The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State
Published By: AEI Press
Available from:
Once viewed by statesmen and corporations as a great hope, the People’s Republic of China has evolved into a nightmare of a problem for the United States. China is now America’s most challenging strategic competitor.
Even as China pursues great national ambitions, its future appears increasingly dystopian. Recently, COVID-19 cast a glaring light on Beijing’s political pathologies. Xi Jinping’s rule through fear turned a local epidemic into a global plague that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, infected millions, and cost countries trillions of dollars. But that is not the end of the nightmare. Even as the plague spread, Beijing still engaged in a global disinformation campaign and continued to coerce its neighbors to advance its territorial claims and create a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific region. China’s grand strategic ambitions do not rest even during a global pandemic.
This is a book about China’s grand strategy and its future as an ambitious, decaying, and dangerous rival. China both exercises its strength and power to undermine the United States and afflicts the world with its internal weaknesses and maladies. The China nightmare is upon us.
Praise for “The China Nightmare”
“Mr. Blumenthal’s approach will catch many by surprise. He says plainly that “China has taken advantage of American complacency.” He rejects the conventional thinking that China’s domestic economy is still moving from strength to strength, thereby providing Chinese president Xi Jinping and the Communist Party with the wherewithal to insist on China’s centrality in Asia and to challenge the U.S. globally.”
— John Bolton, former national security adviser and US ambassador to the United Nations
“Dan Blumenthal’s ‘The China Nightmare’ unmasks the sharp paradox at the heart of China’s strategy to unseat the US as the global leader: Beijing is chasing grand global designs even as the Chinese Communist Party is beset by vexing internal challenges. If Washington fails to respond with strength and dexterity, China will grow ever more dangerous. Blumenthal’s penetrating diagnosis of the challenges China poses and his compelling case for a new competitive strategy that exposes China’s weaknesses will shape Sino-American relations over the long term.”
— Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)
“A perfectly timed diagnosis of the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to the free world. Daniel Blumenthal explains what Chinese leaders want and how they intend to get it. ‘The China Nightmare’ makes clear that if the Party were to achieve its ambitions, the world would be less free and less safe. The author also provides a compelling prescription for how the United States and like-minded partners must compete effectively to prevent the disease of authoritarianism from spreading.”
— H. R. McMaster, author of “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World”
“Dan Blumenthal’s ‘The China Nightmare’ exposes the striking contradictions that bedevil China’s rise as a competitor to the United States: a desire to satisfy external ambitions while compensating for grave domestic weaknesses. Addressing this challenge will require deft and sophisticated responses, and US policymakers will not find a better guide to managing this rising but infirm colossus than Blumenthal’s book.”
— Ashley J. Tellis, Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
“Blumenthal . . . examines the tensions between China’s international ambitions and domestic struggles in this well-informed and alarming study. . . . He carefully situates his geopolitical analysis within the context of Chinese history and draws incisive conclusions about the dangers that a political or economic crisis in China might pose to the rest of the world.”
“Dan Blumenthal is another author who has been able to surmount established conclusions. In his new book, ‘The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State,’ Blumenthal casts a searching light on China — and by way of extension, the faulty logic of American foreign policy. His book tells the story of Chinese Communist Party machinations at home and abroad, taking the reader from vicious inner-party battles to the outer edges of Beijing’s global footprint. And by so doing, he forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable fact: by integrating China into a globalized world, the United States and its allies have poisoned the wellspring of their own success.”
“Blumenthal, therefore, carves out an important third way of thinking about China. Many in Washington see China as ten feet tall and great-power competition as the foremost priority of the United States. Others describe a China with serious internal problems, which does not pose much of a threat, and with which Washington can continue to cooperate. In contrast, Blumenthal’s China is both weak and dangerous.”
— Foreign Policy
