It’s Too Soon to Announce the Dawn of a Chinese Century
Despite the pandemic’s impact, China has a long road to travel before it can surpass US economic power. Inter-capitalist rivalry is driving tensions between Washington and Beijing, not the personalities of Xi Jinping or Donald Trump.
The China Central Television (CCTV) Tower in Beijing, China, on December 13, 2021. (Andrea Verdelli / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
China was the first country to have borne the brunt of COVID-19 at the start of 2020. Western news reports from late January of that year described the scenes in Wuhan with a sense of disbelief.
Those emergency measures would soon become familiar throughout the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese government appears to have done a better job of containing the pandemic than the authorities in the United States.
The experience of COVID-19 has fed into perceptions that China will dominate this century in the way America dominated the last one. Joe Biden has made it a priority to head off that danger before it becomes a reality.
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