China senses an opportunity in Trump’s cultural revolution

IN THE last two weeks, I have visited Beijing and Hong Kong. This visit made clear that in today’s world, the US is a revolutionary – more precisely, a reactionary – power, while supposedly communist China is a status quo power.

In this respect, the European Union has much in common with China. China’s rulers like the way the world and China itself are going. The EU is not quite that complacent. Aware of its economic and security challenges, its elites know that it has to change a great deal. But they, too, vastly prefer the world that US President Donald Trump is trying to destroy to the chaotic one he is trying to create.

For an outsider to draw any clear conclusions from a brief visit to this vast country is heroic, if not idiotic. Nevertheless, I have visited the country at least once a year since 1993, apart from during the pandemic, followed the evolution of the country’s economy closely and made a number of friends among its Western-educated policy elite. The rise of China has been far and away the biggest economic and political story of my lifetime. Heroic or not, one must try to make sense of what Trump means for China, and China means for the world.