Did China Outwit, Outplay & Outlast the West?
Join Live Call Today to Review China World History Tour
Western discussion of China is often framed as a hostile strategic game. The Rise of China. The Thucydides Trap. The USA’s ‘Pacing Challenge’. The most popular strategic game in American global culture is Survivor.
In 2025 has China won the geopolitical game of Survivor?
China History Workshop
My live call/workshop for paid subscribers to review the China World History Tour is being held at noon today 21 June (Eastern Australia time).
Upgrade now to join me at noon or to catch the replay at a time that suits you.
The Zoom registration link is below the paywall at the bottom of this email.
Review of the China World History Tour
While reading and writing my weekly posts, I have come to a deeper appreciation of the social, cultural, and political history of China. I said at the outset of the tour that I was no expert in Chinese history. I have learned much over the last two months.
All the China World Tour Posts
The tour’s aim is to reconsider the roles of five great civilization states or great powers - USA, China, India, Europe and Russia.
Making sense of the rise of China is central to living in tune with the mode of a changing world. Making room for modern China is fundamental to achieving peace, prosperity and harmony in that changing world. But making sense of China is made difficult by too many stories of China - in the news media, in politics, in culture and in history - that close off China from the story of the modern, global world.
I set out my approach to the China leg of the tour in this post, China World History Tour Preview.
Weekly Book Recommendations
Each Saturday, I have provided reading or viewing recommendations with a focus on current and accessible histories of China.
Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age
Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945 (Rana Mitter)
I have of course only scratched the surface of Chinese history. Readers have pointed out to me other interpretations and schools of thought, especially on controversial topics such as the Cultural Revolution. I hope this tour has given you a springboard to make up your own mind on those debates.
Deep Dives
The deep dive series guided you through one leading scholarly history, Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping.
I found Mühlhahn’s history a refreshing guide that sought to explain China on its own terms. Of course it has its biases, but I found it in a different league to most of the geopolitical historical analysis in mainstream and alternative media.
Western, especially American, discussion of China is often framed as a hostile dyadic strategic game. It is often framed as the great threat to Western power. The Rise of China. The Challenge to ‘American Primacy in Asia’. The Thucydides Trap. The USA’s ‘Pacing Challenge’. Trump’s Trade War. The archetypal strategic game in popular Western culture is Survivor.
In 2025 we might ask has China won the geopolitical game of Survivor?
Did China Outwit, Outplay & Outlast the West?
The rise of China in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is undoubtedly one of the greatest developments remaking the world we live in.
Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping
China has risen. There is no doubt about that. It has outperformed the West economically, while also enriching the West. The tidal wave of China’s economic growth has lifted Western boats. China has become the principal workshop of the world, the main trading partner of the world, and the largest real economy (GDP PPP measure).
China has outwitted the West (USA and Europe) in science, technology, educational achievements, and its unique path of social and economic development. Its advantages have shone in league tables of universities, education systems and scientific publications for years. This year Deepseek AI and Zhe Na 2 crowned those achievements.
China has outplayed the West in foreign policy and trade relations. Xi Jinping has played the wise man above the fray in his conversations with Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It has built multilateral institutions (BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Belt and Road) and deep partnerships with Russia, ASEAN, Central Asia and Africa. When Donald Trump attempted a dramatic blindside flip with his 2025 tariff war, the world chose China and the USA made itself a poorer fool.
China has outlasted the West. For eighty years, the USA has stationed troops in Eastern Eurasia and the West Pacific to encircle China in the hope that they can reverse the outcome of the first proxy war of the post 1945 world, when America “lost China.” American troops and crusaders have bunkered down in Taiwan, and prepared war plans to reclaim China as a Western colony. The USA Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, the Drunken Crusader, ranted that he would push the Big Red Button if his President ordered him to do so. The USA has even threatened to use nuclear weapons multiple times, even after the horrors it inflicted at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and many test sites in the Indo-Pacific. But One China still stands. The “arsenal of democracy” admits its ammo for a war with China would not last a month.
But the game of world history or geopolitics is not a game of Survivor. China did outwit, outplay & outlast the West. But the West is still there, with Europe and the USA still bickering about who is the epitome of Western civilization. Russia is there, as it has been for millennia, a neighbour of China straddling the Eurasian steppe. India is still there, and as Dr S Jaishankar says, the fate of the world hangs on the many threads of the India-China relationship that stretch back thousands of years. The United Nations survives despite all the USA dummy spits. The middle powers of the world are realising that they have a part in this game too; that, despite the myths of American geopolitical realism, the states that are not hegemons or challengers or ‘great powers’, those powerless states have power too.
The world does not play by the rules of Survivor. You cannot vote your rivals out of the world island. You cannot exclude a great power from the one sphere of influence we all dwell in on this planet. You cannot prevent China being the “primary” power in East Asia by claiming one country from the Americas, across the North Pacific, was gifted by God with the supreme impunity idol of global hegemony.
Yet since 1991, or 1945, Western elites have believed they can. They have imposed a new form of networked empire on the world and schemed to vote dissenting players out of the world community. It is a tragic and poisonous belief. I believe, in a decade or two, most of the world, even in the West, will come to see this belief as like the colonial imperialism of the nineteenth century, the scientific racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the multiple variants of fascism across the world in the twentieth century.
The great lesson from this world tour is that the many cultures and powers of the world will endure despite the vainglorious ambitions of the West. We need to learn to live with a plural multi-civilizational world, even within the borders of our own states.
I hope my writing and talks help us do that together.
Below the paywall are the live call details for the workshop.
Thanks
🙏❤️🌏
Jeff