The French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the end of his visit to China this past week volunteered that the West is in a state of decline and that China is on the rise. My own belief is that the West is at a plateau from which it will resume its advance when the United States surmounts its current state of nervosity. Nor am I convinced of the inexorable rise of China: it is a totalitarian state prone to frequent errors in almost all aspects of its foreign and domestic policy and brutalizes its own population. Apart from the armed forces, and those with some reservation, no Chinese institution is much admired and no utterance or statistic published by the government of the People’s Republic is worthy of being believed.
