China Leads Global Disaggregation but is not its Sole Driver
by Henry Hopwood-Phillips
“The People of the East have been bullied by western imperialists. China for over one hundred years, India for more than three hundred years. Therefore we, Eastern folk, have instinctive feelings of solidarity.” — CCP Chairman Mao Zedong to India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, October 19, 1954.
The amount of soul-searching that has occurred in Washington to explain a world order that appears to have eroded “very slowly and then all at once” would not make a therapist blush.1 Instead, most U.S. foreign policy literature shares a reactive and defensive nature. Yet there have been moments of self-reflection: Republicans attribute pushback to foreign policy directives that placed too much emphasis on LGBTQ rights, Democrats to neoconservative wars in the Middle East, and centrists to complacency or rogue corporate interests.
One of the few symbols of unity – if only as a figure of fun – has been the former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who wrote in 1989 that “China will exercise a moderating influence in Southeast Asia and not challenge America in other areas of the world.” What little introspection has occurred seems to miss an important fact: American rule could have hypothetically been a supremely beneficent pax and it would still face opposition on a global scale today.
At first glance this appears foolish, like mistaking the properties of chess pieces. Actions of consequence – valorized positively or negatively – accrue to the West’s highly maneuverable pieces; non-western pawns are not permitted the same moves. The West can be praised or blamed, others react to history’s prime mover. For all of the Occident’s rhetoric on equality, the foundations of realpolitik are built on priors which assume that non-western parts are rule-takers not makers; there is a hierarchy to be respected.
A growing crop of developing nations, however, suspect that they are no more bound to play pawns than the medieval West was fixed below its later station. While it is conventional to mark China out as a leader, it is useful to substitute Russia or India if only to oust the notion that China is the sole culprit of an order that seeks to delegitimize a globalism molded by the West.
Since the student movements of the 1960s, Western academia has historically welcomed the prospect of an upheaval. Such enthusiasm, however, was fuelled by an assumption that rising powers would possess a leftist character as befitted many a postcolonial legacy. Yet the trailblazers are rarely scorned naifs but civilization-states that are run as electoral autocracies. These include China, Russia, India and Iran where Zhonghuaism, Eurasianism, Hindutva ideology, and Shi’ite messianism reign.2 Each state considers the connection between liberalism and development superficial or negligible making concessions to the West unnecessary.
To simplify, an iron curtain has fallen between Tehran and Moscow. To its west, lies the mass of status quo powers. To its east, a spread of revisionist players wish to cut the West back down to size, demoting the bloc to its pre-industrial rank; an event that would lead to the parochialization of liberalism’s remit. Those who toy with this alignment occupy various positions on the development ladder: what binds them is not their economic status, or the competence of international governance, but that the West’s value system – and the global hierarchy reflecting it – is geared against them.
Bounded by American allies on the Southeast Asian littoral, as well as Europe in the West, the bloc’s center of gravity is Eurasia and its most concise political expression is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).3 “Eurasia” conjures the scholar Halford Mackinder’s Edwardian predictions on how Britain’s maritime hegemony would be undermined by the advent of rail in Eurasia. While this did not have the presumed effect – despite Beijing’s best endeavor with the 7,000-mile Chongqing-Duisburg railway completed in 2012 – Mackinder was correct in forecasting that Eurasia’s heartlands would threaten a maritime hegemon, and that a Chinese empire ‘organized by the Japanese’ would rise. While on a superficial reading the latter is nonsense, if read historically – as historians write of England being formed by Viking aggression – it carries weight: modern China was born in a welter of Japanese violence.
Forging a Eurasian brotherhood
Beijing’s Eurasian primacy is a new development. In the past Russia steered China’s entrance into both Communism and modernity, mixing idealism and transactionality in a manner mirrored by its “little brother” today.4 Now, however, there is no hierarchy, neither Beijing nor Moscow is in a position to impose its views on the other. Despite variable trust levels, the shared goal of decomposing the international order fosters alliance discipline. It has also supercharged economic relations with China’s exports of transportation equipment, from railway cars to aircraft, rising over 800 percent since Russia invaded, and Chinese shipments of advanced machine tools increasing tenfold over the same period.
