The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, in a piece entitled “China Won’t Bow Down,” explored the fraying U.S.-China relationship through the eyes of six China scholars that have written extensively on the subject, and the consensus seems to be that China is on its way to supplanting the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower.

Martin Jacques, author of “When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order,” told The Los Angeles Times that, due to the rise of China, America is losing clout.

“China is becoming a global power, while America no longer has the same authority that it used to have,” he said, according to The Los Angeles Times.

In just one example of China’s expanding global influence, American officials have heavily courted their Beijing counterparts in order to secure support for sanctions against Iran, North Korea and Sudan. Without China’s approval, action on those fronts is highly unlikely.

China has been treated with kid gloves by American policymakers as of late, most of whom have refused to criticize China for its human rights violations, currency manipulation, lack of religious freedoms or any other sensitive topic.

Another scholar, James Mann, author of “The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression,” told The Los Angeles Times that much of the blame for the contentious relationship could be laid directly at the feet of the free trade proponents that misled the American public into thinking China’s entry into the World Trade Organization would westernize that nation.

“Across the United States, factories have closed and millions of Americans have been put out of work as the result of our decision to keep our markets open to Chinese goods. Meanwhile, the American people have been informed repeatedly that the reasons for our policy were not merely economic — helping American companies that do business with or in China — but political. Free trade was going to lead to political liberalization,” he said, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Quite the contrary, according to Susan Shirk, author of “China: Fragile Superpower,” who says that China’s increased economic freedoms have led to an even more repressive Chinese regime, as the Communist Party seeks to hold onto power.

“It certainly doesn’t look like the heyday of market reform, throwing lawyers into jail, tightening controls on the media. It all reflects great anxiety about challenges to the Communist Party,” she said, according to The Los Angeles Times.

But Zachary Karabell, author of “Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends on It,” say that the two nations are so mutually dependent on one another that they will have to eventually learn to work through their differences.

“There is a restlessness in China about its dependence on the United States, but there is no choice,” Karabell said, according to The Los Angeles Times. “If it’s a marriage, it’s a 19th century marriage — a marriage of convenience for which there is no easy way out.

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