China Since the rise of the Westfrom around 1500, China has mostly been a weak peripheral presence often struggling just to maintain its borders. Distant, different and of relatively minor consequence to the evolving power centres of Europe and North America, the historic middle kingdom featured little in the calculations of the emerging great powers. More recently, the post-1945 inheritors of Western leadership in Washington – even with the surprising ascent of Mao in 1949 – could also comfortably keep China at a significant distance from a centre stage dominated by global rivalry with the Soviet Union. But in the…

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