Commentators seem remarkably reluctant to address the popularity of their cause. A backdrop of global indifference towards the United States has been evident for a while. Between 1991-2020, in over 1,500 cases where the U.S. disagreed with China and Russia on diplomatic issues, the American perspective prevailed only 14 percent of the time compared to the Sino-Russian 86 percent. This is new only insofar as the sentiments have gained significance after gaining hard power support from Beijing. Such feelings reflect an altered economic backdrop. In 2001, over 80 percent of countries with data available had a larger volume of trade with America than China. By 2018, that figure was down to a little over 30 percent with two-thirds of countries, 128 out of 190, trading more with China than the U.S.
Exploiting this quiet majority, China’s rhetoric has become less euphemistic and its behavior less guarded. Its president Xi Jinping appears to share Vladimir Putin’s vision, as articulated in 2014 at Sochi when the Russian president noted that the emergent “Multipolar world… [will] not improve stability; in fact, it is more likely the opposite… A global equilibrium is a difficult puzzle containing many unknowns.” Essentially Moscow and Beijing are willing to risk disorder less to displace western powers within the current order rather than to ensure that in the future no supranational organization is capable of compromising sovereigns – these actions are perceived as defensive in nature.
Instead of focusing on the broad, if sometimes passive, international approval of this vision and identifying its causes, attention remains fixed on directing manufactured outrage at Beijing for actions such as buying U.N. votes with aid, credit and infrastructure in Africa and Latin America, creating a tacit narrative that only history’s losers want to betray the “rules based order.” Yet by definition an upstart begins behind a hegemon and such verdicts carry little weight when countries like India – which is en route to become the world’s third largest economy by 2030 – fail to throw many eggs into the West’s basket. New Delhi’s intransigence – despite intense western pressure – in purchasing Russian oil suggests, at the very least, that it does not believe Washington has no monopoly on the future and that strategic autonomy is a possibility . In the lead-up to the Ukrainian war it imported roughly 4,300 barrels of Russian crude barrels per day (bpd), a figure which rose in the last quarter of 2022 to approximately 80,000 bpd.
India and China have maintained strategic ambivalence for a reason: neither party considers the status quo a formidable barrier to the potential benefits of future cooperation.5 Moreover, this sympathy appears Eurasian in scale given Moscow and Beijing’s support for India’s right to quell Khalistan as a separatist movement akin to Ukraine, Xinjiang, and Tibet, a striking contrast to Washington which stopped an assassination on its soil and warned Modi about its concerns. Similarly, despite border-disputes at locations such as Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin plateau, Beijing stands squarely behind the SCO as articulated by three positive official commentaries from He Yin – since 2019 a nom de plume adopted for the central leadership’s view – on its 2023 meeting.
A larger reluctance on India’s part to distance itself from Russia or China is signaled by Modi’s hesitance to address an $83 billion trade deficit with Beijing, and his refusal to significantly boost the armed forces budget at a time when China has built nearly 400 villages around the border with India as well as similar villages on the Bhutanese border. When Modi took office 2014, India’s defense budget was 23 percent of China’s, it is now 28 percent. Shortfalls can be stark: India’s air force has an official target of 42 squadrons but it currently stands at 31, a gap of more than 200 planes. Much of the air force is technologically a decade or so behind the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the air domain. The navy is also far short of its ambition of a 175-ship fleet by 2035, with 150 ships and submarines to China’s 370. Talk of a three-carrier navy and being a ‘net security provider’ in the Indian Ocean seems fanciful.
Receiving 11 percent of global arms imports in 2022, India is the world’s biggest arms importer and Russia has been its largest supplier for decades. Yet despite severe squeezes on supplies including Moscow’s increased demand to fight the Ukrainian war, competition from other suppliers, higher Indian arms production, and pressure from the West to discard Moscow, Russia’s share of imports fell only moderately, from 64 to 45 percent, a cosmetic adjustment that fits with a soft Eurasian alignment. A direction of travel that was confirmed when Russia and India engaged in talks over jointly producing military equipment to help ‘maintain Eurasian security’ in late December 2023.
India also pushed back on G7 pressure to ban Russian diamond imports in December 2023. Russia controls 30 percent of the diamond market, while India processes 14 out of every 15 diamonds in the world. The G7 originally wanted to track both rough and polished diamonds but after New Delhi raised serious concerns it decided to trace only rough diamonds. Moreover, the fallout might have been larger had India not imported its diamonds primarily from the UAE rather than the G7.
