UNITED States President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly inviting his peer rival, Chinese President Xi Jinping, to his inauguration in January.
Trump, despite the intense rivalry between the two superpowers, has very publicly praised the way Xi wields almost complete control over the Chinese state.
Such is the strength of Trump's admiration for the Chinese president's strongman rule that he evidently wishes he commanded the same level of control over the US. He has in fact threatened to amass near-dictatorial powers to go after his political opponents.
It should be interesting to see if American institutions and their elaborate system of political checks and balances can withstand the assault Trump says he intends to engineer.
The US is clearly in uncharted terrain if Trump indeed makes good his threats to undo the democratic traditions and ethos which have become almost synonymous with what most of us think about the US.
Instead of the country working assiduously to have other countries around the world emulate what it stands for, it will be a shocking climbdown if Trump now works to have his country emulate China's one-party state.
Trump's admiration for Xi is no doubt informed by how China has economically transformed itself in the last 40-odd years under the stewardship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with the tacit understanding given to the Chinese people that in return for their political acquiescence, the CCP will deliver ever-rising living standards.
But that is the state-people bargain that most of those living in East Asia are familiar with and not necessarily peculiar only to China. China's stupendous climb out of poverty is unique only because of the scale of over a billion people making such huge economic strides in so short a time.
Already, there are signs that China's economy is slowing down as it faces various challenges in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As Sebastian Strangio wrote in an Afterword to his book, In the Dragon's Shadow, Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century: "These challenges were a reminder that the indefinite linear growth of Chinese wealth and power could no longer be taken for granted."
If so, the political challenges facing China's government and Xi will be quite unprecedented as they navigate any extended period of slow economic growth.
There will be those who may argue that the solution is not more top-down decision-making but recognising that the Chinese people are not much different from any people anywhere. Once basic economic needs are taken care of, people generally will want some say in how they are governed.
While the US and Americans generally may feel that the country is not going in the right direction on things both political and economic, becoming more like China as Trump wishes for his country may not be the correct prognosis of what ails the US, even assuming China's top-down industrial-policy way to advance till now can be successfully copied. Perhaps only in narrowly-selected areas.
That said, Trump has somewhat succeeded where successive US administrations have failed: getting China's recognition of the fact that the current trajectory of US-China relations is not sustainable.
Unless a more "win-win" arrangement between the two superpowers is arrived at, the growing rivalry and attendant tensions now existing between them will not be eased.
For the sake of continued global peace and prosperity, we must all hope cooler and wiser heads will prevail in both Beijing and Washington.
*The writer views developments in the nation, region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching