The sense of optimism with which the West rang in the new century 20 years ago has long since been replaced by the shock of terrorist attacks, financial crashes, pandemics, and other crises. But if we broaden our perspective, we will see that none of the challenges facing us is insurmountable.
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China’s experience of the coronavirus pandemic has reaffirmed this assessment of faltering American global leadership, the failing capacities of the West to address the challenges of the new century, and the resilience of China’s socialist economy in comparison to capitalism; most importantly, they think it has also validated the superiority of their political system.
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Twice in the 20th century, Japan challenged the West, first in a military-led attempt to become an imperial power and then as an industrial powerhouse. Now, it is China’s turn to take the global stage. Seventy-five years after Japan’s surrender in World War II, and 30 years after its economic bubble popped, the emergence of a 21st-century Asian power is shaking up the “status quo.”
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For the past 50 years, the West has clung to the hope that modernization would automatically transform China into a capitalist liberal democracy. For decades, maintaining this illusion was good for the bottom line, but now the implications of China’s ascendancy have become disturbingly clear.
China has always said it is not seeking to overthrow the global order. We should listen. Why would China go to the trouble of capsizing the global order when it can simply take it over, whole and intact? … Far from opening up a new battleground, China’s plan is to fight on familiar territory. Its message to the world is simple: China is ready to pick up the slack, as the United States retreats from its global responsibilities. For a world exhausted and impoverished by the pandemic, it’s a seductive proposition.
The burst of communications was unusual. While Chinese diplomats have spoken publicly before on big issues such as the China-US trade war and the Belt and Road Initiative, it had not been on such a scale. Observers said the effort was an attempt to shape international opinion about the unrest in Hong Kong, but no matter how united the approach, the campaign was unlikely to be effective.
Much of the Kremlin’s self-confidence stems from the belief that the Western world is changing in ways that suit Russia. Donald Trump is seen to represent a long-term trend in the US rather than a short-term blip: Russian analysts reckon that the US will be less focused on intervening around the world to uphold a liberal, rules-based, US-led order, and that it will be more nationalist, mercantilist and interest-focused. So in the long run, the US and Russia should be able to accommodate each other.
In reality, China’s longstanding suspicion of foreign influence has not prevented the government or the people from becoming remarkably adept at marshalling the flow of overseas cultural touchstones into the country’s borders, remoulding them into something that isn’t entirely Chinese, but is also totally different from its original form.
China and Russia both have features that unite them. Both are blatantly autocratic, show a callous disregard for human rights, and share an openness to using military force in their neighbourhoods. They also share a great interest in pushing back the West’s influence in the world. Yet, despite these various areas of cooperation, the list of potential conflict points between the two powers is long.
Arab regimes spend millions of dollars on think tanks, academic institutions, and lobbying firms in part to shape the thinking in Western capitals about domestic political activists opposed to their rule, many of whom happen to be religious. The field of counter-extremism has been the ideal front for the regional governments’ preferred narrative: They elicit sympathy from the West by claiming to also suffer from the perfidies of radical jihadis and offer to work together to stem the ideological roots of the Islamist threat.
