Occidental Fall: Assessing Chinese Views of U.S. Decline (opens in new tab)

China’s leadership, state media, and foreign policy analysts consider the U.S. a declining but dangerous power. That assessment has remained durable since Michael Swaine analyzed views in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in his 2021 essay for China Leadership Monitor, though the frequency of that assessment has fluctuated. The resilience of such views in the PRC press reflects genuine assessments of U.S. internal contradictions, the Chinese Communist Party’s Leninist predisposition to see ca