Maybe the author has some hubris. But unlike the USSR, China's rise is not containable, because China's trade with the rest of the world, especially with the Global South nowadays, such as the BRI, RCEP, ASEAN, AIIB, BRICS+, etc. The US will only isolate itself if it attempts to contain China.
There is a small but fundamentally important distinction that needs to be made clear about why China’s rise is unstoppable. It’s not the volume of trade, but a combination of the composition of trade, scale of it, the complexity and comprehensiveness of China’s offerings, and the focused long term strategic planning underpinning it.
Chinese exports are not primary commodities or low tech manufacturing. China has a frankly ridiculous degree of dominance on the practical implementation of ideas into high tech reality and the ability to rapidly produce on an industrial scale.
This is an area that the west has deliberately tried to downplay and suppress, giving disproportionate credit to designs instead.
It is precisely this absolute gulf in practical technical expertise that separates the American and Chinese patent industries. In America, the overwhelming majority of patents remain purely paper exercises and are generally only good for rent seeking when someone else actually manages to make the thing into reality later and completely independently. In China, because of their practical expertise, patents gets turned into reality and are usually massively refined and improved in the process.
China’s exports are also not just finished manufacturing goods, but also infrastructure and factories. This has allowed the global south to have its own affordable and distributed industrial and economic revolutions and their wealth and purchasing power have skyrocketed as a result.
Under the western rules based order, the rules and the west’s stranglehold on technology and finance means the rest of the world will never ever catch up. The whole thing was a giant racket designed to keep the west on top. Under that order, with all the wealth and buying power focused in the west, China was their slave no matter how much it developed, as the West can simply shut them down through financial and technological blockades, exactly like how the Japanese were brought to heel and castrated when their economy grew too well.
That is why China went and created entirely new markets in the global south. Most of the western ruling elite were simply not able to recognise the danger because their own personal stories were all mini-mirrors of the west in general. They were landed gentry whose greatest achievement in life was being born into the right family. They had vast inherited wealth and estates and their entire education and life experience was founded on the focus on maximum rent extraction. And that’s how they run their countries. The idea of growing the economic pie was just entirely beyond their experience and expertise and frankly beneath their notice. They were good at carving out an ever bigger slice of the economic pie for themselves, and the all powerful invisible hand of the free market was supposed to do the rest.
Those of the western elite who did have broader economic competence saw the danger, which was why BRI and made in China 2025 were so demonised and actively sabotaged. But they were too few to be able to muster the kind of focus and resources needed to effectively sabotage the project, and China too strong and focused. So today, Chinese exports to the global south now exceeds that of the west. This is a key watershed moment which is going largely unrecognised and unremarked, but the history books will look back and mark this historic moment as a key turning point in history.