China's meteoric rise has Washington worried, not because China is a threat to its neighbors or to US national security, but because China's influence is expanding across the region. It's creating the institutions it needs to finance its own development (AIIB and New BRICS Bank), it's building the infrastructure needed to connect the continents with state-of-the-art high-speed rail (New Silk Road), and its attracting allies and trading partners who want to participate in its plan for growth and prosperity."China is reaching deep within the world island in an attempt to thoroughly reshape the geopolitical fundamentals of global power...... Its two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental infrastructure for the economic integration of the world island from within, while mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through Washington's encircling containment.......If China succeeds in linking its rising industries to the vast natural resources of the Eurasian heartland, then quite possibly.... "the empire of the world would be in sight."
— Alfred McCoy, The Geopolitics of American Global Decline, The Unz Review"The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action."
— Former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, "America's Pacific Century", Foreign Policy magazine.
This is why Washington is worried; it's because China has transformed itself into an economic powerhouse that doesn't conform to the neoliberal model of punitive austerity, pernicious privatization, and madcap asset inflation. China has slipped out of the empire's orbit and charted its own course, which is why Washington wants to provoke Beijing over its negligible land reclamation activities in the South China Sea. Washington thinks it can succeed militarily where it has failed economically and politically.
Comment: Man of the Year for sure! How about Man of the Decade?