Is This China’s Century or the US’s? Maybe It’s Both

This Long Reads Sunday is a reading of Adam Tooze’s recent review of four books on the growing conflict between the U.S. and China.

This week on Long Reads Sunday, our selection is “Whose Century?” by Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books. 

Nominally a review of four recent scholarly works on the conflict between the U.S. and China, Tooze main argument is that the central problem with viewing this as a new Cold War is the idea that it is new. 

Instead, we need to understand that, contra Fukuyama’s famous essay, history didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall – at least not for the Chinese. What’s more, the narrative of having “won” the Cold War fails to take into account the West’s spectacular failures in Asia. 

Only by reframing our understanding can we make sense of the most important geopolitical conflict of the coming century.