The consequences of the presidency of Donald Trump will be debated for decades to come—but for the Chinese leadership, its meaning is already clear. China’s rulers believe that the past four years have shown that the United States is rapidly declining and that this deterioration has caused Washington to frantically try to suppress China’s rise.

Trump’s trade war, technology bans, and determination to blame China for his own mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic have all confirmed the perception of Chinese policy elites that the United States is bent on keeping their country down.

For the last 200 years, the number one power has always been a western power. So when even power pass, number one power passes from the British to the Americans, it went from one Western power to another Western power.

But now we are facing a transition for the first time in 200 years when the number one power is going to be a non-Western power, which is China.

And this is something that the world hasn’t dealt with for 200 years, and therefore it is not surprising that many do not know how to handle this situation. It is inevitable that the United States would at some point become very concerned about China’s rise.

The world is shocked to discover how frightened of China the Americans have become. And as a result, the anti-China sentiment has grown significantly in America.

So it is inevitable that America is going to look for a new ways and means of counter balancing China.

And so the idea of Indo-pacific, what’s behind the Indo-Pacific is a way to balance China’s enormous growth.

But today, India seems to have forgotten the infamous quotation of Henry Kissinger, "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests." Henry Kissinger served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

According to the State Department historian, 'When the fighting developed, the Nixon administration tilted toward Pakistan. The tilt involved the dispatch of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to try to intimidate the Indian government. It also involved encouraging China to make military moves to achieve the same end, and an assurance to China that if China menaced India and the Soviet Union moved against China in support of India, the United States would protect China from the Soviet Union. China chose not to menace India, and the crisis on the subcontinent ended without a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.'

If you look at China’s long history, if China had had the same imperialist instincts, global imperial instincts as the Western countries, Australia should have been a Chinese territory.

But instead Australia was a Western country because the British colonizers came all the way from the Atlantic, to the Pacific to colonize Australia.

So I think that hasn’t been this traditionally, this impulse in Chinese history to go out around the world and conquer the world. That long history of China is a reassuring sign for the world that when China becomes a great power, it will not try to repeat what the West did at the height of its power and colonize the world.

China is beyond socialism towards an ideal form of government. In the early 1980s, the Chinese didn’t have the freedom. They couldn’t choose what to wear. They all wore Maoist suits. They couldn’t choose where to live, where to work and what to study. Certainly zero Chinese could travel overseas.

Today the Chinese people can choose what to wear, where to live, where to work and what to study. And guess what? Every year, 120 million Chinese, I think that's more than the populations in California leave China freely as tourists and amazingly 120 million Chinese returns to China freely.

Now, if China is a communist gulag Stalinist state, as some think, would they go back to China? And so there’s a complete misunderstanding of China.

The United States is about 240 years old. Chinese civilization is more than 2400 years old. In today’s world, you have a society which is 240 years old passing judgment on a society which is more than 2400 years old, and at time when China has its best 30 years of history.

The Americans are telling Chinese: ‘You guys are not doing very well. You should change your political system.’

One thing we all must not forget is: China is beyond socialism. They saw what happened to Soviet Communist party, they saw what happened to Soviet Union, and they saw what happened to Russia. Russian went overnight to democracy. Their economy imploded and their life expectancy came down. Infant mortality went up. The Russian people suffered. And the Chinese said: ‘This is what happens when you have instant democracy.’

China is a civilization state and not a nation state. Why do you think that you would know better what's good for them?

Does that reflect the fact for over 200 years you got used to doing it telling the world how they should behave and therefore you think you can be a better judge of the rest of the world?

Don’t you think that judgmental character in the West has got to adapt to the rest of the world, because the rest of the world today is less willing to be judge by you.