How Trump’s America has created a power

Last October, China’s Xi Jinping delivered the most consequential speech since Mikhail Gorbachev stepped before cameras to formally dissolve the Soviet Union.

Addressing the Communist Party’s 19th Party Congress, Xi made it clear that China is ready to claim its share of global leadership. The implications of this step are global.

As he begins his second five-year term, Xi has consolidated enough power at home to redefine China’s external environment and set new rules within it. His timing is perfect; China is stepping forward just at the moment that a politically embattled and distracted US president is scaling back US commitment to traditional allies and alliances. The United States has created a vacuum, and China stands ready to fill it.

For decades, Western leaders have assumed that a new Chinese middle class would force China’s leaders to liberalise the country’s politics. Instead, it is Western democracy that now appears under siege as citizens, angry over the toll that globalisation has taken on their lives and livelihoods, demand change and governments fail to deliver. Democracy itself is threatened by a weakening of public confidence in traditional political parties, the reliability of public information, and the inviolability of the voting process.

By contrast, China’s leaders have delivered steady advances in the country’s prosperity and a rising sense of China’s importance for the world. Old problems like repression, censorship, corruption, and pollution remain, but measurable progress in many areas of life give China’s people a confidence in their leaders that many Americans and Europeans no longer have.

What does this mean for the world? China is now setting international standards with less resistance than before. This is important in three main areas.

Firstly, for trade and investment, China is the only country with a global strategy. With its vast BeltRoad project and its willingness to invest — without political precondition — in developing countries in every region, China is scaling up its ambitions even as Europe focuses on European problems and trade becomes a dirty word in US politics. Governments across Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are now more likely to align with, and imitate, China’s explicitly transactional approach to foreign policy.