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It’s a big day for President Xi Jinping in Beijing, on his first trip abroad as president, and he’s bringing with him a new, more confident Chinese leadership. Xi’s arrival will be followed by a week of summit summits, and it’s not entirely clear what new initiatives will be taking aim at the West to get those summits finished before a January summit with leaders of the G-20. Yet the stakes in the Chinese government’s current relationship with the West aren’t insignificant. As many argue, the West has to do a lot more, and more urgently, than it is making itself out to be to contain the spread of what some Chinese government-types characterize as ideological “revisionism”—a term coined in the 1980s by the historian John Mearsheimer (Princeton University) to refer to “the notion of a liberal, democratic and pluralistic world order in contrast to an ideology-driven, purist and hierarchical one.” It’s a long-standing critique of the American-led order, one that some American policy-makers and some Chinese leaders themselves have sought to refute, and one that has been particularly apparent when it comes to U.S. plans for North Korea, where the United States has had a diplomatic failure. The Chinese-American relationship has always been fractious, partly because China’s ruling Communist Party—its system of “one-party rule”—seems to be much more open to collaboration, even collaboration between rival regimes. But the United States didn’t start this diplomatic and strategic divide, nor did it start this diplomatic and strategic rift in its relations with China. It started with the Japanese Occupation of Manchuria in 1931. That’s when the United States saw the need for a strong anti-Communist adversary in the Orient.

China’s leaders (and some non-Chinese intellectuals to their credit) have been urging the United States to recognize that history’s lessons about China’s authoritarian governments are still relevant. That’s because it has emerged as China’s top policy goal in the East China Sea (East China and South China Seas)—where it is fighting a three-day, high-stakes war with Japan for the first time since World War II a century ago, while also confronting Japan’s more aggressive neighbors. As Chinese strategists argue, the United States needs a firm U.S. ally in Northeast Asia to counterbalance Japan and the Asian Pivot to contain