Abstract
China’s return to hard-power strategies in Asia represents more than a geopolitical sea change. It is not just Xi Jinping rejecting Deng Xiaoping’s soft-power foreign policy, but the whole ethos of Dengism as the West has sorely misunderstood it. A generation of Western observers has taken this putative Dengism as the abiding essence of the China model. Its ‘win/win’ blueprint for China’s rise became a central pillar of ‘Washington Consensus’ globalism, which is now giving way to the Sino-globalism of Xi’s ‘China Dream’. There is still talk of the ‘peaceful rise’, but Xi conditions his vision of Asian ‘harmony’ on the acceptance of China’s regional supremacy. To comprehend the full implications of this hard-power shift is to recognise that the era of irenic globalism has ended and a new age of power politics has dawned.
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