Chinese Claim on Arunachal Pradesh (South Tibet)

 

Chinese Claim on Arunachal Pradesh (South Tibet)

Introduction

The Sino-Indian border dispute is an ongoing territorial dispute over the sovereignty of two relatively large, and several smaller, separated pieces of territory between China and India. The first of the territories, Aksai Chin, is administered by China as part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Tibet Autonomous Region and claimed by India as part of the union territory of Ladakh; it is mostly uninhabited high-altitude wasteland in the larger regions of Kashmir and Tibet and is crossed by the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway, but with some significant pasture lands at the margins.

 

The other disputed territory is south of the McMahon Line, in the area formerly known as the North-East Frontier Agency and now called Arunachal Pradesh which is administered by India. The McMahon Line was part of the 1914 Simla Convention signed between British India and Tibet, without China's agreement. China disowns the agreement, stating that Tibet was never independent when it signed the Simla Convention. This article addresses the former stated disputed territory .

 

The 1962 Sino-Indian War was fought in both disputed areas. Chinese troops attacked Indian border posts in Ladakh in the west and crossed the McMahon line in the east. There was a brief border clash in 1967 in the region of Sikkim. In 1987 and in 2013, potential conflicts over the two differing Lines of Actual Control were successfully de-escalated. A conflict involving a Bhutanese-controlled area on the border between Bhutan and China was successfully de-escalated in 2017 following injuries to both Indian and Chinese troops.Multiple brawls broke out in 2020, escalating to dozens of deaths in June 2020.

 

Agreements signed pending the ultimate resolution of the boundary question were concluded in 1993 and 1996. This included "confidence-building measures" and the Line of Actual Control. To address the boundary question formalised groups were created such as the Joint Working Group (JWG) on the boundary question. It would be assisted by the Diplomatic and Military Expert Group. In 2003 the Special Representatives (SRs) mechanism was constituted. In 2012 another dispute resolution mechanism, the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) was framed.

 

At least 24 soldiers were killed when the two sides clashed in the Ladakh region, on the western part of their border, in 2020 but the situation calmed down after diplomatic and military talks.

 

In December 2022 troops from the two sides engaged in scuffles in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh

 

Renaming

India rejected ((2023)  the renaming by China of places in what India regards as its eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as part of its territory. The statement included a map that showed the 11 places renamed by China as being within “Zangnan”, or southern Tibet in Chinese, with Arunachal Pradesh included in southern Tibet and China’s border with India demarcated as just north of the Brahmaputra river. a spokesperson at the Chinese foreign ministry said the name changes were “completely within the scope of China’s sovereignty”. “The southern Tibet region is Chinese territory,” the spokesperson, Mao Ning, told a regular media briefing in Beijing  

 

Tipping Point.

 

The year 2020 marked the 70th anniversary of Sino-Indian relations and also became one of the watershed years in the history of bilateral ties between India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Following disagreements between the two countries over territorial delineation and their armies setting up military posts in or near disputed areas, Chinese and Indian troops clashed fiercely at Galwan Valley near Ladakh on 15 June 2020, leading to the death of 20 Indian soldiers and an unidentified number of Chinese troops (BBC 2020). The localized conflict escalated rapidly into a full-blown crisis, with both sides deploying additional troops, missile launchers, and armed helicopters. By all appearances, China and India were on the brink of another war. Further escalation was prevented by a timely intervention by political and military officials, however, the brutality and magnitude of the violence witnessed during the few days that the crisis lasted has complicated the disengagement process, since neither country wanted to be seen as compromising on its national interests  . The Galwan Valley clash was significant for two reasons; first because it shattered the 1988 consensus of keeping the border dispute divorced from the broader relationship and repositioned the border dispute at the centre of bilateral ties, making diplomatic and economic relations contingent upon developments on the border (Vasudeva 2020). Second, the animosity exhibited by the two sides reversed years of hard-won diplomatic and political improvements that had strengthened cooperative structures, setting bilateral ties back years and placing the Sino-India relationship at crossroads where prospects for a major reset appear bleak. The first attribute is perhaps more damaging because the border dispute was already a major driving factor in Sino-Indian rivalry, and its increased prominence is likely to intensify feelings of hostility in New Delhi and Beijing. Moreover, as the existing bilateral border management framework appears to be severely compromised, the rise of border tensions portend a new era of uncertainty where bilateral interaction will be more adversarial, conflict-prone, and volatile.

