China’s leaders will seek to exploit global divisions in 2024

China willBy David Rennie pursue two contradictory goals at once in 2024. Xi Jinping and other Communist Party bosses will seek to rally and lead a bloc of countries that are sceptical of an American-dominated world order. But even as China’s rulers prepare for an age of division and great-power competition, they will present their country as a defender of global unity.To advance their first goal, Chinese leaders will accuse America and its allies of stoking a new cold war. They sense an opportunity to dislodge the West from the centre of world affairs. Their criticisms will have an economic component, too. With global growth slowing, including inside China, leaders in Beijing will charge America and other rich Western countries with erecting protectionist barriers to free trade and imperilling the future of globalisation.