Will grey hair escape the Thucydides Trap?

While addressing Western delegation in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping argued that the US need not worry about the "Thucydides Trap", "so named [after] the Greek historian who chronicled how Sparta's fear of a rising Athens made war between the two inevitable", wrote Prof N Roubini. Graham Allison of Harvard University "examines 16 earlier rivalries between an emerging and an established power, and finds that 12 of them led to war". While the US accuses China of cheating on trade rules, "the Chinese suspect that the US's real goal is to prevent them from rising any further or projecting legitimate power and influence abroad". What is legitimate power? Is the nine-dash line, which grabs large tracts of South China Sea (SCS) from other nations, legitimate power? China has built military bases on artificial islands in the SCS and refused to accept a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. The state-controlled media referred to the US and Japan as "worrying eunuchs" and "paper tigers". In response the then President of the Philippines Benigno Aquino compared China to "Nazi Germany's expansionism before World War Two". China blatantly cheats on trade by creating non-tariff restrictions on foreign companies, by subsidising its companies, by awarding state contracts to Chinese companies and by stealing technology secrets by forcing foreign companies to transfer sensitive technology to local companies. "From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, successive US presidents regarded aiding China's economic rise as a matter of national interest," wrote Prof B Chellaney. No longer. President Donald Trump has started a trade war that has upset China's smooth transition to a high-tech economy by 2025. "Now, Xi's undivided attention is on making this year's growth numbers. Trump's trade-policy grenades are sending a few too many market forces Beijing's way for comfort," wrote W Pesek. Xi Jinping actually refused to dye his hair as is the custom in China and showed streaks of grey on his head recently. Whether this was a refusal to use cosmetics made by US firms, as part of the trade war, or an effort to save money to help the economy, we do not know. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the US have formed a Five Eyes alliance which will cooperate with other nations to resist China's expansionism. Trump has declared a national emergency to protect US computer networks from "foreign adversaries". Chinese scholars and professors have been denied US visas to prevent them from spying on US research. If things get out of hand "full-scale cold war will ensue, and a hot on (or a series of proxy wars) cannot be ruled out". Maybe, China is already in Thucydides Trap. We watch from the sidelines.