Paranoia over China does US no good

Will the United States revert to protectionist policies to perpetuate its hegemony or stick to the principle of free trade at the risk of suffering relative decline?

This is the question Nial Ferguson asks in the introduction to his book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. If the function of the US as the sole superpower is to underwrite a liberal international commercial and financial system, as Ferguson quotes Paul Kennedy as saying, it indeed has a lot of importance for China, the world's second-largest economy.

Whether China can overtake the US as the largest economy in the near future, therefore, becomes a worrying question for many Americans, concerned as they are about the possibility of the US losing its status as the world's strongest power. With such worries comes the "China threat" fallacy, which has been combined with the conspiracy theory to paint a picture of how China's rise poses a threat to the security of the US and the world at large.