We are obsessed with Brexit and Trump: we should be thinking about China | Martin Kettle

This has not been, it must be admitted, an exactly stellar week for those of us who continue to make the case for the enduring strengths of liberal democracy. On the contrary, it has felt like one humiliation after another.

In the House of Commons, a vote to suspend universal credit is brushed aside by Theresa May’s government as though parliament counts for nothing. After elections in Austria and New Zealand, mainstream parties are held hostage while populists decide which of them to put in government. Meanwhile, in Catalonia and Kurdistan, ill-judged referendums cause fresh divisions and confrontational responses from Spanish and Iraqi authorities.

None of these events is in any way an advertisement for the dignity, resilience and pragmatism on which liberal democracies like to imagine they rest. Overshadowing even all of these glum events, however, is the jarring contrast between the world’s two most powerful political leaders.

It’s a contrast that must make many waver in their convictions. Chaotic as ever, Donald Trump got into an unseemly Twitter argument over whether he had told a military widow that her dead husband “must have known what he signed up for”. Meanwhile, a world away in Beijing, Xi Jinping spoke for three and a half hours with assurance and clarity on how China and its global role will evolve and grow over the next 30 years.

The contrast could hardly have been more stark if had been deliberately staged by the Chinese Communist party for its own advantage. While Trump exposed himself as narcissistic and degenerate, a word one rightly hesitates to use but now seems unavoidable, Xi offered an imposing but extremely authoritarian vision of the world.

These differing messages pose a lethal choice which most of us struggle to avoid if we can. If we are sensible, they are not the only two options. Yet they cannot be dismissed. While the democratically elected president’s authority plummets around the world, that of the appointed socialist authoritarian steadily rises. The reputations of the countries and systems embodied in the two men rise and fall with them.

The competition between the liberal democracies and the socialist authoritarians is not yet a new cold war. But the rivalry will redefine the next 30 years, whether any of us likes it or not. All nations and traditions will be compelled to respond and adapt. European governments will be forced to make some complex and unpleasant choices, not least because both the economic superpowers view western Europe as a fulcrum of global influence.

Neither the US nor China is a reliable ally or a model. Both see the globe in transactional terms that give priority to their own national advantage. As Theresa May has found in her meetings with Xi and Trump, both are also dangerous for individual smaller nations to deal with. In such a world, the strength in numbers of the European Union could matter very much indeed. In this context, as in others, the madness of Brexit creates a massive distraction from these larger realities.

Xi’s speech to the Communist party congress in Beijing tested the eyelids and bladders of many who listened to it. Its title, Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, won’t sell as many papers or yield as much online traffic as the latest celebrity revelations, or create as much social media comment as Trump’s latest outburst. But Xi’s speech matters far more than they do.

The thing that matters most is Xi’s uncompromising confidence and ambition. This was the speech of a man who knows where he wants his powerful country to go, and has the power to get it there. His “Chinese dream” is a vision of a powerful party, a reinvigorated economy and an expanded military all playing a dominant role in the affairs of China and on the world stage. It was the manifesto of a president who looks set to lead China for many more years than his recent predecessors, and who is determined to embed his approach in ways that have not been known since the era of Mao.

Yet every one of its messages has big practical implications for Europe. Some of these implications may potentially be positive. Others are definitely not. Europe, its nations and its political leaders, are going to have to search carefully through the options and be very realistic about where they lead. If even a quarter of the media attention that is lavished on Trump’s America could be trained on Xi’s China, our part of the world would be the better for it.

Xi has unequivocally embraced the need to clean up China’s environment. That’s partly because, economically and in other ways, he is a regulator and a controller, not a liberaliser on the Deng Xiaoping model. The New York Times calculates that he used the word “market” only 19 times in the speech, compared with 51 times by Jiang Zemin at the 1997 party congress. All that may be music to Jeremy Corbyn’s ears. But Xi has no interest in western or any other kind of democracy, let alone any sympathy for street protests or strikes, and he certainly has no time for separate systems in Taiwan, Hong Kong or Tibet; nor is he in any way a pacifist or a nuclear disarmer.

History and geography will always mean who Britain and Europe look instinctively across the Atlantic for allies that can ensure the stability of their world. But the habit of mind that assumes that 21st century Europe and North America will continue to evolve together much as they did in the 20th century is no longer sound. Trump has ruptured that assumption, certainly for four years, perhaps for eight, but potentially with lasting effects. Yet how far, if at all, does Europe wish Xi’s China – with its capital and labour investments in the west and its Eurasian strategy of One Belt One Road – to fill the gap?

There was an episode of the American sitcom Seinfeld a few years ago in which George was reading the New York Times in Jerry’s Manhattan apartment. Suddenly George looks up wearily and asks: “When are they gonna learn that news about China is an instant page-turner?” As so often, the show got it right. We all know that China is the biggest this, the most important that, and the fastest-growing other. But in the end, most of us skip to sports, recipes or arts stories.

For many of us, skipping the big read on China has become a dangerous habit. We know we ought to try harder because China so obviously matters. Give us China, Lord, we say to ourselves, but not tonight. After Xi’s speech in Beijing this week, that is no longer a serious option.

• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist