Last fall, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the People’s Republic of China, the government planned the largest military parade and “mass pageant” in Beijing’s history. On October 1st, more than a hundred thousand performers and soldiers mustered downtown, forming waves of color that stretched from voguish skyscrapers in the east to the squat pavilions of the Forbidden City.

At ten o’clock, artillery blasted a fifty-six-gun salute, as President Xi Jinping watched from a high balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square, known to the outside world as the site of a student-led uprising that was crushed in 1989. (In China’s official history, the movement and the crackdown have been reduced to a footnote.) Xi is sixty-six years old, with a full, reddish face, neatly combed hair, and an expression of patient immovability. Since taking office, in 2012, he has redoubled political repression and suspended term limits on the Presidency, so he will run the country for as long as he chooses. For this occasion, instead of his usual Western attire, he wore a black Mao suit. “On this spot, seventy years ago, Comrade Mao Zedong solemnly declared to the world the establishment of the People’s Republic of China,” he said. “That great event thoroughly transformed China’s tragic fate, ending more than a century of poverty, weakness, and bullying.”

Whenever Chinese leaders stage a public spectacle, it provides a chance to assess their self-portrait. In 2008, when Beijing hosted the Olympics, the opening ceremony celebrated Confucius and ignored Mao; the organizers wanted to project confidence but not brashness, a posture that China described as “Hide your strength and bide your time.” Eleven years later, China no longer hides the swagger. On the balcony, to Xi’s right, was the politburo’s reigning propagandist, Wang Huning, a former professor who once travelled the United States and honed a prickly theory about dealing with its people. “The Americans pay attention to strength,” he wrote, after attending a football game at the Naval Academy. “Football has some strategy, but it’s not elegant; mainly, it relies on strength.” He added, “The Americans apply that spirit to many fields, including the military, politics, and the economy.”

In the stands around Xi, uniformed volunteers demonstrated the optimal technique for waving a miniature flag—short, vigorous strokes—and stressed the value of a friendly “countenance” for the camera. But nobody needed much coaching; for many in the crowd, this was a day of unaffected pride in China’s new wealth and power. When I started studying Mandarin, twenty-five years ago, China’s economy was smaller than Italy’s. It is now twenty-four times the size it was then, ranking second only to America’s, and the share of Chinese people in extreme poverty has shrunk to less than one per cent. Growth has slowed sharply, but the country still has legions of citizens vying to enter the middle class. It is estimated that a billion Chinese people have yet to board an airplane.

Xi’s speech gave no acknowledgment of the headlines—China’s heavily criticized internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, protests in Hong Kong, a grinding trade war with the United States. In his telling, the momentum of history was beyond question. “No force can shake the status of our great motherland,” Xi said. “No force can stop the advance of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.”

To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth. Its government is deciding which features of the global status quo to preserve and which to reject, not only in business, culture, and politics but also in such basic values as human rights, free speech, and privacy. In the lead-up to the anniversary, the government demonstrated its capacity for social surveillance. At the Beijing University of Technology, where students trained to march in the parade, the administration extracted data from I.D. cards to see who ate what in the dining hall, and then delivered targeted guidance for a healthy diet. In the final weeks, authorities narrowed the Internet connection to the outside world, secreted dissidents out of town, and banned the flying of drones, kites, and pet pigeons.

From the balcony, Xi presided over fifteen thousand goose-stepping troops and phalanxes of tanks and jets—five hundred and eighty pieces of equipment in all. For nearly a century, the U.S. has been the dominant military power in the Pacific, as it has in much of the world. Xi sees this as an unacceptable intrusion. “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia,” he has said. To achieve that, China has strengthened its military to the point that Pentagon analysts believe it could defeat U.S. forces in a confrontation along its borders.

The most anticipated moment of the day was the début of a state-of-the-art missile called the Dongfeng-41, which can travel at twenty-five times the speed of sound toward targets more than nine thousand miles away, farther than anything comparable in the American arsenal. Watching the missile roll by, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a nationalistic state newspaper, tweeted, “No need to fear it. Just respect it and respect China.” Hu, a seasoned provocateur, added a sly jab at the travails of democracy: above a picture of the missile, he wrote that China was just fine forgoing the “good stuff” of electoral democracy on display in “Haiti, Libya, Iraq and Ukraine.”

When I visited Hu that week, at his office across town, he was in a buoyant mood. The pageant was less about military hardware, he said, than about “self-confidence.” He offered a pitying contrast with the United States. “You overestimated your abilities to transform the world,” he said. “You can’t simply write the screenplay for the future. China, India, the rest of the world—everyone will have a hand in the script.” He pointed to America’s pressure on China over trade. “They thought China was going to throw up the white flag,” Hu said. “But China kept up the fight. It appears that the ability to inflict pain on China is not what you thought it would be.”

I lived in Beijing for eight years, starting in 2005. For the past six years, I have lived in Washington, D.C. This fall, I went back and forth between the two capitals, to gauge what lies ahead for a relationship that is more dangerously unstable than it has been since 1972, when Richard Nixon clasped Mao’s hand in Beijing, setting the course for China’s opening to the world. I talked to those who forged the relationship, and those who would remake it—in politics, business, security, entertainment, and technology—and found them startled by the depth of the rupture and the speed with which it has grown. “The relationship is in free fall,” a senior White House official told me. Deng Yuwen, a former top editor of a Communist Party journal who now lives in the United States, told me that when he talks to officials in Beijing they spare him the bluster. “They are very, very worried that the relationship will continue to deteriorate, that the economic impact will hurt people’s confidence and further growth, that it could have effects beyond their grasp,” he said.

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Shopping Cartoon by Roz Chast

Some level of tension is endemic. Ever since 1784, when the first American merchant ship landed in China to trade ginseng for tea, the two sides have cycled through what John Pomfret, the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,” calls “rapturous enchantment followed by despair.” But the union has always been derived from mutual benefit. Buyers in Canton generated fortunes for the Astor and the Delano families; Christian missionaries built China’s first universities and hospitals. The Cold War pulled the countries apart—the Party feared “Coca-Colanization”—but eventually the People’s Republic needed cash and foreign know-how. On December 13, 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced China’s Open Door policy, inviting in foreign businesses and encouraging Party members to “emancipate their minds.” Two weeks later, the first bottles of Coke arrived.