As Communist Party leaders tell it, China’s relations with the West resemble a brawl between heavyweight champions, made vicious by American cheating
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskIn part, Chinese grumbling is tactical: a bid to blame bilateral tensions on America. When Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, met his American counterpart Antony Blinken on the sidelines of theGeneral Assembly in September, he urged the Biden administration to “reflect on and change” what he called its efforts to contain China’s rise. In part, a chin-jutting stance serves the self-interest of foreign-policy bureaucrats.
It is true that relations worsened in the Trump era. Though seemingly untroubled by Mr Xi’s autocratic ways , Mr Trump saw populist opportunities in telling American voters that China had stolen their jobs and sent covid-19 in return. More conventionally hawkish American officials took advantage of Mr Trump’s combative instincts to enact policies that treated China as a comprehensive threat to national security.
Drawing on interviews with Chinese officials, military men and at least one government minister, Ms Shirk, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, records how China’s foreign and domestic policies took a hardline turn as long ago as 2006. That was during the tenure of Hu Jintao, Mr Xi’s cautious, wooden predecessor, who in his decade as Communist Party chief had to accommodate powerful factions and interest groups, like a weak emperor ruling at the pleasure of feudal barons.
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