Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

Meanwhile, China’s other Asian neighbors were wooed with offers of investment and economic cooperation.

Asian Infrastructure Investment ...

help to build infrastructure and promote trade acro...

“one belt, on...

the economic and military aspects of Chinese foreign policy under Xi served the same strategic goal: to build and extend China’s claim to be the dominant force in Asia and the Pacific.

China’s territorial claims were advanced in a new and imaginative manner through a concerted program of “island building” in the South China Sea.

In an effort to bolster its disputed claims to territorial waters hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland, Beijing began to pursue ambitious land reclamation and dredging programs that converted sea shoals into small islands.

By the time President Xi took office, there was already a body of new ideas and emerging policies that he could draw upon as the basis for a more forceful foreign policy. Three related ideas were particularly important:

sense of aggrieved nationalism, increasing confidence in China’s strength relative to the United States, and a deep fear about China’s own domestic political stability and the potentially subversive role of the West.

The Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of nationalist rhetoric can be ...

Tiananmen Square massacre

In response, the Communist Party began increasingly emphasizing nationalism and national revival—the “great resurgence of the Chinese nation”—as a way of restoring its legitimacy.

In the years after 1989, the idea that China had undergone a “century of humiliation,” only to be saved by the Communist Party from a predatory world, was drilled into a generation of school and university students through new history textbooks and museums.

the same message of humiliation by foreign powers and regeneration by the Communist Party.

“China Dream,”

had uttered the phrase, many Chinese would have become familiar with the idea of a China Dream through the

“It has been China’s dream for a century to become the world’s leading nation.”

China has consistently pursued policies that suggest a pragmatic desire to integrate the country’s economy with that of the West—joining the World Trade Organization, encouraging inward investment, and promoting Chinese investment overseas.

there is also some evidence that many of China’s leaders do subscribe to some of the conspiratorial and anti-Western theories that are prevalent in nationalist circles.

The second factor underpinning China’s increased assertiveness under Xi is the country’s awareness of its growing wealth and power relative to the West.

China had discovered that the lure of access to its giant market was an extremely effective tool for modifying the behavior of foreign powers—even some of those who had once forced China to open its markets at the point of a gun.

“The fact that the old players like the UK and Germany are falling over each other to prostrate themselves before China is certainly a sign of the new world order.”16

The knowledge that China’s growing economic power was enhancing the country’s diplomatic power was doubtless satisfying to China’s leaders.

They helped to make many Chinese—in business and social life—feel less intimidated by the wea...

Jac...

Al...

The financial crisis that began on Wall Street in 2008 and shook the entire global economy had undermined the prestige of the United States inside China.

The fact that China, aided by a massive splurge of government spending, recovered from the shock of 2008 far faster than the West further bolstered Chinese self-confidence.

For all China’s continuing insistence that it was still a developing nation, the government in Beijing was increasingly behaving like a superpower in the making—and the only country that it still seemed to regard as a true equal was the United States.

the third factor underpinning the rise of government-sponsored Chinese nationalism in the Xi years: a fear that the continued rule of the Communist Party was threatened by Western subversion.

When student demonstrators in Hong Kong formed the Occupy Central movement in October 2014 to demand fully democratic elections in Hong Kong, it looked like the fulfillment of China’s worst nightmare.

“one country, two systems.”

2014. That year, China made it clear that it was willing to allow long-promised direct elections for the job of chief executive of Hong Kong—on condition that it could prescreen the candidates.

“color revolution.”

series of pro-democracy uprisings in countries of the former Soviet Union and in the Middle East.

This act of censorship illustrated that the wave of revolutions in the Arab world, which continued throughout 2011, had stirred deep anxieties within the Chinese Communist Party.

Popular risings against undemocratic regimes—and the chaos they could unleash—became a central focus of China’s political thinking. The

The fact that the Egyptian uprising of 2011 was labeled the “Facebook Revolution” and that one of its most prominent early organizers was a Google executive helped to ensure that those two companies were effectively blocked in China.

Shock at events in Hong Kong led the government in Beijing to increase its vigilance against Western subversion.

Great Firewall of China

blocks access to Google, Twitter, and many other Western sites.

Under Xi, the Great Firewall has been raised higher, amid a crackdown on Western influence that has affected universities, bl...

As soon as he came to power, President Xi made clear that the “great rejuvenation” of China must include a crackdown on corruption. If the system was not cleansed, he argued, the survival of the Communist Party itself was at stake.

In the absence of a politically independent police and court system, few powerful Chinese people can be entirely confident that they are not at risk of being swept up in the wave of arrests that, three years into the Xi era, had snared senior figures in the military, regional governments, big state-owned industries, and high finance.

Xi’s China presents a paradox. Its assertive foreign policy and rhetoric suggests that China is increasingly confident of its own power and international role. But a crackdown on dissent and corruption at home, against the backdrop of a slowing economy, points to a strong sense of insecurity at the top levels of government.

These two themes—assertive nationalism overseas and nagging insecurity at home—come together in the governmen...

For the Xi years have seen not only a rise in Chinese assertiveness around the world, they have also witnessed an increased American effort to push back against the rise of China.

Taken together, these emerging attitudes in Beijing and Washington pose a profound challenge to the dominant ideas of win-win interdependence between America and China long promoted by influential academics

and then reflected in official statements in both Washi...

America has grown accustomed, psychologically and politically, to being the first among equals on the global stage.”