China's road to hegemony?

The US and its allies need to catch up quickly.

Xi Jinping delivers the keynote speech at the first China-Arab States Summit. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China.

Vivek Y. Kelkar, Mumbai

When Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia last week to attend the China-Arab and China-Gulf Cooperation Council summits, he received a royal welcome. His arrival in Riyadh confirmed China’s status as the other pole in the global power axis. It’s. sign that Beijing is now setting the pace of a contest for global hegemony with the United States—one quite different from America’s Cold War with the Soviets.

Beijing’s strategy for countering the US is clear: It steps right into any power vacuum Washington leaves—and it has left many, in the past decade—using its massive financial power to wrest the initiative from its American rival in every part of the world that Washington has neglected or sanctioned, be it in the Middle East, Iran, Russia, or Central Asia.