The United States vs. China

The Quest for Global Economic Leadership

By: C. Fred Bergsten

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

After leading the world economy for a century, the United States faces the first real challenge to its supremacy in the rise of China.

Is economic—or broader—conflict, well beyond the trade and technology war that has already erupted, inevitable between the world’s two superpowers? Will their clash produce a new economic leadership vacuum akin to the 1930s, when Great Britain was unable to play its traditional leadership role and a rising United States was unwilling to step in to save the global order?

In this sweeping and authoritative analysis of the competition for global economic leadership between China and the United States, C. Fred Bergsten warns of the disastrous consequences of hostile confrontation between these two superpowers. He paints a frightening picture of a world economy adopting Chinese characteristics, in which the United States, after Trump abdicated much of its role, engages in a self-defeating attempt to "decouple" from its rival.

Drawing on more than fifty years of active participation as a policymaker and close observation as a scholar, Bergsten calls on China to exercise constructive global leadership in its own self-interest and on the United States to reject a policy of containment, avoid a new Cold War, and instead pursue "conditional competitive cooperation" to work with its allies, and especially China, to lead, rather than destroy, the world economy.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 by C. Fred Bergsten (P)2023 by Blackstone Publishing

Great reading and insights

Brings us away from the perception of destined conflict. Might be too liberal (in the international politics sense) than people might like, especially in the current environment.
The reader was terrible; weird, long pauses and changes in sound quality.

Great if you work at the Brooking Institution, not so much if you don’t

This guy has spent most of his life in DC think-tanks and it shows - excessive verbosity, excessive linguistic repetition (did the editor not notice the recycling of whole sentences throughout the work?), excessive faith in institutions of questionable value (why precisely are the G7, G20, etc the best thing since sliced bread?) and an excessive preoccupation with Orange Man Bad aka he really, really, REALLY doesn’t like our 45th President. (He will only tell you this almost every chapter and even devote an entire chapter to this just in case the drip, drip, drip wasn’t sinking in.)

In fairness, the author does have some good points and knows his history well. But the work suffers so badly from the above that I cannot recommend this to people outside of the left-of-center foreign policy community.

If the author actually wants to get out of his ideological bubble, spend time with people whose livelihoods have been affected by trade policies, and see how his arguments are received, THAT would be something I would read. Anything else from this guy - no gracias.

A suggested work instead to the prospective reader - “The Hundred Year Marathon” by Michael Pillsbury. Oh, and you can probably get the substance of the author’s arguments (minus the obnoxiousness mentioned above) from a white paper from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Think think focused

Very well written but I think not quite up to date either recent Chinese economic struggles