The American Project in Decline: Images and Visuals from Beijing and its Peripheries

China's leaders believe their ascent in the 21st century will be aided by a parallel decline of Western developed powers and their monopolization of the international system. Since the 2008 global financial tsunami caused by the United States, Beijing has taken initiatives to seize strategic opportunities presented by the crisis while simultaneously undercutting the ‘Washington Consensus' and larger US-led global order by highlighting its excesses and failures. Concomitantly, China has promoted its Chinese values and a model of economic reform without multiparty democracy as an alternative to Neoliberalism - not so much in an attempt to unseat the US as to raise Beijing's own stock as it assists Washington’s implosion. Accompanying America's and the neoliberal order's decline has been a deluge of imagery (re)producing running visual narratives far superior than any authoritarian or communist propaganda chief could ever conceive. Be it the fall of Wall Street, commercials proclaiming American fire sales, the burning of London, Occupy Wall Street protests, or searing photos and videos of an emergent American police state wantonly pepper spraying docile protestors, a new composition of the U.S. and its Neoliberalism project is being crafted today- one which significantly undercuts American soft power in China, its peripheries in Hong Kong and Macau, and elsewhere. This paper examines the visual culture of American and Western decline as depicted in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by Chinese state and local Chinese and English language media as a response to the moral panic over China’s rise.