The Chinese Century Has Begun

The rise of China has much to do with the descent of America

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Taiwan’s main opposition leader, Cheng Li-wun, in Beijing on Friday. (Xie Huanchi / AP)

I got a text from my friend Robert Arnold this weekend. My phone had been blowing up with all of the political news - from Eric Swalwell to Melania Trump, and from JD Vance in Iran to Viktor Orban’s electoral defeat in Hungary.

This text was different.

It was a link to an NBC news article titled “China's Xi talks peace with Taiwan's opposition leader even as Beijing raises military pressure”. And with all the the crazy enveloping the world at the moment - it was this one that made me stop cooking the chicken I was working on and pause.

It occurred to me then, the world - most notably China - did not wait for America to finish the argument we are having with ourselves.

That is the thing about imperial decline. It does not announce itself with a press release. It arrives in the accumulation of moments that, taken individually, seem manageable. But when taken together, they tell a different story.

This week gave us three such moments. And together, they mark something that can no longer be dismissed as a trend line or a theoretical construct. China is ascending. America is receding. And the gap between the two is closing faster than anyone in Washington has the courage to say out loud. Yes, we all knew it was coming but most projections suggested it would happen some time after the turn of the half way mark this century. And it wasn’t that China was moving on a faster timeline by itself - Trump has so accelerated the decline of the United States that our giant step down has already created a massive vacuum in world leadership that is now being filled daily by our rival.

Start with Iran.

U.S. intelligence now indicates that China is preparing to deliver new air defense systems to Iran within the next few weeks even as Beijing publicly positioned itself as a broker of the fragile ceasefire that paused the American war with Tehran. The weapon systems in question are MANPADs — shoulder-fired anti-air missiles — that posed an asymmetric threat to low-flying U.S. military aircraft throughout the course of the conflict. These were some of the tools that brought down one of our much vaunted F-35 airplanes in Iran and touted by Lockheed Martin as the most lethal fighting machine ever constructed. And according to intelligence assessments, Beijing is working to route the shipments through third countries to mask their true origin.

Read that again slowly.

China helped broker a ceasefire with one hand. With the other, it is arming the country we just bombed. China is mediating the ceasefire publicly while rebuilding Iran’s military capacity privately. That is not a contradiction. That is leverage.

This is not the behavior of a nation intimidated by American power. This is the behavior of a nation that has correctly assessed the limits of that power and is operating just beyond its reach.

This is the action of a nation stepping into the breach knowing there’s nothing we can do about it.

The Iran debacle has exposed something painful. The United States prosecuted a war, leveled a nation’s air defenses, killed its supreme leader, and ended up in Islamabad begging for a deal, while China positioned itself as the indispensable mediator. Iranian advisors are already claiming the support positioned Beijing as a “winner” in a shifting global order. They are not wrong.

Then came Taiwan.

On April 10th, Taiwan’s main opposition leader and Nationalist Party Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun met with Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing — the highest-ranking Taiwanese leader to meet Xi since President Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore in 2015. The symbolism was as important as the substance. Xi declared that the two sides share 5,000 years of history as part of one Chinese nation, and that closer ties are inevitable.

The timing was not accidental. Many had assumed Cheng’s trip would come only after Trump’s visit to China. Instead, after Trump’s trip was postponed, Beijing moved the visit forward. A move that on the surface separates the two events and reinforces Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is a purely domestic matter.

Xi used the meeting to do what great powers do in their ascendant phase: set the terms. He framed peace and stability as contingent on accepting Beijing’s framework. He invited Taiwan’s opposition into a process that Taiwan’s elected government rejected. And he did it all with the serenity of a man who believes time is on his side.

Because it is.

Beijing is clearly hoping to use Cheng’s trip to influence, and perhaps alter, some of Trump’s assumptions about Taiwan. With Trump headed to Beijing next month, Xi has already moved pieces on the board that Washington appears to not even know were in play.

Henry Kissinger spent the better part of his intellectual life trying to make Americans understand China on its own terms. In one of my favorite books written by Kissinger On China, he argued that Chinese strategic culture operates on a fundamentally different temporal axis than Western powers. It is patient and looking at the long-horizon, comfortable with ambiguity, contemptuous of the decisive showdown that American strategists always seek. Where the United States wants a resolution, China wants position. Where America reaches for the hammer, China adjusts the architecture.

We are watching that architecture get adjusted in real time.

Robert Arnold, writing yesterday in his Substack newsletter So, Here We Are, captured the moment with his characteristic clarity: “We are living in the slow, uneasy collapse of the post-Cold War illusion — the belief that power was settled, that the rules were written in permanent ink, that one nation could define the boundaries of action and expectation without serious challenge.” Read the entire essay HERE.

He is right. And what makes this moment different from the years of hand-wringing analysis about China’s rise is that the abstraction is now concrete. We are no longer talking about trajectories and projections. We are talking about this week.

Arnold identifies the core of China’s method: trade routes that bind before they conquer, diplomacy that soothes while pressure quietly builds, the language of peace spoken fluently even as the conditions for leverage are carefully constructed underneath it. That is exactly what we watched unfold across three continents in the span of 72 hours.

Here is what the foreign policy establishment under Trump still refuses to say plainly.

America is not losing to China because China is so strong. America is losing because America is choosing to be weak. The Iran war produced no strategic gain, cost enormous credibility, and handed Beijing a starring role in the peace process. The Taiwan meeting happened because Washington was distracted, because Trump’s visit got postponed, because the American relationship with Taipei is hostage to the mercurial temperament of a president who has already suggested Taiwan should pay for its own defense.

The United States is beginning to show the symptoms of a power that believes its past performance guarantees its future relevance and spending global power credibility like it is in infinite supply, assuming alliances will absorb shock without asking how much strain they can actually bear.

That is not a critique from the left or from the right. It is a cold sober diagnosis.

Empires do not fall in a day. They fall in the accumulation of days when the choices made no longer match the responsibilities assumed. When the gap between posture and performance becomes wide enough for other actors to walk through.

China is walking through.

Xi Jinping is not a villain in a screenplay. He is a strategic actor executing a generational vision with discipline and patience that American politics structurally cannot match. He brokered a ceasefire in a war he had nothing to do with starting. He sat across from Taiwan’s opposition leader and spoke of reunification as though it were no different than following the laws of gravity: inevitable, calm, requiring only time. And while Trump threatens “big problems” on social media and makes the world and his fellow countrymen consider his sanity in the wake of threatening thermonuclear war - China routes weapons through third countries and prepares for a summit in Beijing where it will set the agenda.

That is what a rising power looks like. Not triumphant. Not loud. Just steadily, methodically, filling the space that a retreating power leaves behind.

America is retreating.

China will rise. The question is whether anyone in Washington has the courage to look at this week — really look at it — and reckon with what just happened.