Until recently, China was unmistakably trying to be a hegemon in the image of the United States, increasingly complementing its growing hard power with soft power. But China seems to have missed its opportunity to build a serious rival to, or even supplant, the existing world economic order fashioned by the US following World War II.

All the elements of success seemed to be falling into place for China. It launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a transnational infrastructure investment program intended to define a vision of a China-led, post-Bretton Woods world, much as the US Marshall Plan did for the post-1945 order. China also aggressively promoted the renminbi as an international currency, and persuaded the International Monetary Fund to include it in the basket of reserve currencies underpinning Special Drawing Rights (the IMF’s unit of account) far sooner than was justified.

Project Syndicate