 

Genesis of Sino-Indian Border Dispute

 

Over its seven decades, the Sino-Indian border dispute has become an intractable disagreement, with no resolution in sight. The question of a disputed border emerged in the early 1950s when the PRC effected its occupation of Tibet, a move which created for China and India one of the longest undemarcated borders of the world. The proximity of the Chinese military presence so close to the undemarcated frontier created considerable consternation in New Delhi. Factions of Indian policy elites led by India’s first home minister and also its first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and then-Bombay Governor Girija Shankar Bajpai urged the government of then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to enhance the military and administrative presence along India’s north-east region (Raghavan 2012, 80). However, both Nehru and India’s ambassador to China, K.M. Pannikar, were reluctant to annoy their powerful northern neighbour and decided that India would not actively pursue the border question with Beijing, but would explicitly announce their endorsement of the McMahon Line as India’s border (Luthi and Das Gupta 2017, 8–10). Beijing, on the other hand, was less perturbed by the status of the common border as the new communist regime was more engaged in consolidating its authority at home, supressing rebellions, dealing with poverty, agrarian crises, and fears of invasion by the United States and the exiled nationalist government of the Republic of China, then in exile in Taiwan. Accordingly, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) saw fit to put the boundary issue on the backburner until they were well-prepared to address it (Chaowu 2017, 70). Central to the border dispute was two flanks of territories lying at the two extremities of the vast border; the Aksai Chin region in the western sector, and the India-controlled and administered North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, in the eastern sector. While New Delhi extended its claims on the basis of maps inherited from the British, Beijing claimed that these territories were historically part of Tibet. Over the next few years, the territorial disagreements between the two countries only deepened as the Tibet crisis, Dalai Lama’s refuge in India, and New Delhi’s Forward Policy only intensified the mutual distrust and led to the 1962 war (Shankar 2018, 29–34).

 

China and India fought a war along parts of their poorly demarcated 3,800-km (2,360-mile) frontier in 1962 and clashes in mountainous regions in recent years have seriously strained relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

 

Background

 

The Chinese stand firm on the stance that the area has historically been part of Southern Tibet and that Beijing never partook in any agreement signed during the India-Tibet negotiations in 1912, thus wholly rejecting the British-drawn McMahon line. It is worth mentioning that due to its size and population, the state of Arunachal Pradesh holds the utmost significance in the Sino-India border dispute

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The McMahon Line

 

 

British India annexed Assam in northeastern India in 1826, by Treaty of Yandabo at the conclusion of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826). After subsequent Anglo-Burmese Wars, the whole of Burma was annexed giving the British a border with China's Yunan province.

 

In 1913–14, representatives of Britain, China, and Tibet attended a conference in Simla, India and drew up an agreement concerning Tibet's status and borders. The McMahon Line, a proposed boundary between Tibet and India for the eastern sector, was drawn by British negotiator Henry McMahon on a map attached to the agreement. All three representatives initialled the agreement, but Beijing soon objected to the proposed Sino-Tibet boundary and repudiated the agreement, refusing to sign the final, more detailed map. After approving a note which stated that China could not enjoy rights under the agreement unless she ratified it, the British and Tibetan negotiators signed the Simla Convention and more detailed map as a bilateral accord. Neville Maxwell states that McMahon had been instructed not to sign bilaterally with Tibetans if China refused, but he did so without the Chinese representative present and then kept the declaration secret.

