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Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy. By Kishore Mahbubani. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020. 320 pp. $38 (cloth).
In his new book, Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Kishore Mahbubani provides a guide to understanding the state of the geopolitical relationship between China and the United States. In addition to the title question, Has China Won?, Mahbubani also seeks to provoke readers with two others: Has the United States lost? and, in the event of a U.S.–China geopolitical clash, Will humanity win?
Mahbubani considers how China was able to rise to its current position of near-global primacy and how both the Liberal International Order (LIO), and the US's time as its leader, are increasingly threatened. Consequently, Mahbubani argues that the US–China clash is paradoxically both inevitable and avoidable, but it is ultimately up to both superpowers to employ measures in the coming decades to determine the outcome. Central to Has China Won? are Mahbubani's efforts to explore the common ground between the two countries—through empirical, moral, and historical evaluation—and, ultimately, to encourage the Americans and Chinese to not view each other as existential threats but, rather, to see that they are indisputably the two most powerful countries in the world, and that they must work together to excel equally in the global order. Failure to successfully understand each other—or at the very least, to stabilize the Sino-American relationship—Mahbubani ominously asserts, will result in far-reaching consequences that will impact the US, China, and their closest partners, and will threaten the very existence of humanity.
Mahbubani explores the historical...