He cites extensive sources and statistics to back up his pertinent assertions about American society sources about China, on the other hand, are much fewer, entirely in English and overwhelmingly Western in origin.

He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Asia. This is because Mahbubani is clearly more at ease talking about the US. Who will win this contest What is at stake And who will judge the winner In this book, Kishore Mahbubani evaluates the. Kishore Mahbubani is a former Singaporean diplomat and Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS from 2004 to 2017. When it comes to China, though, he is content to uncritically regurgitate Chinese government talking points: China has never been expansionist (news to the indigenous peoples of Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Taiwan) the 2019 Hong Kong protests were caused by income disparity and inadequate housing provision the emphasis is on the 5,000-year history of China rather than the 73-year rule of the Communist Party. Mahbubani is lucid about the US, correctly identifying its rampant inequality, high incarceration rates, its foolish forays into overseas conflicts, its self-destructive domestic politics, and its à la carte attitude towards international commitments. A big problem is the disparity between the author’s treatment of China and the US. But the book soon gets muddled, far too often seeing China’s impending rise as a geopolitical given divorced from real-world contingencies.

The initial chapter, where he recounts Beijing’s surprise that it found few defenders among US business leaders against Trump’s trade war, is promising. Mahbubani, a former Singaporean ambassador to the UN, sets out to chart China’s coming challenge to the United States’s global supremacy. But, on China, in particular, this is a jarringly dispassionate book. Real-time history can be cruel to books about international relations and one sentence in Kishore Mahbubani’s Has China Won? jumps from the page: “The prospect of a direct war with Russia is practically zero, although proxy wars may take place in territories like the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine.” Mahbubani got one thing right there but you’d need to be particularly dispassionate to see the war in Ukraine as a proxy one.

Kishore mahbubani has china won