"Even China Isn’t Convinced It Can Replace The U.S." - By CWP Alum Jessica Chen Weiss

There’s a hardening view in Washington that China seeks to supplant the United States as the leading world power and remake the international system in its illiberal image.

China has of course fed these fears by building up its military, pressing disputed territorial claims, partnering with a revanchist Russia and with its own rhetoric. President Xi Jinping of China has vowed to thwart what he views as U.S.-led efforts to “contain, encircle and suppress” China, and has said “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph.”

But such ideological proclamations are in part motivated by insecurity — most Communist states have collapsed, and the Chinese leadership fears being next — and are meant more to instill domestic confidence and loyalty to the party than to reflect actual policy or fixed beliefs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/opinion/china-us-world-order.html

Jessica Chen Weiss is the Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies in the Department of Government at Cornell University. From August 2021 to July 2022, she served as senior advisor to the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department on a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars (IAF-TIRS). Weiss is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her research appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy, as well as in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Quarterly. Weiss was previously an assistant professor at Yale University and founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford University. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2008, where her dissertation won the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for best dissertation in international relations, law and politics. 

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