This Brave New World

Anja Manuel, a former U.S. State Department official, argues that the United States must forge constructive relationships with both China and India, not simply fear one and ignore the other, if the world is to peacefully accommodate the rise of two new great powers.

Manuel opens by contrasting two dinners in September 2015. At a formal banquet for Chinese President Xi Jinping in Seattle, Americans and Chinese sat at separate tables and strategic distrust pervaded the room. Days later, at a Silicon Valley dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Americans and Indian-Americans mingled freely, and Modi called the U.S.-India relationship "the defining partnership of this century." These scenes, Manuel contends, capture American relations with Asia: The United States respects China but distrusts it, while relations with India are comfortable but India's rising power is consistently underestimated. She argues that by 2030, Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined in economic might, population, and military spending, and both China and India will hold veto power over most international decisions. She sketches two scenarios: a worst case resembling a new cold war with arms races and irreversible climate change, and a best case with open trade, reformed institutions, and meaningful climate agreements.

The book's opening section examines the historical narratives each country tells itself. Manuel argues that the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, which celebrated ancient Chinese inventions and the voyages of the explorer Zheng He but omitted centuries of Western domination and the era of Communist leader Mao Zedong, reveals China's self-image as a great civilization reclaiming its rightful place. India's Republic Day ceremony, by contrast, commemorates both triumphs and traumas, reflecting a nation more at ease with its full past. She traces how the Communist Party has revived Confucianism, the ancient philosophy emphasizing social harmony and hierarchical order, as a native substitute for Western ideologies that might threaten one-party rule, while in India, Modi's Hindu nationalist government has inflamed tensions between Hindus and Muslims. China's "century of humiliation," the period of forced treaties imposed by Western powers and Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries, still drives a combination of insecurity and assertiveness that complicates diplomacy. India's colonial experience under two centuries of British rule produced a different reaction: Rather than seeking to reclaim dominance, India defined itself as a peace-loving leader of the "nonaligned movement," a Cold War-era coalition refusing to align with either superpower. Manuel also traces both countries' founding narratives: the Communist Party's mythologized revolution versus India's independence movement led by Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, which culminated in the traumatic 1947 partition that killed more than a million people and created permanent rivalry with Pakistan.

Manuel then examines each country's political system by tracing the careers of Xi and Modi. Xi's father, a senior Communist revolutionary, was purged and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval launched by Mao. Young Xi was sent to the countryside for hard labor but remained a loyal Party member, served in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), rose through provincial posts, and was selected to the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the body that rules China. Manuel describes the system of "Leading Groups" through which policies are made, noting that Xi chairs all the most important ones, making him the most powerful Chinese leader in decades. Modi, a tea seller's son, joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist volunteer organization, went into hiding during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of the constitution in 1975, and rose through India's democratic system to become chief minister of Gujarat and then prime minister. India's parliamentary democracy, modeled on the British system, features a directly elected lower house (the Lok Sabha), an upper house (the Rajya Sabha) elected by state legislatures, independent courts, and civilian control of the military. Manuel argues that China's authoritarian system makes reform easier but is inherently brittle, while India's democracy provides resilience but impedes swift change.

On economic trajectories, Manuel traces China's transformation under Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who beginning in the late 1970s dismantled agricultural communes, created Special Economic Zones for foreign investment, and allowed entrepreneurs to flourish. China experienced decades of rapid growth, but she identifies gathering problems: overcapacity in major industries, enormous local government debt, income inequality, a rapidly aging population, and environmental degradation. She argues, however, that predictions of imminent collapse are too pessimistic, citing the country's high savings rate, surplus labor, and large internal market. India's trajectory followed a parallel arc: colonial-era decline gave way to protectionist policies producing sluggish growth until Finance Minister Manmohan Singh's 1991 liberalization quadrupled GDP in two decades. A second reform wave stalled under political gridlock, contributing to Modi's 2014 landslide. Manuel argues that continued growth in both countries serves American interests through expanded export markets, job creation, and economic interdependence that raises the cost of military conflict.

The book's middle section examines six internal challenges. On income disparity, Manuel contrasts a waste-picker slum in Delhi with a Chinese factory dormitory, arguing that India's vast informal economy makes a social safety net nearly impossible, while China's hukou system, a household registration that assigns people as "rural" or "urban" at birth, denies over 200 million migrant workers access to urban services. On corruption, she contrasts China's top-down crackdown led by Wang Qishan, head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, with India's bottom-up movement driven by activist Anna Hazare's hunger strikes and tech entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani's Aadhaar biometric identification system, which has enrolled nearly a billion Indians and enables direct benefit transfers. On demographics, China's rapidly aging population faces an enormous pension gap, while India must educate and employ 12 million young people entering the workforce annually despite nearly 300 million illiterate adults. On gender inequality, Manuel contrasts India's ranking of 127th on the United Nations gender-equality index with China's 37th, detailing domestic violence, sex-selective practices, and women's underrepresentation in politics in both countries. On the environment, she warns that China and India alone could exceed the entire world's carbon budget even after Paris commitments, and argues that incentive-based cooperation works better than lecturing. On managing dissent, she contrasts China's sophisticated censorship apparatus, including the "Great Firewall" and an estimated two million Internet monitors, with India's democratic safety valves, arguing that China's implicit bargain of prosperity for political quiescence is fraying.

The final section addresses both countries' expanding global roles. Manuel characterizes China as a 21st-century mercantilist coordinating investment through the One Belt, One Road initiative, a planned network of ports, railways, and roads across Asia and to Europe, funded by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and hundreds of billions in development loans. India, by contrast, lacks a comprehensive economic foreign policy, and Manuel argues India feels encircled by China's investments in neighboring Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. On global institutions, she contends that the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) were designed for a world the United States dominated and cannot accommodate rising powers. She argues the United States should join the AIIB and push for institutional reform rather than ceding influence. On the military front, she describes an accelerating security dilemma: the unresolved 2,500-mile Himalayan border dispute, China's naval buildup exceeding 300 ships, aggressive moves in the South China Sea, and India's responding defense expansion. She argues this escalation requires both firm deterrence and sustained military-to-military communication.

In her conclusion, Manuel draws an analogy to Britain's patient accommodation of America's rise in the 19th century, proposing the United States treat both China and India as adolescent powers still learning their global roles: maintaining strong alliances and clear red lines while prioritizing collaboration on climate change, counterterrorism, education, and clean technology. She urges politicians to stop fearmongering, businesses to explain the mutual benefits of trade, and citizens to build cross-cultural connections. Invoking the dual meanings of "brave new world," from Shakespeare's optimism to Aldous Huxley's dystopian irony, Manuel argues that the United States has the power to determine which future prevails, but only through patient leadership that accommodates legitimate interests and prioritizes cooperation over confrontation.