Back when they had policies, Republicans were concerned about China. Under the rule of its Communist Party, they said, China was an increasingly totalitarian power that could come to rival America’s global dominance. As was seldom the case when Republicans stated their positions, this time they were right.

While China’s President Xi Jinping had not gone in for Stalin-style show trials, his persecution of China’s Uygur minority, his own chain of gulags, his personalization of power, his establishment of pervasive surveillance, his absolute intolerance of dissent (augmented by his paranoia), and his banishment (or worse) of anyone he suspected of insufficient loyalty to him at least smacked of Stalin, even if the death toll was not comparable.

Behind Xi stood a nation that had become the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, due in no small part to Wall Street’s insistence that American manufacturers move their factories there, since Chinese workers came cheap. Like America in the mid-20th century, and Britain before that, China is now the workshop of the world. As well, it’s become a creator and deployer of advanced technology on a par with the United States—if not better.

As China’s capacity has expanded, so has its reach. It has been enlarging and modernizing its armed forces, occupying (or creating) islands in the South China Sea; investing in and forming alliances with the nations of Africa, most of Asia, and the micro-countries of the Pacific Ocean, while endeavoring to build friendlier trade relations with Europe. It has supported totalitarian nations like North Korea and authoritarian nations like Russia. Most importantly, it has been the only nation whose rise in wealth, power, and influence challenges America’s status as the world’s hegemon, and that challenge is clearly rising.