In an important and lengthy interview with Beijing News (January 18), Yuan Peng, President of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) said: "The United States is sick, China stabilises the world and changes". Contrasting the differences between the US and China, he said when Biden came to power, the epidemic, the economy, and race faced difficult problems. China meanwhile ushered in the opening year of the "14th Five-Year Plan" and entered a new stage of marching towards the second centenary goal. He added that changes in the world, changes in the United States, and changes in China are intertwined. While ushering in new development opportunities, global governance is also looking for new solutions. Explaining so-called "Trumpism", Yuan Peng said it "mainly refers to the Trump administration's insistence on absolute "America first", the promotion of unilateralism, protectionism, and bullying, which puts American interests above all else". Trump, he added, is a non-traditional politician, but important is that he won the support of 75 million people despite losing the election in 2020. He interpreted this to mean "there is actually a deeper force behind him" and "The United States is actually "sick." The various contradictions in the United States are superimposed and difficult to return, which eventually leads to a concentrated burst of various social problems". He enumerated these social problems as (i) class contradiction - from being a society dominated by the middle class, with strong class mobility it has become a society where "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is gradually shrinking, and class contradictions in the entire society have increased unprecedentedly"; (ii) racial conflict - "contradictions between races have gradually become prominent, and finally manifested in the conflicts between races. Last year's "Black Life Costume" movement in the United States was a concentrated outbreak of race contradictions"; (iii) intergenerational contradiction. The elderly, middle-aged, and youth groups in the United States are concerned about different issues, and the politicians they support are also different. Intergenerational conflicts "have led to political polarisation and social polarisation in the United States".

Talking about global changes Yuan Peng emphasised that the "most profound changes is the change in the global power structure, which is "rising from the east and descending from the west." In the past 100 years, the non-Western world represented by China has risen in groups, while the Western world has experienced a general downturn, condensed into one sentence: "East rises and west falls." He pointed also to the rise of non-traditional security threats such as terrorism, financial crisis, global epidemic, biosecurity, food security, climate change, etc. which have brought greater disaster to mankind than traditional threats. Another change is that a new round of technological revolution is gaining momentum. He said "We may witness a concentrated explosion of a bunch of new technologies with the digital economy as the core and represented by blockchain, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and big data. Many of the changes brought to the world by this round of technological revolution are unimaginable". He said "the conflict and impact of the new crown epidemic on the international situation is historic". While it caused widespread devastation, he said the epidemic had exposed "some hidden faces in international politics, such as the US's extreme pressure on China and the politicisation of the epidemic". Yuan Peng asserted that China's rapid rise has caused discomfort in the world and "with China’s steady development, it may not be the United States and other Western countries that will shape the international structure and international order in the future, but China, the biggest variable. China’s development will greatly lead the direction of changes in a century". Yuan Peng suggested it is time "to propose a Chinese plan, such as the ideas of a community with a shared future for mankind, a new type of international relations, and a community of human health and health proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping" as "a new approach to solve some of the common problems in the global changes unseen in a century". Nevertheless he conceded that "the strength and influence of the United States determine that American domestic politics will inevitably profoundly affect the world situation". He added, in conclusion, that some long-standing regional conflicts around the world have not died out and are "leading to increased regional instability". He mentioned the Iranian nuclear issue, impact of the Arab-Israeli reconciliation, and the North Korean nuclear issue. He stressed that faced with "these challenges, leaders of all countries need to stick to the correct direction of globalization, strengthen global governance in action, and jointly solve these global problems".