But this is to get ahead of ourselves. We are nowhere near this. We cannot even touch it. We can barely imagine it. So let us return to the here and now. The West may be in decline. But it is far from dead and buried. Indeed, as I've already alluded to, the West has gained a certain new lease of life since trump's assault on china from 2017 onwards. Indeed, I have been struck by the ability of what started off as an American crusade against china to mobilize wider generalized support in the West and well beyond - India is a case in point. The perception of China in my own country, the UK, has changed fundamentally. The period between 2000 and 2016, roughly speaking, saw a new and widespread curiosity about China, based on the latter’s extraordinary growth and poverty reduction, together with the belief that china could offer new opportunities for western countries. That mood has given way to dominant negativity towards china.
China is now seen as a threat to the West and its way of life as autocratic, undemocratic, untrustworthy, expansionist, secretive, closed. This negativity is not nearly as strong in Europe as it is in the united states, but nor should it be underestimated. Let me give you one example of this shift in attitudes. Between 2000 and 2016, perhaps longer than that, there was a growing interest in Chinese history and Chinese civilization in trying to understand China. Now China is seen almost solely in terms of its history since 1949. Two thousand years of Chinese history have disappeared. China is reduced to the Chinese communist party, which is seen, in turn, as synonymous with the soviet communist party. Many of the gains since 2000 have been lost. Worse, we have even gone backwards. It feels at times a bit like the cold war.
So why the shift? The shift in America was inevitable. Once The US came to realize that its hopes of china becoming like the West were an illusion, then as China continued to rise and spread its wings, the US came to see China as a deadly threat to its global hegemony. We should not underplay what this means in America. Being number one is part of its DNA; that is why the new anti-china crusade is bipartisan and consensual. China is now considered a mortal threat to America's very being. Europe is different. It does not see China as a threat to its hegemony, because it abandoned its hegemonic aspirations after 1945.
Nevertheless, Europe remains heavily influenced by America. They fought the cold war together. They share in very degrees bit, most of all much history and culture. Europeans colonized America, and their ancestors created the united states. So despite the growing distance between Europe and us since the cold war, they still have much in common, certainly compared with china, which, as we know, has a profoundly different culture and history.
