Overview: China is facing tremendous economic, social and political challenges, as well as having become a predominant contributor to climate change. It has also become a predator against the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Mongols, and taken over Hong Kong, silencing any forms of dissent.

It increasingly appears that one of the Communist regime’s main goals is to control the entire world, but this global ambition now faces mounting geopolitical difficulties.

Verdict: At the center stands Taiwan, which has become a full-blown democracy and, perhaps, a model for the entire Chinese nation. The United States - along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and other states - are, more than ever before, willing to defend Taiwan. The possibility of a clash is real, making China along with Russia the main threat to the democratic world.

As I think we all know by now, ever since ancient times, contests among great powers have often involved contests of ideas. The Peloponnesian War was not simply a clash between a regnant Sparta and a rising Athens, but also pitted a liberal, seagoing protodemocracy that saw itself as the “school of Hellas” against a militarized, agrarian slave state.

The ideological threat that revolutionary France posed to the European order was just as serious as the military one. In the run-up to the Second World War, fascist powers and democracies squared off; during the Cold War, the superpowers divided much of the world along ideological lines.

The intertwining of ideology and geopolitics should not be surprising: At root, foreign policy is how a country seeks to make the world safe for its own way of life. Many analysts accept that U.S. foreign policy is driven by ideological impulses. Even hardcore international-relations “realists” concede the importance of ideology when they bemoan the grip that liberal passions have on Washington’s statecraft.

Curiously though, and focusing on the one side of this proffered discussion for now, there has been more resistance to the idea that there may be an ideological component to the grand strategy of America’s chief rival—the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing is not making any “grand strategic effort to undermine democracy and spread autocracy,” has been said on more than one occasion around me, its foreign policy seemingly based on “pragmatic decisions about Chinese interests.”

Furthermore, realists say that China plays Realpolitik while America ignores John Quincy Adams’s 1821 advice to go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Other analysts suggest that it is a distraction or even a “delusion” to emphasize the ideological aspects of Sino-American rivalry at the expense of Beijing’s military and economic challenge.

In fact, the reverse is true, but I digress, for this whole debate has always gotten me riled up, it has become plainly obvious that over the past few years the unfolding world has shown us both Russia and China are a grave threat to democracy and existence of various governments in general; the US therefore showing itself to be the only one (most likely) who’s able to stop them.

As for Taiwan, well, it has gotten high marks when it comes to holding clean elections and protecting political rights. The public strongly supports democracy in principle and by and large approves the island’s system in practice. When it comes to performance, however, the political system does not do so well.

This is partly because of a set of structural factors. Selecting the president and legislature on a majoritarian basis fosters a degree of polarization and complicates the crafting of policy compromises. Periodically, social and political forces seek to circumvent the institutions of representative government (via mass protests, for example). They can block what they oppose but are unable to solve the problems that provoked their action in the first place.

But trying to stay on track again, as, well, these kind of heated discussions really get me worked up, as noted, as a whole, China is actually the world’s largest renewable energy producer and consumer. Indeed, its renewable power output nearly tripled between 2017-2022, averaging 26% annual growth during 2010-2022 which all means that China is home to one-third of the world’s renewable energy capacity.

And so here in China the Super Predator: A Challenge for the Planet by author Pierre-Antoine Donnet, we get to deep dive, and in a more pronounced, less frenzied manner than I have bounced off the walls here with, review of the factual elements that he melds together to showcase a much more cohesive, salient viewpoint of the discussional topic to hand.

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