While these outcomes surprise some, a cursory glance at Indian history would suggest that it would be hubristic to take the development of a US-Indian axis for granted. Though India’s Quad and I2U2 membership, as well as military drills like the Malabar exercises, seem to suggest this orientation, they probably constitute deflective tactics that buy time and good will in order to judge the results of China and Russia’s maneuvers.
Running far deeper than such a detente is New Delhi’s suspicion that the U.S. chose its side when it backed Pakistan and China instead of India and Bangladesh in 1971. Washington deployed its seventh fleet to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India, an action that led the Soviet Union to send cruisers, destroyers and a nuclear-submarine to trail it around the Indian Ocean. For the following quarter century, India remained under U.S.-led technology sanctions. Successive U.S. administrations since Bill Clinton have thawed relations between the two powers but this has not translated into the formation of any meaningful axis. Truly, the most surprising development in China’s rise has been the absence of meaningful alliance formations between the U.S. and India.
In short, while the political theater between Jinping, Putin and Modi is vulnerable to jockeying, the alignment of approximately three billion people, almost 40 percent of the world’s population, is semi-locked. This tentative concord has its own eccentricities, not least that two of the largest agitators for a new world order, Russia and China, possess security council seats, while many of the snubbed G4 contenders – Brazil, Germany, and Japan – are pro-western in inclination.
Theaters of contest
Eurasia’s alignment has entailed a U.S. pivot to the Indo-Pacific, a diplomatic admission that the landmass is not a point of strength and that containment will involve falling back on a maritime plan first conceived by the secretary of state John Foster Dulles during the Korean War. Hence its decision to spend $7.3 billion on military infrastructure on islands such as Guam and Tinian which lie more than 3,300 nautical miles west of Hawaii, and Washington’s renewal of its nuclear deterrent at a cost of $1.5 trillion. Its military presence in the region extends to Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, Diego Garcia, South Korea, and pseudo-pacifist Japan which hosts 54,000 U.S. troops, almost half of them on Okinawa Island.
In most theaters the U.S. position has suffered significant erosion. Conflicts with no easy settlement have occurred precisely where American interests collide with those of Eurasia: Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. These are friction-points where, ideological-moralizing aside, Eurasian states have strong claims based on metrics such as historical continuity: Ukraine is not merely an appendage to Russia but its birthplace; Israel is a western satellite in the eyes of its neighbors; while Taiwan’s anomalous status is dependent on two Chinese states, the PRC and ROC, failing to resolve a civil war.
Furthermore, Europe and the Middle East, once American playgrounds – as immortalized in Team America (2005) – now stand on the front line. Some time has been bought for the U.S. by fencesitting Islamic powers and an incoherent EU. Tensions, however, are beginning to show within a Roman empire sized region now forming the limes (boundaries) of the Atlanticist and Eurasian plates.
One newly-minted swing voter is Saudi Arabia which has shifted from its position as a U.S. ally – housing five American air bases – towards a more ambiguous stance, conducting $175 billion worth of trade with China and India last year, up from barely $5 billion in 2000. This reflects broader trends: the share of Middle Eastern exports going to China and India has risen from five to 26 percent over the last three decades, and the share sent to the U.S. and Europe has declined from 34 to 16 percent. While it may be misleading to ascribe political significance to what may be economic development and a resulting increase in trade, Saudi Arabia’s decision to hold joint naval drills with China in October 2023 suggests political ties are also at stake.
The Entente between Iran, Russia and China – symbolized by the emergence of China as a recipient of 87 percent of Iran’s oil exports in September 2023 – may have also emboldened Hamas to escalate hostilities against Israel. Subsequently, the U.S. has been forced into a position in which it looks potentially complicit with ethnic cleansing if culprits possess the correct international sponsor, which left China free to resume an anti-Israel stance, a position last abandoned in 2010. Such hostility, while historically rooted in initiatives from the 1955 Bandung Conference and Mao’s coalition with the third world, is primarily driven by strategic goals. Beijing seeks to garner Islamic support for its efforts against hegemonic powers, frame pro-Israel India as an ally of the U.S. rather than a leader in the Global South thus protecting its Eurasian primacy, and gain discourse power by aligning with leftist groups that view Israel as a symbol of western imperialism.6
The Entente’s formation also encouraged the Houthis to attack shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb strait, which divides Yemen and the Horn of Africa, on the grounds that it undermines Israel’s war effort in Gaza. Control over such international corridors, which in this case is traversed by 8.2 million bpd or 10 percent of the world’s crude oil, is essential to Washington. Yet after publicizing the participation of over 20 countries in Operation Prosperity Guardian, it became clear that only two – the United Kingdom and Greece – would provide ships under the U.S. Command, and that a lone regional player Bahrain, home to the U.S. fifth fleet, had signed up, indicating a depletion of American soft power.
