(I never expected the relationship to last, which was why I and my co-author Moritz Schularick came up with the word: Chimerica was a pun on “chimera.”) At some point after that, as I have argued in Bloomberg Opinion previously, Cold War II began. Unlike with a “hot” war, it is hard to say exactly when a cold war breaks out. But I think Cold War II was already underway - at least as far as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping was concerned - even before former President Donald Trump started imposing tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018. and China were butting heads over so many issues that cold war began to look like a relatively good outcome, if the most likely alternative was hot war. Ideological division? Check, as Xi Jinping explicitly prohibited Western ideas in Chinese education and reasserted the relevance of Marxism-Leninism. Economic competition? Check, as China’s high growth rate continued to narrow the gap between Chinese and U.S. in strategic areas such as artificial intelligence.Ī technological race? Check, as China systematically purloined intellectual property to challenge the U.S. Geopolitical rivalry? Check, as China brazenly built airbases and other military infrastructure in the South China Sea. Rewriting history? Check, as the new Chinese Academy of History ensures that the party’s official narrative appears everywhere from textbooks to museums to social media. Arms race? Check.Ī classic expression of the cold war atmosphere was provided on July 1 by Xi’s speech to mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party: The Chinese people “will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or enslave us,” he told a large crowd in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. “Anyone who tries to do so shall be battered and bloodied from colliding with a great wall of steel forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese people using flesh and blood.” This is language the like of which we haven’t heard from a Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. Most Americans could see this - public sentiment turned sharply negative, with three quarters of people expressing an unfavorable view of China in recent surveys.
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