Even Trump’s vastly better-informed predecessors found it hard to see the world from China’s point of view. It is a difficult habit to shake. The West in general has imposed its preoccupations on China for more than two hundred years. From Hegel to John Stuart Mill, our greatest philosophers unanimously wrote off China as a lost cause to modernity. Each of them had different reasons. Hegel and then Marx dismissed China as an oriental despotism. Mill saw it as a flawed civilisation. Social Darwinians classified the Chinese as belonging to the lower races. Max Weber said Confucian culture would
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