Western shipping looks set to suffer a cost premium either way.7 Whether the bloc polices the straits – a British Type-45 Destroyer costs $160,000 per day to run – and pays higher insurance premiums, or sends bulk carriers around Africa and adds 10-12 days to journeys, testing South Africa’s poorly-managed support system in the process, which is unlikely to operate at extreme overcapacity for protracted periods, Houthi assets will have to be destroyed if the playing field is to be altered.8 Adding insult to injury, even though the costs of Chinese exports like autos look set to increase by 20 percent due to the security situation, China’s anti-piracy ships share a record of refusing to respond to distress signals from U.S. allies.
Meanwhile, the Monroe Doctrine lies in tatters with most Latin American governments viewing China’s economic rise as a model. Over the last two decades trade between China and Latin America has grown by 2,600 percent. China is South America’s main trading partner and the second largest trading partner for Central America.
Only Europe remains pro-American by default, a situation attributable to the expense of running large, intrusive states which are largely dependent on keeping security costs low, a strategy enabled by NATO’s security umbrella. Yet there are signs of strain. Despite Washington indicating that it may not be able to provide Ukraine’s next tranche of financial or military support due to domestic haggling, the EU remains dormant. Such inertia is curious given the risk of the European theater being abandoned by the U.S. to focus on countering China or a potential multiplication of Asian fronts.9
If Russia pursued a conventional war past Kiev, the EU’s strongest military power – France – would struggle to execute a draw. Moscow has a 1.3 million strong army while France and Germany together can field approximately 300,000 men or 23 percent of the Russian figure. Moreover, real numbers are much smaller, as only 77,000 French troops are deployable and their German equivalents are possibly non-existent given Berlin was forced to push the formation of a brigade in Lithuania back to 2027. These figures were understandable when Russia formed a rump state in the 1990s but amount to hubris when Putin pursues a war in eastern Europe and shows that it is possible to thrive despite western opprobrium.
Beijing essentially views the EU as a fin de siècle power which can barely meet its modest commitments to Ukraine – S. Korea supplied the country with more artillery shells than the EU, which fulfilled only a third of its promise – or its NATO targets, and will not seriously contribute in a U.S. conflict with China. For the EU, this judgment works insofar as it means China does not treat it as a threat. However, Beijing also considers the EU to be uniquely susceptible to policy-shepherding via economic pressure or subversion. China’s ability to recruit and manipulate academics, policymakers, business leaders and even politicians in the EU, as revealed by the exposure of the Belgian senator Frank Creyelman in December 2023 for example, suggests such calculations are not amiss.
It is not that the EU will fall easily into a Eurasian camp – too much postwar liberalism is ingrained to facilitate a clean switch – but that defeatism is hardwired into its DNA having become intellectually invested in models of economic determinism that minimize agency. In 2021, China was the biggest EU trading partner overall, the top exporter to the EU and the bloc’s third biggest market. In 2022, the EU recorded a trade deficit of more than 365 billion euros with China. In short, if the EU is to follow an economically determined road it clearly leads to Beijing.
Crucified by commitments to Washington’s security and Beijing’s prosperity, like any subaltern power the EU will prove an indubitable ally to whichever side looks more likely to win. Should Washington gain ascendance, it would protest to Beijing that it could not financially justify large armed forces and would not defend a protectionist turn that might result in global involution.
Conversely, in the case of China’s ascendance Washington would be informed that the continent lacked the resources to repeat its Cold War performance, the subtext being that it possessed sufficient resources to avoid the complete subordination to Washington that followed WWII. Brussels would also claim that it was ill-suited to play the Anglosphere’s maritime front onto Eurasia and that it was always destined to favor developing countries over developed ones; to privilege its Metternichian or Napoleonic soul as an electoral autocracy, a role assisted by its experience with semi-democratic organizations such as the EU.
