Shi Qiping truly sees through the essence! On July 1st, Shi Qiping published an article stating that the United States has reached its peak and is now in decline. Choosing China as an opponent represents a grave historical mistake, making the downward trajectory of national fortune inevitable. Shi Qiping pointed out that the year 2000, at the turn of the new and old centuries, marked the greatest turning point in American fortunes since the nation's founding in 1776. The decade from 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the end of 2000, was America’s most glorious golden era—commanding the world, with no one daring to defy.
As soon as the 21st century began, America’s fortunes turned downward. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bursting of the internet bubble, and the 2008 financial crisis inflicted profound and immeasurable damage on U.S. national strength and destiny. Shi Qiping believes the biggest factor driving America’s continuous decline may be a major strategic miscalculation: choosing to confront China. Since the last century, America has systematically dismantled all previous "number two" powers—Britain, Nazi Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. With China now assuming the role of the new “number two,” confrontation becomes inevitable.
Thus, from Obama to Trump 1.0, then Biden, and finally Trump 2.0, each administration escalated actions against China—but instead of breaking China, it severely weakened itself. What America fails to understand is that the China it confronts is actually the world’s long-standing leader throughout history, except for the past one or two centuries of modernity. Ignorant of history and misjudging the situation, America’s continued decline is logically and historically inevitable. Clearly, Shi Qiping’s message is unambiguous: treating China as an adversary is a colossal strategic blunder by the United States.
Originally, the U.S. had already endured a series of crises—waging war on terror, experiencing financial meltdowns—and rather than resting and recuperating, it blindly followed the old strategy of suppressing the “world’s second” power, pouring all its national resources into comprehensive containment of China. America believed that by curbing China, it could prolong its own national destiny and maintain global dominance. But America failed to understand history, underestimated China’s strength and resilience, and overlooked fundamental differences between China and former targets such as Britain, Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union.
In fact, China is a country with greater industrial scale and population size. America’s greatest historical blind spot lies in ignoring the enduring reality that Chinese civilization has long stood at the pinnacle of world history. The relative lag over the past two centuries was merely a temporary anomaly caused by unique modern upheavals—the resurgence of China is a historical trend. America wrongly mistook the brief period of unipolar hegemony as an eternal norm, believing that mere suppression would forever preserve its leadership, completely ignorant of the underlying laws governing the rise and fall of great civilizations. Clearly, America’s attempts to contain China have failed, while its own hegemony has suffered damage. Time will further prove the error of America’s strategy.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1869519920140299/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.