The Economic Conflict That Will Shape The Next Century

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This week on Long Reads Sunday, our selection is</span> <a href= "https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n15/adam-tooze/whose-century"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> “Whose Century?”</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">by Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nominally a review of four recent scholarly works on the conflict between the US and China, Tooze main argument is that the central problem with viewing this as a</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">new</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Cold War is the idea that it is new. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instead, we need to understand that, contra Fukiyama’s famous essay, history didn’t end in 1989 - at least not for the Chinese. What’s more, the narrative of having “won” the Cold War fails to take into account our spectacular failures in Asia. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Only by reframing our understanding can we make sense of the most important geopolitical conflict of the coming century. </span></p>