Yet more glaring than economic figures is the pervasive anxiety within American society. Reportedly, over 70% of adults feel uneasy about the political climate, while 70% are plagued by financial pressures. Concerns about housing and the cost of living are particularly acute among young people.
Gallup polls point out that Americans' anxiety about their own political system is "uniquely high" among wealthy nations globally, with a continuous erosion of social trust.
This anxiety is morphing into absurd policy theatrics.
Recently, U.S. authorities placed Chinese consumer products such as Qiaqia melon seeds, Synear dumplings, and Septwolves menswear on sanction lists, with the excuse once again being "Xinjiang supply chains." From chips to snacks, the sanctioning cudgel has slipped from "choking the neck" to "choking the throat," prompting even American netizens to lament, "having to bid farewell to spiced melon seeds."
Observers note that a packet of melon seeds cannot threaten U.S. security; what truly frightens Washington is the completeness and resilience of China's industrial chains.
On August 5th, China's Ministry of Commerce took decisive countermeasures, placing relevant U.S. entities involved in Xinjiang-related supply chain tracing technologies on its own list and strengthening export controls on products like drones. This series of events undoubtedly highlights a profound sense of imbalance deep within a superpower.
Anxiety has become an unavoidable keyword for understanding contemporary America. Many habitually attribute all of this to China's rise or economic cycles, but this remains trapped within the confines of the so-called "imagined adversary."
In my view, America's current anxiety is a systemic product, fermenting simultaneously along at least three main threads: the complete financialization of human existence, the political system's loss of capacity to absorb risks, and the identity crisis of a hegemonic power amidst shifting global dynamics. These conditions intertwine, collectively creating a wave of anxiety sweeping the nation.
A Sense of Security Becomes a Luxury
In America, from birth to death, nearly every critical juncture in an ordinary person's life is meticulously wrapped in financial products.
At eighteen, if you wish to attend college, you will likely sign your first large-scale loan contract.
Student loan debt has ballooned to a staggering scale over the past few decades, with tens of millions of Americans entering society saddled with this debt. Before even starting to earn an income, a deep deficit is already etched onto their balance sheets.
This is merely the beginning. After starting work, you must choose from countless health insurance plans, each with different deductibles, co-payment ratios, and coverage. A wrong choice means an unexpected illness or an emergency room visit could push family finances to the brink.
Buying a home means shouldering a mortgage spanning thirty years. Retirement depends on 401(k) accounts deeply tied to the stock market.
Your physical health, housing security, and life in old age—all things once considered basic rights—have now become assets requiring personal management and assumption of risk within financial markets.
This situation creates a phenomenon starkly at odds with reality. Supermarket shelves are stocked with goods, electronic screens scroll with record-breaking stock indices, yet people's hearts are filled with an unshakeable sense of fragility.
A 2025 survey captured this paradox: 70% of Americans are experiencing financial anxiety, and 76% feel intensely isolated amidst this struggle. People's fear is not starvation, but that the "middle-class life portfolio" painstakingly built over decades could collapse instantly in the face of a financial crisis, a job layoff, or an exorbitant medical bill.
I term this situation the "exploitation of expectations."
Capital not only extracts the surplus from present labor but also, through financial instruments, prices and trades the risks of the worker's life decades in advance. Your investment in education, health expectations, the possibility of property value appreciation—all are woven into complex chains of financial derivatives.
The deeper the financialization, the tighter the bond between individual life and systemic volatility.
When inflation rises, interest rates climb, or supply chains are disrupted, risks that existed only on spreadsheets and actuarial models instantly translate into tangible psychological pressure. During sleepless nights, people's minds might race over the mortgage payment due next month, a notice of denied insurance reimbursement, or a sharply shrunken retirement account figure.
This anxiety is not about basic survival; it's a form of "scarcity amidst abundance."
