Podcast with Gideon Rachman | The Rise of China and Easternization

Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs columnist at the Financial Times is not the first analyst to comment on the impending rise of China as a world leader in the face of a weakening Western world. However his account in his latest book Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond proves astute, broad reaching and timely. In the book, Gideon delves into the major reasons behind a shift of power from the West to the East, how the world’s political and economical fault lines are being redrawn and most importantly how the US will decide to respond to all of this.

We sat down with Gideon in this insightful podcast q+a to talk about China’s rise to superpower status almost overnight, what President Xi Jinping’s recent Mar a Lago visit symbolises and if we should realistically expect war to break out between the US and China in the near future.

“How do you get this balance right between menace and example…They’ve been pouring money into the military and they are being more assertive about this, but their major effort is economic diplomacy and basically just using the power of money.”