Before going any further, it's worth considering: How many people in China smoke weed? Obtaining reliable statistics of illicit activity in China is difficult, but we can be reasonably sure it's less than in the United States. Americans smoke more pot, per capita, than all but two countries in the world, and, while a recent study from the medical journal Lancet doesn't discuss China specifically, it found that Asians consume less marijuana than people from any other continent.

This, of course, hasn't always been so; in fact, drugs have played a central role in modern Chinese history. China fought two different "Opium Wars" against the British in the 19th century, after which a significant percentage of the Chinese population became addicted to the drug. When Chairman Mao Zedong assumed power in 1949 and formed the People's Republic of China, the newly empowered Communists shut down opium dens throughout the country, arrested smokers, and executed dealers. Within just a few years, China had completely eradicated opium use in the country.

Today, Chinese law has little tolerance for illegal drug use. As in Singapore and Malaysia, traffickers remain subject to the death penalty, and four years ago China marked the occasion of the UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking by publicly executing 24 convicted drug dealers. However, marijuana grows in the wild throughout the country's southwest, a fact I can confirm as a four-year resident of Yunnan Province. (At a wedding I attended in Xishuangbanna, a Yunnan prefecture located near the border with Laos, some foreign guests offered pot to locals only to be told that they preferred store-bought cigarettes.) In Beijing, dealers are a ubiquitous presence in bar districts despite periodic crackdowns by the police, and they sell more than just marijuana: The tranquilizer ketamine has become popular among China's urban youth, and police recently seized three tons of methamphetamine in a rural village. A Chinese journalist was even able to buy marijuana via an online forum.

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But Tina Brown's tweet has less to do with marijuana than it does with a persistent belief that any sign of American "weakness" must necessarily translate into an advantage for China. In fairness, she's hardly the only person guilty of this: Three years ago, when heavy snow in Pennsylvania forced the cancellation of an NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings, then-Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell objected in these terms:

We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.

And when in 2011 Amy Chua published her famous "tiger mom" essay in The Wall Street Journal, featuring a description of her draconian, cruel parenting technique, she touched a nerve with Americans who suddenly questioned whether their own parenting might be inadequate. Whether the subject is legalized marijuana, parenting, or canceled football games, the basic message is the same: Americans are fat, soft, and lazy, and the Chinese are lean, disciplined, and hard-working—and that's why they're gaining on us.