It would therefore be churlish to view Berlin as particularly errant for on the one hand allowing 60 percent of its 5G network to rely on Huawei, while also refusing to call out U.S.-backed sabotage on NordStreams one and two in September 2022, or distance itself from U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza offensives, as it displays the EU’s dynamics in nuce. Its ostpolitik – had it fully committed to it, sacrificing its western ties – has been less offensive than its cakeism. Berlin, lacking the investments for strategic autonomy, amasses the benefits of both parties until – having failed to accept a single cost – it will be forced to sustain the costs of non-compliance imposed by both. In brief, Germany is barely a semi-suzerain state.
In many ways it is remarkable that Germany’s assimilation to an Anglo maritime alliance is treated as preordained. While historiographical glamor accrues to Europe’s western seaboard which dragged the globe’s political center of gravity towards the Atlantic, the Teutonic drumbeat of drang nach osten which led its compatriots into the Baltic and Eastern Europe is routinely neglected. Also forsaken are the eastern impulses of Russia – only 200 miles to its east – relegating its Bosporus-based faith, the Tatar Yoke and its push into China in the seventeenth century to history’s margins.10 Yet the Germano-Russian Roman von Ungern-Sternberg was not lost when he tried to revive the Mongol khanate in 1921, Germany has never been a first-rate naval power except on paper, and the two world wars it fought can be read as attempts to pull Europe’s spine back from La Manche to a post-Roman, telluric orientation on the Rhine. Concisely, Germany may be a Eurasian influence deep within a continent defined by 42,000 miles of coastline.
Dismantling the ramparts of international law
Geopolitical complexity has been lost amidst the political trend of conceptualizing international competition solely through the prism of economic coercion. This discourse comes preloaded with a terminology of derisking, decoupling, friendshoring, resilience, dependence, diversification, subsidization, shocks, risks, disruption etc. but to concentrate solely on the economic stakes is to mistake the weaponry for the goal. Economic statecraft is deployed in order to dismantle western universalism, which is at its most refined in international law.
Fuelling the conviction that such a goal is feasible are deeper beliefs – best described as a variety of occidentalism, the mirror image of the West’s orientalism – such as the conviction that Eurasia possesses two virtues that the West lacks: mass and an ability to accept steep costs.11 The latter is a darkly amusing gambit for China in particular having been subject since the Reform Era to an avalanche of critiques that painted the PRC as unstable because it depended unduly on performance legitimacy.
Few nations resent history’s winners internationalizing their laws until barbarized or effeminized by them. To empathize with China’s trauma, it is helpful to imagine if the Qing emperor’s treatment of the Macartney embassy of 1793 had not been a temporary, localized setback to British prestige but the official assignment of a middling rank in perpetuity; for China to emerge repeatedly victorious in war against Britain and encourage the adoption of Chinese technology, which led not only to the fall of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha but the abandonment of a western weltanschauung for a left-field Chinese equivalent.
History is replete with the victims of the West’s expansion. In general, its aspersions – which often still color diplomatic reputations today – were triggered by a desire to psychologically justify a state of exception, i.e. the application of violence, to distant players that, barring the Ottoman empire, posed little to no threat. To sketch a rough sequence, the Eastern Roman world was cast as heretical; the Islamic world presented as a realm of perfidious infidels; Latin America reckoned a heathen non-entity or a Black Legend writ large; while senility or imbecility was ascribed to the ancient empires of India and China.
Over time a single form of Christianity – Catholicism originally branded Orthodoxy as suspect before Protestantism repaid the favor – came to stand for civilization, especially its most enthusiastic constituency, Germanic folk, who nevertheless segued into deism and violence. The partnership of deism and violence is underrepresented in literature. Colonization was fairly small-scale under Christianity; there was little mass migration and the goal of conversion discredited immoderation. Colonization was supercharged when the Enlightenment “disclosed” nature’s hierarchy of races and Nietzsche painted the restraints of faith as the unwelcome effects of ressentiment. Deism appeared to empty heaven without destroying it, meaning science and pseudo-science could be deified and violence validated.
In brief, the powers of Europe led the family of nations through feats of arms and technology, which were often the same thing, and international law was the result of their hegemony; laws reflected their norms. The scholar Alfred Zimmern admitted that international law was little more than a ‘decorous name for the convenience of chancelleries,’ which was most useful when it ‘embodied a harmonious marriage between law and force.’ The jurist Carl Schmitt concurred that international law had an undeniably European character. A personality that was due to Hobbes’ acknowledgement that ‘sed auctoritas non veritas facit legem’ (authority, not truth, makes the law). All of which, while cloaked in the imagery and language of continuity, represented a total break with the Christian tradition best summarized by Psalm 85 which refers to the bond between ‘Mercy and Truth’ and the kiss between ‘Justice and Peace.’
