Opinion

China has blown its historic opportunity

In the wake of the pandemic, China could have reshaped the US-led global order by becoming the development bank, central bank and medical supplier to the world.

Arvind SubramanianDevelopment economist

Jul 23, 2020 – 6.38am

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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

Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic adviser to the government of India, is a senior fellow at Brown University and a distinguished non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development.