With the US putting up walls of protectionism and denial, the 21st century belongs to a resilient, dynamic Chinese empire
In the first instalment of a two-part commentary prepared for next week’s Boao Forum, John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney, offers an unorthodox interpretation on the global turmoil triggered by the Trump administration. Maga, he argues, isn’t a push to restore America’s global dominance, but rather a sign of an empire in retreat, now confronted by a resurgent China – its most significant economic, diplomatic and geopolitical threat since the late 18th century
There is an old Chinese saying: when the winds of change blow some people build walls while others build windmills. This proverb has a fresh pertinence for our world is living through stormy times marked by a strange subdivision – the emergence of a powerful new Chinese empire of a kind unknown in previous world history and the walled withdrawal and retreat of the global empire of the United States.
Getting the measure of these world-shaping dynamics should be a priority for every thinking person, but the task is hampered by much bluff and bluster, propaganda and disinformation and – strangely – by widespread support for the view that US President Donald Trump’s preachings on America’s renewal and greatness are basically correct. It’s true that both the supporters and observers of Trump’s vision of America’s embattled global role are predicting a rough ride for the world. But even when they are doubtful or outright hostile to the new president’s mutterings, including his bizarre executive order against “windmills”, they tacitly or explicitly indulge his conviction that the US, despite its recent decline, is still the dominant global power and will remain so indefinitely, thanks to the gutsy leadership of the new Trump administration. Presented as breaking news for audiences hungry to make sense of a moment of great drama, Trump’s recent victory is interpreted as he would like it to be understood, as the triumph of the zeal to fix American decline, as the beginning (as he crowed at his 2025 inauguration) of a splendorous new “golden age” in which the US, standing on the verge of the “four greatest years in American history”, proves that it’s the “most powerful, most respected” country on our planet.
Is Trump’s “Maga” a restoration of power, or a retreat, as Xi’s China emerges as a major global player? Photo: TNS
One trouble with this way of thinking is its blindness to the ways the US squandered its global supremacy and bankrolled the rise of its principal rival during the past four decades. American decline is not recent. Never mind the latter-day pandering to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Think of the disastrous military interventions, the wars lost, the botched Blinken-style diplomacy and lies told, the cynical violations of the so-called “rules-based order”, and the derision and laughter nowadays generated by a “backsliding” US-style liberal democracy. Then think of the huge historical irony: the way the diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China and the subsequent material contributions of the US to its sweeping reforms co-produced the return of China, after two centuries of subjugation, to a position of global prominence. The consequence? Thanks to the US, technically speaking, China is no longer merely a “country” or a “big power”. It is an empire on the rise. If by empire we mean a supersized polity whose economic, governmental, diplomatic, cultural and military power spills over and spreads far beyond its borders, then the undeniable fact, as I explain at length in China’s Galaxy Empire (2024), is that China is rapidly becoming an empire with a global reach. Not only is this fledgling empire a formidable challenge to American global hegemony and a far more robust and determined rival to the American empire than was the Soviet Union. The new Chinese empire is in fact the most serious geopolitical threat the US has faced since its foundation as a republic in the late 18th century.
A new empire
The spinning shadows of Chinese windmills are everywhere on America’s walls, but you wouldn’t know it from the derogatory statements and bleak forecasts made by Maga believers. Orientalist ignorance and denial of China’s imperial ambitions are the underbelly of their belief in US superiority, so let’s consider some of the most important evidence.
Measured by total assets, the four biggest banks in the world are Chinese. China has outflanked bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to become the largest global creditor backed by its own financial services institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China is spearheading the global rebellion against a world financial system defined by the US dollar and its rentier finance capitalist economy; in mid-2023, for the first time, the renminbi topped the US dollar in China’s cross-border transactions. With a nearly US$1 trillion surplus in 2024 – the US hasn’t enjoyed a trade surplus since 1975 – China is the largest trading country and owner of half the world’s patents.
Despite US-led efforts to “decouple” from China by applying tariff penalties, boycotting its products and services, and banning the sale and import of new communications equipment from Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies, China’s economy – unlike the former Soviet Union – is an open political economy shaped by big business entangled with big government. It is a new species of state capitalism which attracts substantial upstream investment from major foreign companies such as Airbus, Samsung, Toyota, German chemicals giant BASF and Singapore’s OCBC bank and lithium-ion battery manufacturer Durapower Holdings. China, meanwhile, produces one-third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than the US, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Britain combined. China is the European Union’s and India’s main trading partners in goods. It is the principal investor and trader in the world’s most sizeable free-trade zone in Africa; and in Latin America, for the first time in two centuries of independence from the Spanish empire and de facto economic and military dependence upon the US, countries such as Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and Colombia are actively drawing closer to China.
