GoKawiilThe Chinese establishment has abandoned that view in stages. When Brexit was approved, in 2016, the West seemed to be turning inward. The fight over COVID-19 vaccines provided a signal that the U.S. was splintering; the storming of the Capitol offered another. After Trump returned to the White House, his Administration declared, “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” His aide Stephen Miller spoke instead of an international order “governed by force,” adding, “These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
In Beijing, a think tank at Renmin University recently published an assessment titled “Thank Trump,” which wryly hailed his efforts to hasten the “twilight of an empire,” by undermining America’s alliances, civil service, scientific institutions, and democratic credibility. In the past two years, the international approval rating of the U.S. has dropped nearly forty points, according to a worldwide survey by the Alliance of Democracies; in multiple polls, China now rates higher than the U.S.
For China, America’s retreat comes just as decades of state investment, industrial policy, and diplomatic planning are paying off. It would be foolhardy to entirely trust China’s official statistics; as the economist Gao Shanwen once told an audience in D.C., the official growth rate “will always be around five per cent.” But the change is plainly visible. In two decades, China has gone from producing about half as much electricity as the U.S. to generating more than twice as much, at far lower prices; in 2023, it installed more solar power than America has installed in its entire history. Meanwhile, Trump reëmbraced fossil fuels, in what the historian Timothy Snyder called “superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form.”
Trump has promised for years that he would stop China from “raping our country” through unfair trade practices. On “Liberation Day,” in April, 2025, he unveiled a program of sweeping tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicted that Beijing would quickly submit, saying that his counterparts were “playing with a pair of twos.” Instead, China retaliated by restricting exports of rare earths and high-powered magnets. Within weeks, Ford was forced to suspend production of Explorers at its plant in Chicago, and automakers were pleading for a deal. Since then, China has not only retained its position as the world’s largest trading nation; it also achieved a record trade surplus of $1.2 trillion, as it redirected its exports away from the U.S. In 2001, four out of five countries traded more with America than with China. By 2023, the map had reversed: seven in ten trade more with China.
For the moment, China’s rulers have avoided overtly antagonizing America, because they believe that, even in decline, it remains uniquely dangerous. After Trump’s interventions in Venezuela and Iran, and his threats to Canada and Greenland, the Beijing Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, wrote that the U.S. was “dragging the world back to a dark age of plunder and division through superior military might.” But that bluster obscures a colder calculation: Chinese leaders believe that Trump’s struggle to dominate the world is actually aiding China.
“The cookies are mediocre, but they have the longest line in the city.” Cartoon by Juan Astasio Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Rush Doshi, a professor at Georgetown and a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump’s pursuit of territorial control a recurring historical error. In the eighteenth century, while Russia fixated on conquering Eurasia, Britain developed the steam engine; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Europeans fought over Africa, Americans mastered the assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran and Cuba, “China is focussed on winning the technologies of the future,” Doshi said. If the U.S. were to lose the competition over the next wave of industries—including A.I., biotech, and robotics—as it lost the ones over solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.”
What kind of world does China imagine? A preview of sorts is provided by its Belt and Road Initiative, which since 2013 has directed about a trillion dollars into scores of countries, building highways, hospitals, mines, ports, and “smart cities” equipped with Chinese technology. To China, Doshi said, “autocracies are considered perfectly legitimate, and technology is used to strengthen them. China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.” In Nepal, where newly installed facial-recognition systems have been deployed against activists, a photograph from a security headquarters showed a wall of video feeds above a sign that read “With Compliments of the Ministry of Public Security of China.”