By Bill Emmott, independent writer, lecturer and international affairs consultant

With the new year under way, much attention has been centred on January 20th, the date when Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. Yet we actually know everything we can at present know about what a new Trump administration will bring and the condition America is in. Which is to say, we know that the U.S. has the strongest big economy in the world and that an abundance of contradictory indications about Trump's policy intentions await resolution. So rather than looking at how America might affect the world, it may be better to ask how the world might affect America. Or, more particularly, to ask what the year ahead looks like from the point of view of China and of President Xi Jinping, now in his 13th year in office.

The broad answer is that two of the main narratives or slogans deployed by President Xi in recent years are looking rather tarnished as the year begins. The first is that "the East is rising and the West declining". The second is that we are witnessing "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". Such grand strategic claims should not be judged based on just one or two years of performance, but nonetheless neither looks as if it would or could be invented today based on current trends.

Regarding the first slogan, much depends on how you define the West. Europe's economic trajectory does look decidedly wobbly. Yet given that the United States is the main country China sees itself as competing with and wants to be seen as comparable to, the performance of the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic is the most relevant, and in that time, America has not looked at all like a country in decline. Just the reverse: for all its undoubted problems, the U.S. remains the clear world leader in economic and technological terms. The gap between the U.S. and everyone else, including China, is widening rather than narrowing.

Moreover, in the three years since President Xi's "strategic partner", Russia's President Vladimir Putin, ordered his military to make a full-scale invasion of neighbour and former colonial possession Ukraine, the West's security alliances have shown more strength than weakness. In the Indo-Pacific, Japan's new national security strategy and defence build-up plan stand out, but also new is AUKUS, the submarines and technology partnership between Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., as is the deepening of the security relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines.

Most prominently of all, Western military and financial support for Ukraine has been larger, more widely shared between Europe and the U.S., and more enduring than either President Xi or President Putin will have expected back in 2022. It has been less than Ukraine wanted or needed, and certainly far short of what was needed if Russia were to be driven out of the territory it has seized. But it does not support the notion of a declining West, and nor do the decisions in 2022 by Finland and Sweden to join NATO.

President Xi might be hoping that President Trump will now do his best to undermine these alliances, by starting a trade war with Europe and Japan or by weakening America's commitment to European security and to NATO. But whether Trump does or does not perform such acts of self-harm is entirely outside Xi's control, which is not a comfortable feeling for an authoritarian leader entering what promises to be a difficult year for him.

It looks likely to be difficult for Chinese domestic reasons, not international ones. As each year passes, the Chinese economy is looking more and more like Japan's did during the 1990s: the collapse of the property and construction sectors has removed a big source of GDP growth while leaving banks and local authorities deep in debt; and the struggle to adjust to that debt is depressing household consumption and producing deflation.

Meanwhile, the population is falling gradually and ageing, imposing steadily heavier burdens on the health and social security systems. Amid that general stagnation, plenty of dynamism can and will be seen, just as was the case in Japan in the 1990s and 2000s, but the overall effect is to worsen the public finances and to depress household incomes.

This is a very long way from looking like "the great rejuvenation" that President Xi is so fond of talking about taking place between now and 2049, the centenary of the People's Republic of China's creation by his predecessor, Mao Zedong. Economic cycles come and go, of course, so this could prove temporary, but demography and the rising debt burden make it safer to assume the problems are deep-seated. As things stand, President Xi and his economic team do not look as if they have a credible plan for turning things round. Threats from Trump of even higher tariffs on Chinese imports into the United States, China's biggest market, make the need for such a plan look even greater.

During his now three terms of office, President Xi has had one highly consistent policy: he has sought to attack what he rightly sees as the main threat to the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy and continued leadership, namely corruption. It must therefore be quite dispiriting for him that he continues to detect corruption at the highest levels even of the People's Liberation Army. In November, the fifth-highest ranking officer, Admiral Miao Hua, was placed under investigation, just the latest of a series of senior officers to be removed from their posts.

What all this means for the world is that while China will continue to be a bully in the South China Sea and an important competitor, especially in cars, consumer electronics and perhaps artificial intelligence, it will not enter its own new year on Jan. 29th in confident or strong form.

The year of the snake is supposed to be one of renewal, just as a snake changes its skin, which is what President Xi will no doubt be hoping for. But it will also be one in which both he and his partner President Putin will find themselves facing up to the West and to a new American president from positions of weakness, not strength. It could be that the children's board game of Snakes and Ladders, popular in the West but invented centuries ago in India, could prove more apposite for China: in that game, a snake represents a reversal of fortune, as if you land on one you have to slide down it and you fall behind your competitors. Watch out for the snake, President Xi.