The material world is sufficiently plentiful, but people are filled with doubt about their ability to remain within this world of plenty. It's akin to someone standing outside a glass case gazing at an array of goods, uncertain how long their admission ticket remains valid. However, when the tentacles of the national security apparatus reach toward a packet of melon seeds, it signifies that even the most mundane daily consumption has been artificially cast under the shadow of uncertainty.
That packet of melon seeds made American consumers suddenly realize that the cheap, convenient, and abundant supply system they were accustomed to is so fragilely dependent on policy changes and geopolitical games in distant countries.
At that moment, anxiety becomes concrete and minute, carrying the scents of five-spice and caramel.
The Risk-Pricing System Has Completely Failed
In a functionally sound economic governance system, the government plays the crucial role of a risk buffer. The guidance of industrial policy, the safety net of social security, and the support of public services together form a sponge-like structure that absorbs and disperses societal risks.
Enterprises and individuals can take risks, innovate, and fail within certain bounds because a relatively safe foundation exists.
However, when the political system sinks into deep polarization and the quagmire of "vetocracy," this buffering mechanism begins to disintegrate.
Over the past few decades, the opposition between America's two major political parties has escalated from policy disagreements to almost mutual obstruction on all issues. Building infrastructure? If one party proposes, the other inevitably opposes. Reforming the healthcare system? Every attempt is accompanied by immense political cost and ultimate legislative gridlock. Controlling gun violence, addressing climate risks, repairing aging power grids—these systemic projects requiring long-term planning and sustained investment are repeatedly shelved amidst endless partisan infighting.
The government has gradually transformed from a risk resolver into a risk deflector.
And deflecting risk requires a convenient external target, and China has been conveniently pushed into that position.
Explaining the pain of domestic industrial hollowing-out as the result of "China's unfair competition," and channeling societal anger stemming from internal contradictions toward a competitor thousands of miles away—this operation carries extremely low cost in political-economic terms.
It doesn't require touching entrenched domestic interest groups or launching difficult self-transformation; it merely requires signing a sanction order or updating an entity list.
Therefore, when restrictive measures in the high-tech sector fail to achieve expected results, this impulse to deflect anxiety externally begins to trickle down.
In the years following Huawei's sanctioning, China has not halted its pace in chips, AI, and other areas. The global competitiveness of its photovoltaic and new energy vehicle industries has even continued to strengthen. Policymakers in Washington found that methods of suppression at the top were becoming increasingly ineffective, so the logic of sanctions began sliding down a peculiar track: from "choking the neck" to "choking the throat."
Melon seeds, dumplings, and menswear entering restriction lists—this isn't necessarily the result of strategic calculation, but it is inevitably an emotional action following the overflow of anxiety.
Yet, there exists an inextricable dilemma here. The core capability of a mature economy lies in accurately identifying, rationally pricing, and effectively hedging against truly destructive risks.
Prior to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the American financial system precisely suffered a catastrophic failure in this regard—it massively misjudged credit risks as safe assets.
Today, a similar misalignment is recurring in another form.
Washington can mobilize the entire nation's bureaucracy and legal tools to establish complex traceability review procedures for whether a packet of melon seeds involves Xinjiang cottonseed, yet it struggles to launch equally powerful diagnosis and intervention for the country's continuously ballooning government debt, a fundamentally shaken social safety net, or the extremely polarized wealth distribution structure.
This is the loss of risk-pricing capability. Political elites channel vast administrative resources and legal authority toward targets whose symbolic meaning far outweighs their actual impact, while systemic risks that could truly shake the foundations of society are left unattended.
Ordinary Americans see news flooded with China-related sanction reports, while at the same time, potholed roads go unrepaired near them, medical bills remain exorbitant, and wage growth has stagnated for years. That immense sense of disconnect transforms into a pervasive anxiety. People vaguely sense that the nation's helmsmen also seem adrift; they plaster the ship's cabins with portraits of enemies, yet turn a blind eye to the cracks forming at the bottom.
