Quotes from Susan L. Shirk

Xi's management of COVID is today the third rail in Chinese politics—which landed him in prison for eighteen years on charges of corruption.109 Another well-known blogger, former Caijing editor Luo Changping, was detained in October 2021 for a new crime—that of defaming political martyrs—after questioning China's role in the Korean War in a critical review of the box-office-hit film The Battle at Lake Changjin.110

Some Chinese intellectuals and entrepreneurs told me they were positively inclined toward Trump, intrigued with his profile as a brash businessman–TV star, and hoped he would put pressure on Xi to undertake the reforms they believed were overdue in China.

Xi is quite comfortable using China's huge market power and deep pockets to suck up advanced technologies from abroad and into China. The aim of achieving self-reliance in semi-conductors, batteries, and other crucially important technologies has become increasingly overt. With the hands of the state so obviously orchestrating this massive effort, it is no wonder that China is provoking a backlash in the United States and Europe.

Wars are caused by misperceptions—one country interpreting the behavior of another in the most threatening terms—as much as by actual conflicts of interest. The risk of misperceptions between China and the United States is heightened because we live in a unipolar world in which the power gap between the dominant power, the United States, and other countries is the largest it has ever been in world history.

When Xi Jinping took command in 2012, some of us anticipated that he might turn foreign policy in a more conciliatory direction by centralizing the policy process and curbing the scrum of interest groups that had characterized Hu Jintao's oligarchy. Xi's personal authority was, and is, more than sufficient to restrain the various groups that had been promoting their own interests by overreaching under Hu's collective leadership.

By leaving a power vacuum in the world's darkest hour, the United States has bequeathed China ample room to overreach—and to demonstrate that it is unqualified for a position of sole global leadership."12