When President Nixon announced his open door to China a half century ago, that country was still reeling from the cascading disasters of Mao Zedong’s rule. China was weak and isolated.
Today, China is vying to overtake the U.S. position in global leadership, its market reforms having lifted millions of its citizens out of desperate poverty, and with its Belt and Road initiative having invested billions of development dollars in dozens of countries.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Alfred McCoy argues that as American power and influence wanes and Chinese economic and military might expands, the world order established by U.S. hegemony after 1945 will give way to a new order with China at the top – with terrible consequences for the principle of universal human rights.
“It’s been a death foretold,” said Mr. McCoy of America’s decline. “The supreme analytic body of the U.S. Intelligence Council does these 30-year projections… and back in 2012 they did a 30-year projection that by 2030 China’s economy would be larger than the U.S. economy, part of an epochal shift of the epicenter of global power,” said Mr. McCoy, the author of “To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.”
Although China may be on the rise, climate change threatens to upend its primacy before it is fully established, Mr. McCoy said.
Conservative estimates of sea level rise and warming temperatures indicate that by 2100, hundreds of millions of climate refugees will be forced to seek arable land and fresh drinking water, creating immeasurable political problems across the Eurasian landmass as well as Central America.
To listen to the full interview with Mr. McCoy, download this episode of History As It Happens.
