4. This Sucker Could Go Down

Tristan Redman is joined by Cindy Yu, a columnist at the Times and author of the Substack newsletter Chinese Whispers, and Pierre Haski, a longstanding foreign correspondent and commentator on France Inter radio, to examine a five-year period in which China's confidence grew as the West's certainties came under strain.

They begin with the Beijing Olympics of August 2008, which opened as Russia invaded Georgia, and the global financial crisis that followed within weeks of the closing ceremony, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the largest bankruptcy in US history and shook confidence in the American economic model.

They also discuss the Arab Spring of 2011, and the Nato-led intervention in Libya that followed a UN resolution to protect civilians, an operation China and Russia came to see as having gone beyond its original mandate.

The episode also covers the crackdown on civil society and the internet that followed inside China, and concludes with Xi Jinping's appointment as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012.

'How Did We Get Here: No World Order' is a BBC News Long Form Audio production

Presenter: Tristan Redman
Producers: Keiligh Baker and Nik Sindle
Sound engineers: Neil Churchill, Gareth Jones and Mike Regaard
Production co-ordinators: Sophie Hill and Katie Morrison
Editor: Matt Willis
Radio 4 commissioners: Daniel Clarke and Hugh Levinson