In the centuries when dynasties ruled China, kings and chieftains across Asia sent “tribute missions” to the imperial court to pay homage to the emperor in exchange for access to the empire’s riches and favors. Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing this week recalled those missions. The United States president arrived hat in hand, seeking money and promises from China’s latter-day emperor, Xi Jinping.
At their meeting in Beijing today, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin made a show of how close they’ve become. Putin and Xi, referring to each other as friends, praised the strength of their relationship as their two countries advanced an agreement to build a gas pipeline that would bind their economies even more tightly together.
The revelation that North Korean troops have been gathering in Russia, ostensibly to assist President Vladimir Putin in his brutal invasion of Ukraine, has stoked Western fears of autocratic states banding together to undermine the interests of democracies. There is an authoritarian coalition, but it’s rickety—and it depends on China’s tolerance for chaos.
As China’s leader, Xi Jinping, intensifies his campaign to reshape the U.S.-led global order, the big question hanging over international affairs is: How will he choose to do it? Xi purports to be a man of peace, offering the world fresh ideas on diplomacy and security that could resolve global conflicts.
Words matter in international diplomacy, and Donald Trump has spewed out some that are especially dangerous. He signaled that he might not defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. “Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview released on Tuesday. “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.” Trump went on to imply that protecting the island was not even possible. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he said. “It’s 68 miles away from China.
A global trade war is starting, and China is at the center of it. A reckoning for Beijing’s economic model, which is designed to promote Chinese industry at the expense of the rest of the world, has long been coming. China’s trading partners have had enough. The result will be a wave of protectionism, with potentially dire consequences for both China and the global economy.
Search on the Chinese food-delivery app Meituan for ejiao, and all sorts of goodies pop up. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor’s court, valued as a traditional remedy taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep, and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses.
By all rights, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, should be one of the world’s most respected companies. The technology start-up has created an innovative social-media platform with global appeal—an achievement that puts ByteDance in the elite ranks of Facebook and X.
There’s a single reason the company doesn’t get that respect: It’s Chinese.
In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony.
“I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.
A new pattern is emerging in Chinese foreign policy that bodes poorly for global stability: Chinese leader Xi Jinping pretends to favor peaceful resolutions to international conflicts while actually encouraging the world’s most destabilizing forces.In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents.
This weekend’s tumultuous events showed just how big a gamble the Chinese leader Xi Jinping took by partnering with Moscow.Russian President Vladimir Putin survived the rebellion that Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army unleashed on Saturday. Perhaps Putin’s hold on power was never in great peril.
Can a million people vanish from the planet without the world knowing? It seems impossible in this age of instant digital communications, ubiquitous smartphones, and global social-media platforms that anything of comparable consequence can go unnoticed and unrecorded—no matter how remote the country or how determined its rulers might be to hide the truth.Yet that’s apparently what has happened in China over the past two and a half months.
For three years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, fought a remorseless battle against COVID-19. He called it a “people’s war”—a national struggle to defeat an unseen foe and save lives. The contest locked families in their homes for weeks, strangled the economy, and closed the country to the world.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.China is signaling that its three-year battle against COVID-19 is entering a “new stage.” What that looks like will have huge political and economic consequences.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
President Joe Biden is changing Washington’s policy on Taiwan. And it’s about time.On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Biden was asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan from a Chinese military assault. He replied: “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”Making such a pledge breaks with Washington’s traditional approach to Taiwan’s security.
On April 19, 1979, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware was in Beijing, meeting with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, when he put Washington’s nascent friendship with the Communists to the test.That Biden was sitting there at all was remarkable. The United States and China had been implacable foes for decades.
As Joe Biden confronts Vladimir Putin about Russia’s military buildup along its border with Ukraine, another world leader is probably watching with keen interest. China’s Xi Jinping, too, has a geopolitical grievance in his neighborhood—in his case over Taiwan, the microchip-rich island that Beijing insists is and always should be part of China.
Every now and then, China’s Communist insiders, in their frantic attempts to shield themselves against international criticism, inadvertently let slip what truly scares them. So it was recently in the tragic case of Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis star who disappeared after accusing one of China’s most senior leaders of sexual assault. The scandal has embarrassed the Communist Party and posed a new threat to Beijing’s already beleaguered Olympic Winter Games.
Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, is tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Its founder, Hui Ka Yan, is scrounging to find the cash to meet payments on the $300 billion his company owes. Beijing has warned local officials to prepare for possible fallout if the gargantuan firm collapses.
Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, is tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Its founder, Hui Ka Yan, is scrounging to find the cash to meet payments on the $300 billion his company owes. Beijing has warned local officials to prepare for possible fallout if the gargantuan firm collapses.
China’s economic “miracle” wasn’t that miraculous. The country’s high-octane ascent over the past 40 years is, in reality, a triumph of basic economic principles: As the state gave way to the market, private enterprise and trade flourished, growth quickened, and incomes soared.This simple lesson appears, however, to be lost on Xi Jinping.
As China comes into greater conflict with the West, and the United States in particular, now is a good time to consider the long arc of this relationship. In the West, Chinese history is commonly framed as having begun with the first Opium War, giving the impression that European powers always had the upper hand. But from the first direct contact between East and West—the arrival of the Portuguese in south China in the early 16th century—the Chinese were dominant.