The West’s leadership failure on coronavirus is only helping China usurp it

So, Xi Jinping has eradicated poverty.

The Chinese President has declared “complete victory” this week, in what the Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times has called “the great miracle”.

It is easy to scoff at this as a piece of propaganda, but it is not to be underestimated. China’s poverty reduction is remarkable.

In three decades, the lives of nearly 1.4 billion people have been transformed, as a country that could not feed itself has become the world’s engine of economic growth, and stands on the cusp of usurping the United States as the most powerful economy humanity has ever known.

How we got here

The span of Xi Jinping’s life tells this story. He was born in 1953 just a few years after the victorious Communist revolution. By the late…