No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War With the West

When and why did China’s relations with the West go off the rails? Washington and Tokyo began to feel uneasy about Beijing around 2010, when Chinese policymakers decided that the global financial crisis had at long last tipped the power balance in their favor and started a push for global supremacy. It took longer, about a decade, for policy in western European capitals to catch up. By then, China’s aggressiveness in promoting its own components for Europe’s information infrastructure and its belligerent conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic had crystallized the consensus that Chinese behavior threatened European security. The last straw was when the Chinese leader Xi Jinping promoted China’s relations with Russia from an alliance of convenience to a real partnership just before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Small, a one-time optimist about China’s integration with the West, observed the historic reversal in process as he traveled through Western and Asian capitals in the past decade. He tells the story with a combination of close detail and clear analysis that will inform both specialists and generalists. Xi did come close to achieving a stranglehold over European economies and information systems and even to splitting the Atlantic alliance, but he pushed too soon and too hard—and now the West seeks to keep China at arm’s length.