According to U.S. President Donald Trump, his recent meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping — the first of his second term — was “amazing.”
Trump may have campaigned on the promise of squeezing America’s biggest geopolitical competitor, but that is not what has happened. Instead, top Chinese academics and retired military leaders whom I spoke to in Beijing this week all agree that Xi’s international strategy has been vindicated and that an increasingly fractured multipolar world is working very much to China’s advantage.
The Chinese view is that we are entering a prolonged phase of counter-globalization. For a country that has relied on export-led growth to lift itself out of poverty, this prospect might seem like a problem. But Chinese leaders are not losing any sleep over it. As they see it, the post-Cold War order sought to create a single global market and promote democracy and human rights through common rules and institutions.
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