While the U.S. worries about whether it can continue a century of dominance, China is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who is now a fellow at Tsinghua University, told me, “Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles.” But Americans, in his view, have lost that historical awareness. “They have been so strong for so long that every American believes, ‘I’m a member of the strongest nation on earth,’ ” he said.
The Chinese are no less convinced of their ascendancy. A European diplomat who has attended meetings with Xi and his advisers told me, “They’re feeling like the champions of the world. They think they can contend with anybody.”
... Rush Doshi, a professor at Georgetown and a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump’s pursuit of territorial control a recurring historical error. In the eighteenth century, while Russia fixated on conquering Eurasia, Britain developed the steam engine; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Europeans fought over Africa, Americans mastered the assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran and Cuba, “China is focussed on winning the technologies of the future,” Doshi said.
If the U.S. were to lose the competition over the next wave of industries—including A.I., biotech, and robotics—as it lost the ones over solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.” ... To China, Doshi said, “autocracies are considered perfectly legitimate, and technology is used to strengthen them. China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.”Yet Osnos reports that there are observers who don't see Trump's bow to China as indicating permanent global subservience. Rather we are spectators to a contest of somewhat precarious oligarchies -- this is unstable.
... Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me that the international system the U.S. constructed after the Second World War—and ran, often to its benefit—is “definitely dead and beyond redemption.” He said that Trump’s dismantling of the country’s alliances signaled the end of the “willingness of the American public to play the role America has played for most of the last eight decades.”
But America’s diminished stature does not necessarily clear a path for China. Few people these days are enthusiastic about the prospect of a world dominated by either superpower. ...
... The likely successor to the American order, then, is not a Chinese order so much as what Leonard calls a period of “un-order”: a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit. In the words of Suisheng Zhao, a China scholar at the University of Denver, it is the makings of a “twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all.”
During the Cold War, as futurists on both sides of the Iron Curtain plotted to control the direction of history, another group coalesced around a more modest idea. Mankind 2000, as it called itself, was made up of European survivors of fascism who were wary of both Communist determinism and American hubris. They warned that man could be “absorbed by his machine” and declared, “The future belongs to all of us, not only to small oligarchic groups.”
Spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems than like a race between small oligarchic groups—tight circles of men with immense power over everyone else’s future....
Scary, but not simple or inevitable. Oligarchs and aspiring monarchs always think they've solved the problem of pesky peoples who think they ought to get a say in how their lives are lived. Perhaps China's future is not so clear. New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, writing from Beijing, sees a more complicated reality in the country he has watched develop for 30 years.
For China and its top leader, Xi Jinping, the biggest prize from a summit in Washington, notably free from confrontation, may be simple: time.
Time to cope with a housing market crash that has wiped away the savings of tens of millions of Chinese families. Time to deal with local governments running short of money as land-use revenue collapses. Time to make China even less vulnerable to economic pressure from the United States and other industrialized countries.
And perhaps most consequentially, time to prepare for the once-in-five-years Communist Party national congress next autumn, which will choose a new slate of top leaders to work under Mr. Xi.
“By trying to stabilize relations with the U.S., China can better concentrate on its own priorities,” said Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. ...
It ain't easy governing one of the most populated, fastest growing economies and societies the world has ever seen. China is big and on the rise, but its destination, and ours while in our relative decline, has not yet been written.