America Cannot Find the Ground on Which It Stands
In 1791, shortly after America's founding, the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, submitted his famous "Report on Manufactures" to Congress. In this document, he expressed a forward-looking judgment: a nation's true strength does not depend on possessing a few advanced inventions or controlling several colonies, but on its ability to build a complete manufacturing system, from raw materials to finished products, within its own territory.
Starting from this point, America, over nearly the next two centuries, step by step constructed its own industrial fortress through protective tariffs, government subsidies, and defense procurement.
Steel, automobiles, aviation, semiconductors, computers—behind every industry that later allowed America to dominate stood the presence of state power.
This logic of "construction" shaped America's national character.
It believed that by building more, creating better, and expanding wider, it could remain atop the global industrial chain.
However, in recent decades, this logic is being replaced by another impulse—one that is less strenuous but also more negative. Instead of painstakingly rebuilding domestic manufacturing capabilities that have been lost, it is easier to dismantle the manufacturing capabilities others have already built.
The deeper meaning of placing Septwolves on the list lies precisely here.
This decision has nothing to do with any technical concern. It is merely about having the ability to disrupt the integrity of your industrial chain. Even if it's just creating some compliance trouble in your most unrelated corner, it's worth a try.
The mindset behind this is no longer the proactive construction of Hamilton's era. It has become a geopolitical version of "scorched earth tactics"—if I can't run fast enough, I'll use all sorts of methods to trip you up.
The shift from construction to destruction highlights a profound identity crisis. America's accustomed role was that of a system designer and maintainer, exporting rules, monetary credit, and technological standards.
The unfolding of global supply chains was, to some extent, an extension of this will.
However, when the physical distribution and knowledge accumulation of industrial chains were reconfigured globally, Washington found itself no longer the frontrunner in many emerging fields. Catching up again requires long-term fiscal investment, educational reform, and infrastructure construction—all difficult to achieve in the current political climate.
In contrast, wielding sanctions to weaken competitors carries far lower institutional costs, at least in the short term.
But destruction can never replace the function of construction. Every update to an entity list signifies that the previous round of restrictive measures failed to achieve the expected effect. Every inch the list lengthens silently measures the helplessness of the blocker.
If a hegemonic power increasingly relies on "prohibition" to maintain advantage, the signal it sends is precisely the waning of its own "building" capacity. Because genuine industrial standing is defined by what has been built, not by what has been prohibited.
The pervasive anxiety Americans are experiencing stems largely from this identity uncertainty.
This nation is unwilling to retreat to the role of an ordinary nation-state focusing on internal problems, struggles to continue bearing the high costs of maintaining the global order, and cannot easily prevail in fair competition. This identity rupture causes foreign policy to swing erratically—one moment championing free markets, the next turning to blatant protectionism. Economic data oscillates between growth and slowdown, and public confidence follows suit.
The younger generation worries about housing affordability; the older generation worries about political governance failure. And when all these people look toward the nation's political center, they see not a clear direction, but a series of self-consuming tug-of-wars.
Melon seeds do not threaten anyone's security; nor do dumplings or jackets. In my view, what truly unsettles Washington is a profound sense of powerlessness.
Chinese companies have laid out production capacities across many countries, filling market gaps and participating in fair competition with tangible products—this in itself is a constructive logic.
Looking at America, if energy continues to be drained by endlessly externalizing contradictions and emotional sanctions, anxiety will only intensify.
So where is the prescription for anxiety? It's not on some external adversary. It lies solely within America's own body politic.
Rebuilding a system of social trust so ordinary people have stable expectations for tomorrow's life. Reconsolidating the industrial base so the middle class regains a pathway to dignity through labor. Redefining the relationship between capital and people so finance serves the real economy instead of extracting a sense of security—none of these tasks can be accomplished by sanctioning melon seeds.
Let me reiterate: a nation's ultimate standing is always determined by what it proactively builds, not by what it desperately blocks.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Dongzhen Shanglüe", author: Dongzhen Shanglüe
