China says ‘East is rising and West declining’, but has it been misunderstood?

But according to Yuan Peng, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government-linked think tank in Beijing, the narrative is not aimed at Washington and should not be mistaken as China’s official view of the US.

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Nato says China presents ‘systemic challenges’

Nato says China presents ‘systemic challenges’

“‘The rise of the East and the decline of the West’ is not about strength comparison, much less about China’s rise and America’s decline,” he said in an interview with the official China News Service published on Thursday. “It is about a kind of momentum and a historical trend.”

He said the narrative had grown popular when the international order was changing rapidly, featuring the rise of “the non-Western world” led by China and US-led Western countries running into “internal and external problems, even a very serious institutional crisis”.

In a report at the end of last year, Yuan’s think tank said Covid-19 had accelerated a shift in the international order, stating “China advances, the United States retreats”.

But Yuan denied in the interview that China was gloating or forecasting Washington’s terminal decline, and insisted that “China is looking at a general trend of a hundred years or even hundreds of years, not sticking to a specific thing”.

Americans have been debating whether the administration of President Joe Biden is tough enough on China, with the deeply fraught US-China relations showing signs of a slight thaw.

Washington officials and academics have consistently rejected Beijing’s assertions about a decline of the US. Nicholas Burns, Biden’s nominee for American ambassador to China, said on Wednesday that the US should not overestimate China’s power and he was “confident in our own country”.

Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong also warned against Chinese overconfidence in August, calling the idea of American decline “a possible misunderstanding”.

Despite tensions over Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea, top Chinese and American diplomats held a rare meeting two weeks ago, paving the way for the first virtual summit between Xi and Biden later this year.

But Yuan cautioned against rosy expectations of breakthroughs. He described the recent improvements in relations as “only intermittent and partial”, warning that temporary detente and tensions would become “the new norm” in ties that looked set to be “a protracted battle or a strategic stalemate”.

From Beijing’s perspective, according to Yuan, the US-China feud has been seen in the context of Beijing’s efforts to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. China could continue to enjoy “a period of strategic opportunities” despite its rivalry with the US, but had entered a stage with the “highest risks” both at home and abroad, he said.

Yuan was particularly critical of what he saw as the Biden administration’s approach of competing with China from “a position of strength”, claiming it was derived from misinterpreting the Chinese narrative and was based on a hegemonic concept of “might is truth”.

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“But that does not mean that China intends to challenge or even displace the US [in the region],” he said.

He lashed out at Biden’s policy of seeking to compete with and confront China while asking for cooperation at the same time on specific issues such as climate change and non-proliferation.

“This is the wrong strategy adopted under the wrong positioning,” Yuan said. “[The Biden administration] has not only failed to correct [former president Donald] Trump’s wrong China policy, but it has doubled down on it.”

The idea of an American decline has become a popular topic in China’s state media, especially after the US experienced its worst economic and political crisis in decades in the form of the pandemic and election chaos under Trump.

In a speech to China’s provincial leaders in January, Xi declared that with the rise of the East and the decline of the West, the unprecedented changes the world had seen would be conducive to China’s development, according to state media.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Washington ‘reading too much into’ catchphrase on US decline, China rise