A popular meme in Kenya goes something like this: everytime China visits, we get a hospital. When the US visits, we get a lecture.

That's of course not an accurate picture of the competition between the West and China in the global South, but it does highlight a certain disconnect that can be perceived widely among many in these regions which have been included in the Belt and Road projects, or who have otherwise fallen out of favor in terms of their previous allies.

This week on Departures we are pleased to feature a conversation with the author Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Dr. Mastro's new book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power," is a tour de force examining how China was able to climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage - which ended up being not so different from a startup business aiming to disrupt a ringfenced status quo.

Dr. Mastro's book is enormously helpful in challenging how we understand China's success and aims to offer insights on how the response from Washington and other Western allies to adjust to the geopolitical realities that lie beyond the newspaper headlines.

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