The US Is Squandering Its Hidden Advantage Over Xi Jinping
America’s soft power influence over China’s 1.4 billion people is being quickly eroded by the vitriol and suspicion seeded by Donald Trump eight years ago.
Visitors at Shanghai Disney Resort in October. Instead of viewing the US as a paragon of development, young Chinese people now see the country in a more pragmatic way, no better or worse than other options across the globe.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergIt’s Sunday night in Shanghai’s trendy historic quarter, and hundreds of Katy Perry fans are holding up cellphone torches inside a techno club, as they dance to the American pop star’s latest anthems.
President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party banned Perry from entering China in 2017 after discovering she’d signaled public support for Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as a breakaway province. Yet nobody in the club seems to care.