从中国的经济困境中得到安慰，都是不够的。要认清美国的最大竞争对手，就需要了解这两个中国如何共存。

“Americans have too many imagined notions about China,” said Dong Jielin, a former Silicon Valley executive who recently moved back to San Francisco after spending 14 years in China teaching and researching the country’s science and technology policies. “Some of them hope to solve American problems using Chinese methods, but that clearly won’t work. They don’t realize that China’s solutions come with a lot of pain.”

“美国人对中国有太多想象，”曾在硅谷担任高管的董洁林说，她在中国从事了14年的科技政策教学和研究工作后最近搬回了旧金山。“有些人希望美国的问题用中国的解决方式，这肯定行不通。他们不知道中国的solution（解决办法）会带来很多pain（痛苦）。”

吉利汽车在宁波的汽车装配线。

Just like the United States, China is a giant country full of disparities: coastal vs. inland, north vs. south, urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, state-owned vs. private sector, Gen X vs. Gen Z. The ruling Communist Party itself is full of contradictions. It avows socialism, but recoils from giving its citizens a strong social safety net.

与美国一样，中国是一个存在各种差异的巨大国家：沿海与内陆、北方与南方、城市与农村、贫困与富裕、国企与民企、X世代与Z世代。执政的中共本身就充满矛盾。虽然它宣称实行社会主义，却不愿为人民提供强大的社会保障。

Chinese people, too, grapple with these contradictions.

中国人民也在努力应对这些矛盾。

Despite the trade war, the Chinese tech entrepreneurs and investors I talked to over the past few weeks were more upbeat than any time in the past three years. Their hope started with DeepSeek’s breakthrough in January. Two venture capitalists told me that they planned to come out of a period of hibernation they started after Beijing’s crackdown on the tech sector in 2021. Both said they were looking to invest in Chinese A.I. applications and robotics.

尽管发生了贸易战，但过去几周里与我交谈的中国科技创业者和投资者们却比过去三年的任何时候都更乐观。他们从今年1月DeepSeek的突破上看到希望。两名风险投资家对我说，他们已打算走出中国政府2021年开始打击科技行业后的冬眠期。两人都说，他们正在考虑投资中国的人工智能应用和机器人技术。

But they are much less optimistic about the economy — the gloomy China.

但他们对整体经济——也就是无望的中国——则没有那么乐观了。

The 10 executives, investors and economists I interviewed said they believed that China’s advances in tech would not be enough to pull the country out of its economic slump. Advanced manufacturing makes up about only 6 percent of China’s output, much smaller than real estate, which contributes about 17 percent of gross domestic product even after a sharp slowdown.

我采访的10名高管、投资者和经济学家一致认为，中国在技术方面的进步不足以帮助它摆脱经济萧条。先进制造业只占中国经济产出的6%左右，远低于房地产行业对国内生产总值的贡献，即使在经历了急剧放缓之后，房地产行业仍对经济产出有约17%的贡献率。

When I asked them whether China could beat the United States in the trade war, nobody said yes. But they all agreed that China’s pain threshold was much higher.

当我问他们中国能否在贸易战中打败美国时，没人给出肯定的答案。但他们都同意，中国能忍受更多的痛苦。

It’s not hard to understand the anxiety felt by Americans frustrated with their country’s struggles to build and manufacture. China has constructed more high-speed rail lines than the rest of the world, deployed more industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers than any country except South Korea and Singapore and now leads globally in electric vehicles, solar panels, drones and several other advanced industries.

美国人对自己的国家在基建和制造业上困难重重的焦虑不难理解。中国的高铁总里程已超过了世界其他地区，每万名制造业工人配备的工业机器人数量仅次于韩国和新加坡，中国在电动汽车、太阳能电池板、无人机和其他几个先进产业目前都处于全球领先地位。

宁波的太阳能电池板。

Many of China’s most successful companies have gained resilience from the economic downturn and are better prepared for the bad days ahead. “They’ve been DOGE-ing for a long time,” said Eric Wong, the founder of the New York hedge fund Stillpoint who visits China every quarter, referring to the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency. “By comparison, the U.S. has been living in excess for a long time.”

中国许多最成功的企业已从经济低迷中练就了韧性，为更艰难的时刻做足了准备。“它们在很长时间里一直在DOGE-ing，”每个季度都会去中国的纽约对冲基金Stillpoint的创始人埃里克·黄（音）说，DOGE是特朗普政府削减开支的所谓“政府效率部”的英文首字母缩。“相比之下，美国多年来一直在挥霍。”

But as we marvel at China’s so-called miracles, it is necessary to ask: At what cost? Not just financial, but human.

但是，当我们惊叹于中国所谓的奇迹时，有必要问：代价是什么？不仅是经济方面的代价，还有人的代价。

China’s top-down innovation model, heavily reliant on government subsidies and investment, has proved to be both inefficient and wasteful. Much like the overbuilding in the real estate sector that triggered a crisis and erased much of Chinese household wealth, excessive industrial capacity has deepened imbalances in the economy and raised questions about the model’s sustainability, particularly if broader conditions worsen.

