From the end of the Cold War until recently, the West subsisted on a diet of delusions about China. Economic liberalization, the United States told itself, would lead to political liberalization. Beijing would be content to follow in an American-led world order.
GettingChinaWrong_062122.jpgAs Aaron Friedberg chronicles in his new book, Getting China Wrong, these hopes were always naive. The Chinese Communist Party would never relinquish its grip on power. Nor would the CCP be a willing junior partner to a West that it both fears and hates.

Friedberg is a professor of international relations at Princeton and a former U.S. deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. In 2010, he authored a prescient book titled A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. At the time, many policymakers, academics, and media outlets were indulging in what the journalist James Mann has called “the China Fantasy.”