So China has gone from a swing factor in the global economic order something more like the rock underpinning the global outlook. A great reason for policymakers around the planet to fire off some thank-you notes before People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan's likely retirement this year.
There are two lessons from all this. The first is that the global economy is an incredibly interconnected and complex place and can't just be undone by slogans like "the end of globalization" that were so trendy a year ago.
The second is broader than economics: China puts experienced policy practitioners in charge, from the president's office on down. They do the hard work and don't rejoice in sowing chaos and confusion. As a result, China is a source of stability, not a threat to it.
Few serious people think that the U.S., a proxy for the West, is remotely capable at this juncture of launching something on the scale of the Belt and Road Initiative. More corrosive is an idea becoming fashionable that democracies just can't do big things any more. We'll see how that plays out. Declinism is rife throughout American history -- and yet the U.S. keeps bouncing back.
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