Since at least the early 1990s, China's rise has been identified as ‘a defining element in post-Cold War international politics’ (Shambaugh, 1996, 180), and questions have been asked about what China's leaders might do to try to change the world once they had the power to do so. We are a now at a point when we no longer just need to use the future tense. To be sure, we can still speculate about the future. But we now also have real-world examples to analyse and evaluate. Identifying a defining moment when China made some sort of transition to global power status with the ability to push for change is not an exact science. The identification of China as a global power began to become relatively common in the mid-2000s, but really became a wellestablished ‘common sense’ position in the years following the global financial crisis. China might not have been seen as the predominant global power in all issue areas, but by as early as 2012, surveys showed that China was already popularly thought of as the world's leading economic power among respondents in North America and Europe (Pew Research Center, 2013). And all of this was just as Xi Jinping was taking power, and before he had begun to signal a new direction for China, with both the desire and ability to take a new global role.

While a few have gone to the next step and endowed China with superpower status, there is no need to see China in this way or as closely catching the US (though many do) for it to be thought of as a global power. And being a global power is certainly not the same thing as being the single global power or the predominant one. Nor does it mean that China's rise is over. It could continue to rise even further either as a result of what it does, or as relative power capabilities shift as others decline. Or it might suffer a decline or even a crash as a result of indigenous or endogenous shocks, or a reconfiguration of global power structures and alliances.