In mid-2023, the renminbi surpassed the US dollar in China’s cross-border transactions for the first time. Photo: Getty Images
Globally significant shifts are also happening in China in matters of everyday life. After experiencing low levels of life expectancy like those in the West a century ago, life expectancy (78.6 years in 2022 compared with 51 in 1962, according to World Bank data) has surged beyond levels in the US, where healthy life expectancy at birth has been declining. Life expectancy is even higher among China’s 400-million strong middle classes, how are beneficiaries of the domestic push towards a “moderately prosperous society”. Global expansion has for them become a way of life. Loyal to the system, guided by dreams of house, car and money, frequenters of shopping malls, practised at the art of keeping their heads down – follow the party, but listen to your wife, runs a common joke – the social significance of the new middle classes has been boosted by overseas studying and by massive state investments in higher education: a nearly 10-fold increase during the past two decades. China now produces more STEM graduates than India, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada combined.
Not to be overlooked is a fact of sobering importance: the People’s Liberation Army and its strategy of militarised peace. The PLA is now the globe’s largest standing army, with 2 million troops backed by an expanding nuclear arsenal, more submarines than any other power, the world’s largest amphibious assault ship, and sophisticated military hardware. The PLA is heavily involved in United Nations peacekeeping operations. In Libya, Yemen and Sudan, the PLA has already practised the difficult military arts of evacuating its citizens from conflict zones. Its hand has been strengthened by China’s settlement of disputes with neighbouring states, including India. The PLA’s militarised peace strategy is backed by a huge military-industrial-aerospace complex featuring mega-companies sporting trade names such as China North Industries Group Corporation and the Aviation Industry Corporation of China. It is reinforced by space-power aspirations, a heavy reliance on smart diplomacy and a commitment to a new and formidable model of warfare that presupposes, runs the Chinese saying, that melons forced from the vine don’t taste sweet. Success in war, runs the PLA way of thinking, demands self-control, forbearance and the ability and willingness to wait (wuwei, or non-action). Only fools rush into war. Wars are won, or avoided, by outfoxing opponents, wearing down or frightening enemies without firing a single shot.
Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army of China, the world’s largest standing army, conduct military training in Xinjiang. Photo: AFP
Imperial resilience
The evidence of strengthening Chinese global power is unmistakably clear. So are its unusual sources of resilience.
At home, the governing system of the fledgling empire is not a crude and unstable form of “autocracy” or “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism”, as Maga enthusiasts and analysts usually claim. The Communist Party has long been nurturing clever, shock-absorbing methods of governance and what its leaders term a “democracy that works”. In the heartlands of the empire, government takes the form of a one-party “phantom democracy” with Chinese characteristics. It’s a political system of centralised control mixed with anti-corruption procedures, local popular courts, early warning detectors and governmental accountability experiments. Abroad, backed by corporate telecommunications giants such as Tencent and Huawei, the new Chinese empire has post-territorial qualities. The first global empire to be born of the age of digital networked communications, China does not succumb to the hubris and make the mistake of early modern European empires, which brazenly grabbed land and sea routes, violently herded millions of people of different languages and cultures into bounded territorial states, and functionally depended upon capital cities at home, and in their colonies. China expands differently. Its state-owned corporations and governing institutions instead prefer unbounded flows, corridor opportunities, open borders and long-distance transactions. Beyond its borders, China’s rulers foster the rapid and unrestricted movement of capital, goods, and services along with the defence of UN institutions and the building of new cross-border institutions such as Brics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
The point is this: China is neither an old-fashioned land-grabbing empire nor a land-hungry maritime empire. It’s an empire preoccupied with flows of capital, the spread of new information technologies and global markets for its competitively priced goods and services. It connects cities and hinterlands with high-speed railways, airports and shipping lanes. It is building global networks of logistics hubs designed to link airports, rail and road routes, cargo ports using information and robotics technologies to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of parcel delivery systems and boosting cold-chain capacity for delivering foods, medicines and vaccines worldwide. Buoyed by its deep dependence on webbed networks of digital communications, fluid mobility – not territorial occupation – is the currency of the new Chinese empire.
A peaking power?
