Accidental Conflict
America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives
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Behind the bluster of two powerful leaders, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, was an undercurrent of shared vulnerability and global ambition. For America’s 45th president, China was the lightning rod in his campaign to make America great again. For China’s fifth generation leader, it was all about the rejuvenation of the Chinese Dream after a century of humiliation.
It was an unmistakable recipe for conflict — but with a diabolical twist.
Author
A rare combination of thought leadership on Wall Street and academia qualifies Stephen Roach as a leading practitioner of analytical macroeconomics. After thirty years at Morgan Stanley, mainly as the firm’s chief economist and eventually as the Hong Kong-based Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, he joined the Yale faculty in 2010 where he developed popular new courses — “The Next China” and “The Lessons of Japan.”
A forecaster by training in his early days as a Fed economist, Stephen Roach has long been mindful of the perils of historical extrapolation. As seen through that lens, his vision of the “Next China” offers a unique template for the exciting but daunting possibilities of China’s uncertain future. Roach’s focus on the US-China relationship is an outgrowth of the interplay between two major strands of his professional experience—as a leading US economist and an influential analyst of a rising China. His two most recent books—Accidental Conflict (2022) and Unbalanced (2014)—draw extensively on that focus.
He has a Ph.D. in economics from New York University and lives in New Canaan, CT.