 

 

 

 

 

 

India's claim line in the eastern sector follows its interpretation of the McMahon Line. The line drawn by McMahon on the detailed 24–25 March 1914 Simla Treaty maps clearly starts at 27°45’40"N, a trijunction between Bhutan, China, and India, and from there, extends eastwards. Most of the fighting in the eastern sector before the start of the war would take place immediately north of this line. However, India claimed that the intent of the treaty was to follow the main watershed ridge divide of the Himalayas based on memos from McMahon and the fact that over 90% of the McMahon Line does in fact follow the main watershed ridge divide of the Himalayas. They claimed that territory south of the high ridges here near Bhutan (as elsewhere along most of the McMahon Line) should be Indian territory and north of the high ridges should be Chinese territory. In the Indian claim, the two armies would be separated from each other by the highest mountains in the world.

 

During and after the 1950s, when India began patrolling this area and mapping in greater detail, they confirmed what the 1914 Simla agreement map depicted: six river crossings that interrupted the main Himalayan watershed ridge. At the westernmost location near Bhutan north of Tawang, they modified their maps to extend their claim line northwards to include features such as Thag La ridge, Longju, and Khinzemane as Indian territory. Thus, the Indian version of the McMahon Line moves the Bhutan-China-India trijunction north to 27°51’30"N from 27°45’40"N. India would claim that the treaty map ran along features such as Thag La ridge, though the actual treaty map itself is topographically vague (as the treaty was not accompanied with demarcation) in places, shows a straight line (not a watershed ridge) near Bhutan and near Thag La, and the treaty includes no verbal description of geographic features nor description of the highest ridges.

 

Boundary disputes  

 

In 2006, the Chinese ambassador to India claimed that all of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory amidst a military buildup. At the time, both countries claimed incursions as much as a kilometre at the northern tip of Sikkim. In 2009, India announced it would deploy additional military forces along the border. In 2014, India proposed China should acknowledge a "One India" policy to resolve the border dispute.

    

 

In April 2013 India claimed, referencing their own perception of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) location, that Chinese troops had established a camp in the Daulat Beg Oldi sector, 10 km (6.2 mi) on their side of the Line of Actual Control. This figure was later revised to a 19 km (12 mi) claim. According to Indian media, the incursion included Chinese military helicopters entering Indian airspace to drop supplies to the troops. However, Chinese officials denied any trespassing having taken place. Soldiers from both countries briefly set up camps on the ill-defined frontier facing each other, but the tension was defused when both sides pulled back soldiers in early May. In September 2014, India and China had a standoff at the LAC, when Indian workers began constructing a canal in the border village of Demchok, Ladakh, and Chinese civilians protested with the army's support. It ended after about three weeks, when both sides agreed to withdraw troops. The Indian army claimed that the Chinese military had set up a camp 3 km (1.9 mi) inside territory claimed by India. According to scholar Harsh V. Pant, China gains territory with every incursion.

 

In September 2015, Chinese and Indian troops faced off in the Burtse region of northern Ladakh after Indian troops dismantled a disputed watchtower the Chinese were building close to the mutually agreed patrolling line.[60]

 

 

 

 

In June 2020, Indian and Chinese troops engaged in a brawl in the Galwan River valley which reportedly led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers.  

 

Recent developments

 

Union Sports Minister Anurag Thakur on Friday cancelled his visit to the Asian Games, due to China’s denial of entry to Indian wushu players from Arunachal Pradesh, even as the government registered an official protest at the decision. The three players — Nyeman Wangsu, Onilu Tega and Mepung Lamgu — were refused entry . While Ms. Wangsu could not board the flight from Delhi, the other two were told they could only travel till Hong Kong. With no further development and their event scheduled for Sunday, it seems unlikely they will be able to participate. Government officials in New Delhi said they were surprised by China’s treatment of the three sportspersons from Arunachal Pradesh who had valid accreditation. Despite ongoing tensions between India and China at the Line of Actual Control, Mr. Thakur, who also holds the portfolios of Information and Broadcasting and Youth Affairs, was scheduled to travel to Hangzhou for the inauguration of the Asian Games by Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday. It was only after the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) learnt on Friday, that the players were stopped from boarding their flight from Delhi late on Thursday night, that the decision was taken to cancel the ministerial visit, and to lodge protests with Beijing. An official told The Hindu that it could not have been a “coincidence” that the three sportspersons targeted were all from Arunachal Pradesh.

