Is China now the leader of the free world?

How things change, says Isabel Hilton. Two years ago, foreign
policy experts feared that China’s then-new president, Xi Jinping,
was abandoning Beijing’s liberalising agenda for a more repressive,
“hard-edged nationalism”; the talk was all about how the US
could uphold pluralist, democratic values in the face of a newly
aggressive China. Who could possibly have guessed that soon the
two countries would swap places, with the US tearing up the old
international arrangements, and China playing the enlightened,
internationalist role – as Xi so resoundingly showed in his speech
to the UN last month. China, he said, wants to “build a
community of shared future for mankind and achieve shared and
win-win development”. It will also be a force for global stability:
within five years, Xi predicted, China will “import $8trn of
goods, attract $600bn of foreign investment, make $750bn of
outbound investment, and Chinese tourists will make 700 million
outbound visits”. And, he added, China had “worked hard to
advance and uphold human rights”. You may feel sceptical about
that one, yet the amazing thing is it’s still more believable than the
stuff spouted today by the so-called leader of the free world.