Maga supporters and more than a few Western politicians, diplomats and journalists ignore these manifold sources of resilience. They instead think wishfully and scoff in clichéd generalities about the coming crackup of the new China. Trump’s supporters make especially loud noises about the “rise” and “expansion” of China and its role as an “existential threat” to the West. In the next breath, they hurl predictions of the imminent crumbling of the new Chinese empire under the combined weight of forces such as declining birth rates, rising life expectancy, real-estate sector troubles, youth unemployment, exports dependency, ecological damage and political corruption.
Some Maga enthusiasts combine the contradictory thoughts by describing China as a “peaking power”. The idea is that China is a “risen” power and that’s why it’s dangerous, both at home and abroad. Domestic repression of citizens is backed by resource grabbing, economic sanctions, military interventions and other acts of foreign aggression. The remedy? Outside powers led by the US must strengthen their military capabilities, rattle sabres, talk rough and tough and bargain hard – all the while glaring at their Chinese opponent, without blinking. As China struggles, the US, our planet’s “No 1 Force for Good”, should press hard its own advantages and resources of greatness, so the argument goes. Vainglory will prove victorious.
Post-imperial denial
It may indeed come to pass that the young and resilient Chinese empire unwittingly falls victim to surprise setbacks and unforeseen shocks. If that were to happen, its stillbirth would undoubtedly cast a curse upon the whole world, the US included. Global supply chains would snap. UN peacekeeping missions would falter; the whole UN system, to which China is now the largest funder, would grind to a halt. A catastrophic uncivil war in China’s heartlands might result. In search of safety, tens of millions of refugees would pour across its borders into neighbouring territories, with regionally destabilising effects.
Nobody can yet say whether such outcomes are likely, or what the collapse of a too-big-to-fail China would practically bring to the world. For the moment, what instead must be noted is the flipside of this scenario and the most consequential blind spot within the Maga mindset: its neurotic refusal to admit that the American empire is itself entrapped in the dynamics of long-term decline that favours an unusually resilient Chinese global empire.
What are the symptoms of protracted American decline? Most obviously, there are the economic challenges to US supremacy. China’s rising leadership in matters such as global investment and trade, manufacturing, and AI and digital technologies is undeniable. An equally formidable threat to American economic power is China’s drive to break the dollar system by globalising the renminbi through its own state-owned banks, currency swap measures, gold holdings, a new cross-border payments systems, and a state-regulated e-currency.
An employee produces semiconductor chips at a factory in China’s Shandong province. China produces one-third of the world’s manufactured goods – more than the combined total of the US, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Britain. Photo: AFP
Maga enthusiasts and American officials should be worried by these economic trends, but there are equally formidable challenges confronting the American empire. Consider the matter of legitimacy. Historians teach us that durable empires always try to camouflage their own immodesty by convincing both their heartlands and their clients and subjects abroad that their power is a force for good. Empires aim to get under the skin of the people whose lives they shape at a distance.
China’s Communist Party leaders know this. Telling the China story well is for them of exceptional strategic importance. What’s significant is the way the young Chinese empire isn’t framed by a single dominant ideology. The symbols deployed by party officials, diplomats and journalists to justify the worldly spread of Chinese power have a kaleidoscopic “yin-yang” quality. There’s plenty of pragmatic, businesslike patter about stability and development, gross domestic product, making money, growing rich and “prosperity”. But Communist Party leaders also spout articles of faith such as “harmonious society”, “Confucian principles”, “rule of law”, the “democratisation of international relations”, “ecological civilisation” and “ancient Chinese civilisation”. Other standard phrases include “territorial sovereignty” and “national dignity”. “Peace”, “anti-imperialism” and “protection from foreign enemies” are also favourite words in their semantic arsenal. And there’s abundant talk of “socialism” mixed with dollops of “Marxism”.
Whatever is thought of the consistency or veracity of this rainbow vocabulary, China’s leaders and their media publicists are acutely aware of the reputational dangers of ideological rigidity. Knowing that those who sow thorns reap wounds, they want to be seen as strong but flexible, benevolently tough servants of “the people”, strong-willed champions of planetary peace, wealth creation, good governance, and environmental resilience. The intentional ambiguity and cloudy vagueness enable China’s leaders to sail with the political winds and bamboozle their foes. In turn, their bamboozling – as the Chinese expression has it – enables them to shift a thousand pounds with four ounces. In contrast to the US, whose global legitimacy is suffering a sharp decline, reputational ambiguity grants China political flexibility and strength in more than a few global settings.
Originally Published by South China Morning Post
You can read part two here