中国自上而下的创新模式严重依赖政府补贴和投资，事实证明，这种模式效率低下且浪费严重。就像房地产行业的过度建设引发了一场危机，并抹去了中国家庭的大部分财富一样，工业产能过剩加剧了经济的不平衡，这种模式的持续性令人存疑，尤其是在大环境恶化的情况下。

The electric vehicle industry shows the force of the two Chinas. In 2018, the country had nearly 500 E.V. makers. By 2024, about 70 remained. Among the casualties was Singulato Motors, a start-up that raised $2.3 billion from investors, including local governments in three provinces. Over eight years, the company failed to deliver a single car and filed for bankruptcy in 2023.

电动汽车产业是这两个中国之间进行博弈的典型样本。2018年，中国拥有近500家电动车企。到2024年，大约还剩下70家。其中夭折的奇点汽车从投资者那里筹集了23亿美元，投资者包括三个省的地方政府。八年多的时间里，该公司连一辆车都没交付，并于2023年申请破产。

The Chinese government tolerates wasteful investment in its chosen initiatives, helping fuel overcapacity. But it is reluctant to make the kind of substantial investments in rural pensions and health insurance that would help lift consumption.

中国政府容忍重点产业的投资浪费，助长了产能过剩。但它却不愿在农村养老金和医疗保险等有助于提升消费的领域进行大量投资。

“Technological innovation alone cannot resolve China’s structural economic imbalances or cyclical deflationary pressures,” Robin Xing, the chief China economist at Morgan Stanley, said in a research note. “In fact,” he wrote, “recent advances in technology may reinforce policymakers’ confidence in the current path, increasing the risk of resource and capital misallocation.”

摩根士丹利首席中国经济学家邢自强在研究报告中指出，“单靠技术创新无法解决中国的结构性经济失衡或周期性通缩压力。”他写道，“事实上，最近的技术进步可能会增强政策制定者对当前道路的信心，从而增加资源和资本错配的风险。”

The Chinese leadership’s obsession with technological self-reliance and industrial capacity is not helping its biggest challenges: unemployment, weak consumption and a reliance on exports, not to mention the housing crisis.

中国领导层对技术自主和工业能力的痴迷无助于解决其面临的最大挑战：失业、消费疲软和对出口的依赖，更不用说房地产危机了。

Officially, China’s urban unemployment rate stands at 5 percent, excluding jobless migrant workers. Youth unemployment is 17 percent. The real numbers are believed to be much higher. This summer alone, China’s colleges will graduate more than 12 million new job seekers.

官方数据显示，不包括失业的农民工在内，中国城镇失业率为5%，青年失业率为17%。据信，实际数字要高得多。仅今年夏天，中国的高校毕业生就将带来1200多万新增求职者。

Mr. Trump was not wrong in saying factories are closing and people are losing their jobs in China.

特朗普说中国的工厂正在关闭，人们正在失去工作，这并没有错。

In 2020 Li Keqiang, then the premier, said the foreign trade sector, directly or indirectly, accounted for the employment of 180 million Chinese. “A downturn in foreign trade will almost certainly hit the job market hard,” he said at the onset of the pandemic. Tariffs could be much more devastating.

2020年，时任总理李克强表示，外贸部门直接或间接地带动了1.8亿中国人的就业。“产业出口下降，对就业会带来直接冲击，”他在疫情开始时表示。关税可能更具破坏性。

Beijing is playing down the effect of the trade war, but as negotiators held talks last weekend with their U.S. counterparts, its impact was obvious. In April, Chinese factories experienced the sharpest monthly slowdown in more than a year while shipments to the United States plunged 21 percent from a year earlier.

北京正在淡化贸易战的影响，但随着上周末中美谈判代表举行会谈，其冲击是显而易见的。今年4月，中国工厂经历了一年多来最严重的月度放缓，对美出口同比骤降21%。

All of the economic fallout will be shouldered by people like a man I spoke to, with the surname Chen, a former university librarian in a megacity in southern China. He asked that I not use his full name and where he lived to shield his identity from the authorities.

所有的经济后果都将由像我采访过的一位陈姓男士这样的人来承担，他曾是中国南方某大城市的一所大学的图书管理员。为了不让政府知道他的身份，他要求我不要透露他的全名和居住地。

Mr. Chen lives in the gloomy China. He stopped taking the vaunted high-speed trains because they cost five times as much as a bus. Flying is often cheaper, too.

陈先生生活在那个无望的中国。他不再乘坐被大肆吹嘘的高铁，因为高铁的价格是大巴车的五倍。连飞机票也往往更便宜。

He lost his job last year because the university, one of the top ones in the country, was facing a budget shortfall. Many state-run institutions have had to let people go because many local governments, even in the wealthiest cities, are deeply in debt.

他在去年丢了工作，因为那所全国顶尖的大学面临预算短缺。许多国有机构不得不裁员，因为许多地方政府，即使是最富裕的城市，也是债台高筑。

Because he’s in his late 30s, Mr. Chen is considered too old for most jobs. He and his wife had given up on buying a home. Now with the trade war, he expects that the economy will weaken further and that his job prospects will be dimmer.

因为陈先生快40岁了，人们认为他年纪太大，不适合从事大多数工作。他和妻子已经放弃了买房的打算。现在，随着贸易战的爆发，他预计经济将进一步走弱，他的就业前景将更加黯淡。

“I’ve become even more cautious with spending,” he said. “I weigh every penny.”

“我在消费上更加保守，”他说，“变得锱铢必较。”