China and the West

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The cementing of China’s President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule over the country earlier this month has rendered as effectively impotent the West's post-Soviet efforts to persuade the Chinese to adopt liberal democracy. Instead, having given them access to mass markets and World Trade Organisation membership, Europe and the US now face a China that has harnessed and adapted the capitalist model to its self-interested ends without conceding its ideology. So has the West fundamentally misunderstood China for the past three decades?