Beijing and Washington don’t trust each other – maybe that’s OK
In the spring of 2019, Matt Pottinger, then the Asia director for the National Security Council, was working at his office in the White House when a rare document caught his attention.
A secret speech delivered by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to China’s Communist Party Central Committee in 2013, not long after Mr. Xi took power, had just been published in China’s top party journal, Qiushi. Mr. Pottinger found it especially revealing of Mr. Xi’s worldview.
“The language was so explicit,” Mr. Pottinger recalls of the speech, in which Mr. Xi laid out an ambitious strategy for China’s Communist Party to win a fierce ideological struggle against the capitalist West. “Capitalism,” Mr. Xi said, “is bound to die out.”
The stark difference between Mr. Xi’s internal
