Opinion | Is China ready for the burdens of global leadership as the US becomes increasingly isolationist?

Where in the world has the United States gone? The Trump administration’s retreat from constructive global engagement is like matter at the edge of a black hole – only accelerating. President Donald Trump, in just the past week or so, has suggested that US-South Korea military exercises were “ridiculous and expensive”, while praising a letter from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, to whom he gave another free pass on continued missile tests.

He has largely ignored the chaos that is enveloping Hong Kong, until tweeting praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping's leadership last Wednesday and then suggesting Xi could meet the protest leaders. Any former US administration would have at least stood up in principle for democracy. And while South Korea and Japan are waging low-level economic war on each other, the good offices of US diplomacy remain closed.

Even global assistance is withering under Trump as he threatens to eliminate US Agency for International Development funding. Beijing, meanwhile, continues a worldwide Belt and Road funding spree.

Take China’s lending spree, for example. The promise of US$1 trillion makes for great soft power projection across much of the developing world. There are port and rail projects in Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and even Europe.

Two years into a development programme to rival any other in more than half a century and the easy money is already coming to an end. Loan defaults are piling up. An overseas backlash is brewing over the alleged importing of Chinese workers for massive construction projects rather than using domestic labour.