After the chaos of 1914-1945, however, the West’s informal primacy lay in tatters. Yet what emerged was neither a formalized ascendance, nor an international legal system constructed multilaterally and layered with cultural compromise, but a legal labyrinth that hid an inner enigma: a discriminatory character. Wherever international policemen might appear, interests vanished in the name of a higher justice. Western powers did not fight but protected and guarded, while the wars of others were criminalized as violence; they lost control of justice narratives, becoming spiritually akin to the pirates of early modernity.
Two instruments within international law’s toolbox are notable for an elasticity that rarely compromises the effect. The first is “justiciable” rights, a category of law which does not pretend to have the force of execution behind it but contains nominal aspirations that are often potent in countries that ignore its appeals. Whenever grassroots factions – to which the “right” was built to appeal – gain traction, and if their success fulfills a western geostrategic agenda, a ratchet is implemented. If the host country fails to adhere to the values implicitly advertised, its government is discredited, initially via soft signals such as hostile media reports or linguistic tics such as a government’s demotion to a “regime,” and later via bribes, threats and ostracism.
The second is a type of discourse power meaning how hegemonic powers are able to – depending on rank – credibly assert that they prosecute claims on behalf of international law, or in defiance of it if accompanied by an emergency trump-card.12 London and Paris notably lost this power at Suez (1956) when confronted by Washington which pivoted to the Arab world; a transfer of allegiance thrown into relief by the poverty of its immediate results, which included the permanent alienation of France, which went on to develop its own nuclear weapon, and president Nasser’s insistence on praising the Soviet premier Krushchev rather than president Eisenhower for stopping imperialist “aggression.”
America’s auto-exemptions from the laws it lauds are legion. At the Tokyo Tribunal (1946-1948) for example the United States excluded the emperor Hirohito to ensure its occupation of Japan went smoothly. Atrocities including the No Gun Ri massacre (1950) in Korea, the My Lai massacre (1968) in Vietnam, as well as the nine deaths at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where president George Bush argued that the detainees were not entitled to any of the provisions of the Geneva Convention, received media attention but rarely legal scrutiny. Furthermore, nobody held the former secretary of state Hilary Clinton to account for ordering her security services to break the communications systems of the U.N. security-general of the U.N., the other four members of the Security Council, and to secure the biometric data, credit-card numbers etc. of key U.N. officials in 2009.
Nowhere is the hierarchy displayed more nakedly than the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (1968) which reserves the right to deploy nuclear weapons to five powers. The treaty has an approximate function to the aforementioned justiciable rights – which are born as legal fictions but work as political millstones – in that it is technically non-binding but in reality forms a political albatross. Non-aligned India went through hell to get its stockpile, North Korea and Iran are treated as outlaws for their efforts, meanwhile it is an open secret that Israel, a U.S. ally, possesses them.
In reality international law is neither properly international nor law but the mystification of an ideology so that its prescriptions are not dismissed on ideological grounds. It attempts to represent particular interests as abstractions so that they gain a universal purchase. It is performative in the sense that its pronouncements attempt to bring into being what they invoke; its purpose is to blur the lines between coercion and consent, conjuring utopias as apologies.
In the early days of the PRC international law was ignored or embraced only on paper, but in 1996 president Jiang Zemin warned the Central Committee that this had resulted in an ignorance that put it at a strategic disadvantage. He called on China to become ‘adept at using international law as a weapon to safeguard our national interests… and to firmly grasp the initiative in international cooperation and struggle.’ These words would not be used by Xi who prefers to couch initiatives as reactions to western encroachment (“We must reject all acts of power politics and bullying” he announced at the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs in late December 2023) but they encapsulate Beijing’s approach to international law. On a superficial level China cooperates and on a strategic plane it fights to overturn its fundamentals.
A critical mass of other powers also refuse to buy into the globalist dream and resent the rewriting of America’s imperial history as politics of a higher order. They agree with Xi Jinping that the West misreads history when it assumes that “modernization is synonymous with westernization and vice versa.” Yet for all of Xi’s geopolitical packaging, such as the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), the alignment is explicitly negative. It does not occur in the name of a new structure with superior moral claims – most for instance would disagree with Xi’s claim that China overcomes the contradiction between private ownership of the means of production and socialized large-scale production in a more effective way to the western world – but as a rejection of foreign universalisms; a sense of revulsion towards the weight afforded to a culture to which they never signed up. China leads this group but it is only the largest scalp of a hydra-headed resistance.
