As the U.S. retreats, Beijing is talking more boldly about how it wants to change the global order and assert its own values and interests.
As a regular visitor to China, I was surprised earlier this year when I heard for the first time a Chinese official refer to his country as a superpower (chaoji daguo). But China’s view of its place in the international order is changing quickly. In a little-noticed speech last month, before a packed house of China’s senior foreign policy officials and scholars, President Xi Jinping put the world on notice: China has its own ideas about how the world should be run and is prepared, as he put it, to “lead in the reform of global governance.”
