JCU Professor Enrico Fardella, together with Professor Sergey Radchenko from Johns Hopkins University, recently published an article in Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is an American magazine founded in 1922 and one of the leading publications on international affairs and foreign policy.
The article, titled China Is Sabotaging the World That Enables Its Rise, Beijing’s Risky Bet Against the West, argues that China’s rise contains a fundamental strategic contradiction. Beijing has benefited enormously from the international order built first by the Soviet Union and, above all, by the United States, yet it increasingly seeks to weaken the very system on which its prosperity still depends. Under Xi Jinping, president of China since 2013, the country has combined growing geopolitical ambition with an economic model centered on investment, industrial policy, weak household consumption, and persistent external surpluses. These imbalances have generated mounting resistance in the United States, Europe, and other major economies. This has encouraged protectionism, de-risking, and supply-chain diversification. Europe is particularly vulnerable because its internal economic divisions make a coherent response difficult.
Fardella's article maintains that continued pursuit of industrial dominance may therefore turn out to be self-defeating. Conversely, a more sustainable trajectory would require China to rebalance toward household income and consumption, reducing its dependence on foreign demand and easing tensions with its principal trading partners and global markets.
Read Professor Fardella’s article, China Is Sabotaging the World That Enables Its Rise.
Professor Fardella serves as a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at JCU and as an Associate Director of the Guarini Institute for Foreign Affairs. In his research, he focuses on the history of Chinese foreign policy, as well as China’s relations with the European Union, the Middle East, and Italy, from the Cold War to the present.
