The closest Xi Jinping has come to publicly declaring this ambition was when he said, in 2014, that “it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia”—a euphemism for a situation in which America has been kicked out of a region that then has no way of resisting China’s power.13 Other officials have been more explicit. In 2010, PRC foreign minister Yang Jiechi told ten Southeast Asian countries that they must defer to Beijing’s wishes because “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.”14
