The teacher Yan Xuetong71 years old, published a book in 2013 where you pulled around 300 predictions about the direction that relations between the great powers would take in the next decade. Especially around a then-rising actor, China, which was beginning to break into some global power games, but which was still on the back foot.
Yan’s predictions, according to subsequent studies of his work (The inertia of history: China and the world in 2023), they had an accuracy of 82.3%. His great success was predicting the current trends on the international scene. That China would become the second power which would give him great authority to play a new role in international affairs and this would unleash a pulse on several fronts with the US; the EU, Russia and Japan would lose some of their luster; the world would be more multipolar, with West in decline y East Asia gaining more and more weight and boosting economic growth.
In Beijing, Yan is currently the great ideologue of China’s foreign policy one of the main strategic thinkers. He is the dean of the Institute of International Relations at the elite Tsinghua University, where presidents Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping studied.
PhD in Political Science from the University of California, all of Yan’s writings have long since become the fuente from which they drink international relations of the Asian giant. This academic was one of the first to predict the new Cold War between Beijing and Washington, pointing out that his country would challenge American hegemony. Now he maintains that USA is in declinebut he has made it clear that China is not yet ready to be a true world leader because it lacks the necessary resources, especially in the military field, to assume that responsibility.
Yan has also rubbed his crystal ball as to the next moves on the global board with Trump back in the White House. In an interview with the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Postthe professor points out that we are now heading towards a “bipolar world”, in which distance between the US and China with the rest of the world will be increasing.
Beijing will benefit from the deterioration of US foreign relations, but in both the economic and military fields, the Asian power will continue to lag far behind. He European discontent with the American focus on Israel’s war against Hamas will help China improve its relations with the EU. With Trump, the chances of a war in Taiwan will decrease, although the trade dispute between Beijing and Washington will intensify with a new barrage of tariffs.
This is the view of Beijing’s leading foreign policy oracle, a scholar who maintains a more aggressive position that the Chinese regime, like the US, should establish a formal network of allies and provide them with military security. And that this would have to be done before 2034, when what is called “counterglobalization”, with the populism dominating all ideologies, it will be the strongest current.