China’s Belt and Road Initiative is booming

China’s leader, President Xi Jinping, sees difficult times ahead. At a conclave of the Communist Party’s most senior officials that ended on Oct 23, he warned that over the next five years, the task of ensuring China’s development while maintaining its security would become “much harder” amid a “notable rise in uncertainties and unforeseen factors”.

Mr Xi’s meeting a week later in South Korea with US President Donald Trump

produced an uneasy truce

in the two countries’ fight over trade. But it will not have eased Mr Xi’s biggest headache: America. The cure for Trumpian instability, as he sees it, is an alternative order that draws the rest of the world closer into China’s orbit.