China vs America: A Warning

As a Cabinet minister attending meetings of the UK’s National Security Council, Oliver Letwin took a profound interest in our relationship with China. So much of the discussion of world events inevitably turns into a debate about the attitudes and intentions of Beijing. But the more Letwin became involved in such discussions, the clearer it became to him that there was an absence of any settled Western strategy for conducting a peaceful long-term relationship with China.

With China’s authoritarian market socialist regime becoming increasingly assertive, and with the authorities in Washington becoming progressively hostile towards the growth of Chinese power, the world is now in a much more precarious state than it was a decade ago, and the situation is only going to deteriorate. Recent repressive moves by China in Hong Kong and Chinese military activities in the South China Sea have only served to heighten tensions, exacerbated too by concerns in the West about China’s lack of transparency in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and by increasing Western measures directed against Chinese companies such as Huawei.

China vs America traces the contours of history, both ancient and modern, to explain how China has emerged as a challenger to American power in the twenty-first century and the discomfort that this is causing in the West. This book is a powerful call to correct the collision course on which the great powers of the world are currently embarked before it is too late.

Oliver Letwin was the British Member of Parliament for West Dorset from 1997 to 2019. He was a member of the UK’s National Security Council from 2010 to 2016, during which time he played a central role in developing the UK’s policy on China and India. Since leaving office, he has been vice-president of the Great Britain–China Centre, a fellow of the Legatum Institute, and a visiting professor at the King’s College London Policy Institute, where he chairs the Project for Peaceful Competition (a global academic network promoting scholarly dialogue about the management of global power relationships). He holds master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge and has been Procter Fellow at Princeton University, Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, and a visiting professor at the University of Reading.