Has China Won (Again)? Kishore Mahbubani on Washington’s Four-Thousand-Year-Old Problem

China, China. Yesterday we had the prize-winning Princeton historian Beth Lew-Williams on how nineteenth-century America turned immigrants from China into John Doe Chinamen. No name, no vote, no route to citizenship. A century of humiliation. A hundred and fifty years later, the Chinese aren’t asking anyone’s permission for anything.

Which brings me to an old friend of this show, Kishore Mahbubani. He’s a Singaporean diplomat and one of the world’s most bullish thinkers on the rise of China as a twenty-first-century superpower. His Has China Won? came out in January 2020 and has just been reissued with a new foreword.

So, six years later, has China won (again)? Kishore is far too smart to fall into such a binary trap. But he does say that nothing he wrote in 2020 needs retracting. His message then and now to Washington is that America has misidentified its opponent.

“The biggest mistake Americans make is to think they are competing against the Chinese Communist Party,” Mahbubani says. “The United States is not competing against a hundred-year-old party. It is competing against a four-thousand-year-old civilization — the world’s oldest continuous civilization.”

At the same time, Mahbubani insists, he’s not predicting the fall of America. The wily Singaporean diplomat, in fact, reminds Chinese audiences never to underestimate the Yanks. So there’ll be no winners (or losers) in the great China vs America twenty-first-century game. Like at American kids’ soccer games, everybody gets a medal.

I pushed him on what many China watchers in the West, like Orville Schell and the former Australian PM Kevin Rudd, see as Xi’s descent into totalitarianism. They are all trapped in a Western bubble, Mahbubani shot back. A hundred million Chinese leave the country as tourists every year and then freely come home again. John Doe Chinaman has, apparently, been retired (again).

FURTHER READING

•   Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (PublicAffairs), by Kishore Mahbubani. New edition, with a foreword by the author.

•   Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W. W. Norton), by Dan Wang.

•   Kishore Mahbubani, author website.

•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Beth Lew-Williams on Chinese life under American racial law, and Kishore Mahbubani on the Asian century.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Kishore Mahbubani spent thirty-three years in the Singaporean foreign service, serving twice as Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations and as president of the UN Security Council in 2001 and 2002. He was the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, where he is now a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute. His books include Can Asians Think?, The Asian 21st Century, Living the Asian Century and Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, reissued this year with a new foreword.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes ever