NOTES
- To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926) p.136. ↩︎
- While the CCP denounces imperialism, its nationalization of the Qing empire represents a survival of nineteenth century maximalism which encouraged the development of the Megali Idea, Turanism and so on. Moreover, the treatment of natives in Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia etc. by both government and the Han majority today is attuned with the spirit of one of China’s most representative thinkers, the seventeenth-century Wang Fuzhi, who argued that regarding barbarians ‘to slaughter them is not an unbenevolent act, to deceive them is not untrustworthy, and to steal their land and wealth is not unrighteous’ cf. Chunqiu Jiashuo (CSQS) 5:299. ↩︎
- The SCO’s membership includes China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran as well as most of Central Asia, and while the organization is primarily a security pact, it focuses on internal security. Nevertheless, Russia and India appear keen to see it develop into a powerful platform for multilateral collaboration to consolidate and further domestic, regional and Asian interests. ↩︎
- A patronizing view that the Chinese are a passive people whose apathy enables oppressive regimes is shared by both the West and Russia and strikes a remarkable contrast with the fact that the Chinese view themselves as naturally tumultuous to the extent that only authoritarian governments can prevent the eruption of incessant civil war. ↩︎
- Modi’s choice of words for his vision of the future at the G20 meeting in New Delhi, September 2023, was revealing. He called it the “century of Asia” in order to avoid becoming constrained by U.S. narratives and prepare room for deeper relationships with China and Russia when expedient. See “21st Century belongs to Asia, Modi tells ASEAN ahead of G20,” EFE, September 7, 2023. ↩︎
- This shift in focus towards Palestine has led to an increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric in some circles. In the past, such sentiments were often veiled in backhanded compliments that acknowledged the intelligence and influence of Jewish people. However, positive remarks often masked underlying distrust. This complex interplay of admiration and prejudice has historical roots in the earliest nationalists who simultaneously admired and criticized aspects of the Zionist movement. ↩︎
- Only Egypt appears in a worse position, caught on two horns in that its failure to join the U.S. coalition leads it to forfeit $9 billion in annual revenue that the Suez Canal provides annually, while joining it would signal a betrayal of not only China – which is the lead funder of its $60 billion New Administrative Capital – as well as the greater Palestinian cause. See “Suez Canal…” Reuters, June 21, 2023. ↩︎
- George Allison, “How much does it cost to operate a Type 45 Destroyer?” UK Defence Journal, June 8, 2021. This also fails to take into account the cost of shipping damage. Bulk carriers can cost between $25-65 million depending on size, while drones cost around $2,000, though the Houthis have diversified their arsenal, firing pricier anti-ship ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. ↩︎
- The Ukrainian war also lacks the political and media pressure applied by cross-party vehicles such as the House Select Committee on the CCP, which alerts both the public and the 118th Congress to threats posed by Beijing. ↩︎
- Frustratingly for the author, the wind that pushes westwards is privileged in Chinese culture as it is this wind, the east wind, 东风, Dongfeng, that is used as a metaphor for the driving force or momentum of revolution and progress, and so the PLA uses “east wind” (Dongfeng) as the name of its tactical missiles. ↩︎
- The problem with the Eurasian bet that the West lacks a readiness to accept cost is that it is only half-right. As a bloc it does seem uniquely predisposed to avoiding conflict after its 20th century wars yet after it has exhausted all other possibilities, the West would almost certainly mount a war while framing it as self-defense, a rescue attempt, or a civilizing mission. ↩︎
- Rough parallels occur in identitarian politics when leftists declare which ethnic minority representatives are authentic or otherwise. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Islamic “voice,” for example, was deemed “inauthentic” by the Dutch sociologist Merjin Oudenhampsen, while her subsequent conversion to Christianity was reckoned ideologically motivated by the right. For the former, see “Deconstructing Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” Politics, Religion & Ideology, September 19 (2016), p. 3. For an example of the latter, see its rejection by Sohrab Ahmari, “In Defense of Ayaan…” American Conservative, November 14, 2023. ↩︎
Henry Hopwood-Phillips is a senior analyst at Mandeville, a political risk consultancy. Send him mail.
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