PRC foreign policy : Mao vs. Xi

There was a time in the West until about a decade ago when, if you said you studied Chinese, some folks might ask you what for. This is changing rapidly on the back of China's economic growth, and nowadays Chinese studies departments in Western universities are packed to the rafters. Talk of China becoming the next global power broker is no longer considered outlandish, although the topic is hotly debated. Optimists suggest that China will be socialized into the prevailing liberal world order, pointing to Xi Jinping's (selective) embrace of globalization, as opposed to President Trump's go-it-alone transactional approach. By way of evidence, on the one hand, they underscore the fact that over the past two decades, China resolved all its land-border disputes with the exception of India. Pessimists, on the other hand, usually point to the militarization of the South China Sea and draw alarming comparisons between contemporary China and Germany on the eve of World War I.