Decline and fall? The US puzzle facing Beijing

China had been in awe of the United States for over a century and a half, and during the period of reform and opening up introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1980, it was the model of development for the country. Even after the crackdown on the Tiananmen movement in 1989, the United States had shown its might.

It had defeated the Soviet Empire and stretched the border of NATO to the former Eastern Europe. In 1991, the Americans oversaw the actual demise of the USSR and its partition into several countries, and at the same time redrew the political map of the Middle East by mustering an all-encompassing alliance against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

During that war, it inaugurated a military revolution with high-tech precise missile launches. After that, the US stopped Serbia in its tracks in Yugoslavia and showed the force of its economy when all Asian economies toppled during the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 while Wall Street kept afloat.

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