Xi Jinping is Right About the U.S. Empire

On the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s current visit to the United States, the New York Times published an article detailing some of Xi’s thoughts about the United States.

The article states: 

In Mr. Xi’s telling, China sought to rise peacefully, but Western powers would not accept the idea that a Communist-led China was catching up and could someday overtake them in global primacy. The West would never stop trying to derail China’s ascent and topple its Communist Party, he said in speeches to the military that are largely unreported by the media.

In 2015, Xi told military commanders: “Some Western countries absolutely never want to see a socialist China grow strong under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The Times writes that Xi’s speeches “voiced an almost fatalistic conviction … that China’s rise would prompt a backlash from Western rivals seeking to maintain their dominance.” Xi told Chinese Air Force officers in 2014, “The faster we develop, the bigger the external shock will be, and the greater the strategic blowback.” According to the Times, “In Mr. Xi’s worldview, the West has sought to subvert the Chinese Communist Party’s power at home and contain the country’s influence abroad.”

The problem, one that all too many Americans are loathe to confront, is that Xi Jinping is right about the U.S. Empire. 

Throughout history, empires have loathed rivals, opponents, adversaries, and competitors. They do everything they can to prevent them from rising, including the imposition of harmful economic measures but even going so far as to initiate wars against them, all with the aim of weakening what they perceive as a rising rival to their empire.

Of course, such measures inevitably also damage the peo