Liu Yiqian made global headlines in 2014 and 2015 by paying top prices for paintings and antiquities but is starting to liquidate some of his artworks.
The different reactions in China and the US to these two incidents fully illustrate the complexity and delicacy of the US-China relationship. Ultimately, this stems from the US flawed perception of China and its unhealthy political ecosystem, which generates strong emotions in both Chinese and American societies, in turn affecting the bilateral relationship and creating a vicious cycle. Correcting this abnormal state depends crucially on whether the US can make substantive adjustments.
The ideological competition between democracy and authoritarianism was supposed to have died with the Cold War. But it has returned with a vengeance, powered above all by the rise of China. Now comes a book by a respected scholar that purports to explain the secrets of the China model, and to show why it works better than liberal democracy. The recently book The China Model: