Until the late 2010s, there was a widespread view that China's rapid growth and even its political and economic model would make China the number-one power in the world by 2030. But Xi Jinping has pulled back from the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and China is facing growing problems: slowing growth, ballooning debt, endemic corruption, mass dissent, demographic decline and institutional sclerosis. Xi Jinping is preparing China for war, militarizing China's foreign policy. The central argument of this book, when first published, was that just such developments might well occur.