Editor’s Note for Tuesday, August 9, 2022

My thoughts today:

A former chief opinion editor of the Global Times and current head of the pro-government think tank Chongyang Institute, Wáng Wén 王文, has published an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “​​Why China’s people no longer look up to America.”

Elsewhere in the New York Times, Li Yuan writes of the “strident rhetoric” from nationalists — emboldened under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and some of which is produced by the Chongyang Institute — which “shows how little they think of American power and how easily they think China would win a great-power competition with the United States.” Yuan goes on to suggest that such “posturing and nationalistic sentiment heighten the risk of war, especially as China establishes a new status quo with Taiwan.”

Writing in the Financial Times earlier this week, Stephen Roach, author of the upcoming Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives, describes “an ominous escalation of conflict between the U.S. and China since 2017” as the two “vulnerable nations…blam[e] the other for their own shortcomings.”

I interviewed Roach for my Invited to Tea series earlier this year, and he will give the keynote address at our NEXTChina 2022 conference on November 9. You can register to attend here.

Our word of the day is Bangladesh (孟加拉國 mèngjiālā guó).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief