China says ‘East is rising and West declining’, but has it been misunderstood?
- The phrase has caught on among government officials and state media in describing Beijing’s view of a post-pandemic world
- However, a Chinese scholar says the expression does not specifically predict or gloat about an American decline
Americans may have misinterpreted a phrase used by officials in China as celebrating the United States’ decline, a prominent Chinese scholar has said.
Coinciding with Beijing’s increasingly assertive posturing under President Xi Jinping, the phrase, dating back to as early as 2014, has been regarded as expressing China’s growing confidence about its global ascent at a time of America’s relative decline.
But according to Yuan Peng, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government-linked think tank in Beijing, the narrative is not aimed at Washington and should not be mistaken as China’s official view of the US.
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“‘The rise of the East and the decline of the West’ is not about strength comparison, much less about China’s rise and America’s decline,” he said in an interview with the official China News Service published on Thursday. “It is about a kind of momentum and a historical trend.”
