From former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief Geoff Dyer, a balanced and far-seeing analysis of the emerging competition between China and America.

Global politics is shifting rapidly. After decades of rising, China has entered a new and critical phase, seeking to turn its economic heft into global power. In this deeply informed book, Geoff Dyer argues that China and the United States are now embarking on a great power-style competition that will dominate the century. Tensions in the South China Sea and East China Sea are a foretaste of the broader competition to come. With keen analysis based on a deep local knowledge—offering the reader visions of coastal Chinese beauty pageants and secret submarine bases, lockstep Beijing military parades and pigeons caged from the sky—Dyer explains why the U.S. also has a real chance to come out on top and can retain a central role in the world. The Contest of the Century is essential reading at a time of great uncertainty about America’s future and about Asia’s emerging disputes.