How China can turn the trade war into a ‘strategic opportunity’ to ascend to global leadership

If you think 86-year-old Zheng Bijian’s best years are behind him, think again. The strategist and former executive vice-president of the Central Party School is best known for his coinage “peaceful rise”, which has been the defining notion of China’s foreign policy for well over a decade.

For almost as long, however, Zheng has been besieged by criticism, first from the likes of University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer, a realist who contends that China’s rise will inevitably lead to acts of aggression and put it on a collision course with established powers, and most recently from Harvard scholar Graham T. Allison, who warns darkly of a “Thucydides trap” that threatens to drag China and the United States into a devastating war for dominance.

In the light of recent events, Zheng’s critics appear to be winning, but the old Communist theorist refuses to throw in the towel just yet.

The Trump administration has not only imposed new tariffs on US$200 billion in Chinese imports but also threatened to tax all US$500 billion of Chinese goods, deeply vexing many Chinese. The country’s raucous netizens are discussing the potential blow to the economy. Articles have revisited how Japan signed the Plaza Accord in 1985 and staggered into a “lost decade” after its bubble economy burst, conjuring up an ominous sense of déjà vu.