Divided but Not Poles Apart: Europe, the United States, and the Rise of China

While differences remain, the gap between US and European debates over the likely impact of China's rise on the global order has narrowed in recent years. At the same time, China's leaders have been more confident in establishing dichotomized distinctions between their view of how the world should be ordered and how China will act as a great power on one hand, and what they depict as the West's preferences and the typical modus operandi of Western powers on the other. Despite evidence of ever clearer dividing lines between different visions of China's impact on the future of the global order, this is not the same as a return to bipolarity. The problems of disentangling transnational economic relations, different levels of followership for potential leaders, and pragmatic considerations of governance efficacy in diverse issue areas all suggest something other than fixed bloc-type alliances on either side of a bipolar divide.