China Is Slamming Shut Its Window of Opportunity
Leaders in Beijing have lost the tactical flexibility and risk controls that helped them nurture the country’s rise, and it’s not clear they are capable of changing course.
China’s aggressive actions have rallied opposition around the world.
Photographer: Guang Niu/Getty Images
Chinese leaders like to intone that “great changes unseen in a century” are sweeping the world today. What they really mean is that, after long years of humiliation and decline, China is seeing the global balance of power tilt in its favor. In trying to seize this supposed window of opportunity, however, the Chinese regime is in danger of slamming it shut.
For four decades after the death of Mao Zedong, a benign external environment helped China vault from an impoverished and isolated backwater to an economic superpower. Now China’s hard-won ties with the developed economies in the West are fraying, jeopardizing the country’s economic growth and access to investment and critical technology.