Photo by Ken Ishii-Pool/Getty Images
Xi Jinping is fond of saying that the world is undergoing changes unseen in a century, and on that one, he’s not wrong. Alliances are shifting, cold war thinking informs superpower activity on every continent (including Antarctica), and trade barriers once thought regressive and self-destructive are now treated as essential (albeit unfortunate) planks of any coherent security platform. And in the middle of that environment, I have a simple request for Western media institutions and public intellectuals all over the world: please, stop telling me that Chinese leaders are playing the long game.
They’re not.
They won’t.
In fact, they can’t!
