China Races past America & into the Future

The future is on the Pacific Rim.

I've been hearing that since at least the early 90s when I was living the twenty-something expat life, teaching English in Southeast Asia. The late '80s had definitely put the spotlight on the economies of the East, with Japan bursting ahead technologically and buying up huge amounts of American real estate. Granted, that run became stagnant just as the Sleeping Giant began to wake.

Washington Post writer Fareed Zakaria has always had his finger on the pulse of emerging political and economic issues, and he made a statement with his book The Post-American World, which wasn't as much about the waning of the United States as it was "the rise of the rest."

And no place is rising higher and faster than China. In a recent opinion piece, Zakaria notes "As America fumbles, China races ahead."

Xi is building the future while Trump pushes tariffs and fights the woke wars.

For about a decade, the United States has been comforted by the notion that China had lost its way. After 35 years of astonishing growth, Beijing stumbled internally and abroad. Its leaders cracked down on some of the country’s most innovative sectors, from technology to education, driving entrepreneurs into exile or silence. Its “wolf warrior” diplomacy alienated its neighbors from India to Australia to Vietnam.

That era is over. China’s leaders have corrected their course.

Last month, while President Donald Trump accused nations at the U.N. General Assembly of being hopeless failures and harangued the United Nations for not hiring him to renovate its headquarters decades ago, President Xi Jinping put forward a Global Governance Initiative, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.N.’s founding. He proposed strengthening the multilateral system along a series of dimensions, positioning Beijing as the constructive, agenda-setting superpower.