To do so, the book makes use of an original database of Chinese Communist Party documents-memoirs, biographies, and daily records of senior officials-painstakingly gathered and then digitized over the last several years from libraries, bookstores in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Chinese e-commerce sites (see Appendix). 3 China’s leadership and foreign policy elite declared that a “period of historical opportunity” had emerged to expand the country’s strategic focus from Asia to the wider globe and its governance systems. The West’s subsequent response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and then the storming of the US Capitol by extremists in 2021, reinforced a sense that “time and momentum are on our side,” as Xi Jinping put it shortly after those events. Beijing believed that the world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect abroad and were struggling to govern themselves at home. From China’s perspective-which is highly sensitive to changes in its perceptions of American power and threat-these two events were shocking. Then, a little more than three months later, a populist surge catapulted Donald Trump into office as president of the United States. On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. For Xi, the origin of these shifts is China’s growing power and what it saw as the West’s apparent self-destruction.

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