The coronavirus joins tough list of 2020 tests for China's global leadership

Davos, Switzerland – "Has China Won?" Kishore Mahbubeni, the Singaporean author and intellectual, greets me warmly in a conference lounge here and hands me a card promoting the March release of his new book, bearing that provocative question as its title. The cover blurb announces that he will explain "how, while America became arrogant and distracted, a three-thousand-year-old civilization is well on the way to becoming the number one power in the world." The year ahead is likely to provide the most profound trial yet for that thesis and for the durability of China's rise. Several new shocks and challenges, ranging from a potential pandemic to slowing growth, will test the resilience of China's authoritarian leadership and the state-run capitalist system that has provided the country four decades of record growth. It thus also could mark a significant year for the emerging, generational clash, not of civilizations as Samuel Huntington had argued, but rather of economic and political systems, between democratic and authoritarian capitalism.