 

“The Government of India has learnt that the Chinese authorities have, in a targeted and premeditated manner, discriminated against some of the Indian sportspersons from Arunachal Pradesh,” said MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi. “In line with our long-standing and consistent position, India firmly rejects differential treatment of Indian citizens on the basis of domicile or ethnicity,” he said.   Reacting to India’s decision to cancel the ministerial visit, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs doubled down, saying that its government has “never recognised so-called Arunachal”. On August 28, China released the “2023 edition of the standard map of China”, which continues to show the entire State of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin region within China’s borders.  The map followed an announcement from Beijing in April that it would “standardise” the names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, including a town close to the capital Itanagar. This was the third such list “renaming” places in Arunachal Pradesh.

INDIA and RAW on a killing spree

 INDIA and RAW on a killing spree

 

Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, was shot dead outside a Sikh temple on June 18 2023 in Surrey, a Vancouver suburb with a large Sikh population. Nijjar supported a Sikh homeland in the form of an independent Khalistani state

 

 

In the UK, Avtar Singh Khanda, who was said to be the head of the Khalistan Liberation Force, died in Birmingham in June 2023

 

Paramjit Singh Panjwar, who was designated a terrorist by India, was shot dead in May 2023 in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province.

 

The Canadian government has now said that there is irrefutable  evidence of involvement of Indian agencies in the killing in Canada   Canada's foreign minister  said a top Indian diplomat, Pavan Kumar Rai, had been expelled over the case.

 

The UK killing is likely to be arranged by RAW in similar fashion although no such claim has been made by the UK authorities .

 

THE KILLING IN Pakistan is significant as it would be likely to have been carried out by TTP or Daesh or BLA and could conclusively establish, already known ties, between RAW and terrorist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan

 

The fallout continues from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement that his government is investigating “credible allegations of a potential link” between the Indian government and the killing of a Sikh leader in British Columbia.

If those allegations are proven, experts said the June 18 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar would represent a targeted, extrajudicial killing on foreign soil – and mark a flagrant violation of international law.

Canada’s allies have only given muted and rhetorical support to Canada over the Indian/ RAW killings of the Sikh leader in Canada The US and the West deem that their  anti China alliance has more importance than State terrorism on foreign soil . This Machiavellian approach brings to light the US stance over human rights and terrorism. only when core American interests are not threatened are the lofty human rights issues  evoked ,but even when there are blatant and brazen trampling of such lofty ideas by a key ally  the US chooses to look elsewhere  There is defiantly a need for a bi polar World Order  and US dominance and imperialism needs to be checked and balanced.  Also remember that under the Indian set up the RAW and intelligence chiefs and organizations report directly to the Prime Minister 

“This episode should be a warning to Western leaders, including [US President Joe Biden], who have fawned over Modi. The last couple of decades of travails with Vladimir Putin should have taught us something about the difficulties of trying to reform nationalist authoritarians, or the perils of granting them impunity.”

“In this case, though, Modi isn’t showing any sign of investigating and seems to be trying to profit politically, by inflaming the prickly nationalism that has carried his career forward so far.

He portrays himself as defender of India’s Hindu majority from Muslim jihadis or Sikh separatists — or sanctimonious Western imperialists — and this dust-up might actually help him in next year’s Indian elections.”

“”We must not forget that in India, the intelligence services report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office,” said Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya, an Indian intelligence specialist at the University of Hull.

Sending agents to assassinate their target in a foreign country is therefore all the more risky for the Indian government.

“If the operation is discovered, it is the direct responsibility of the head of government”

That perhaps stiffened the resolve of Narendra Modi’s government to brazen the allegations out. India angrily denies them, even as it hints that, whoever did for Mr Nijjar, he had it coming. In this, many Indians cheer their government on. It had long branded the dead Canadian a terrorist for advocating a separate Sikh homeland in Punjab and associating with violent groups dedicated to that cause. Indians grimly recall—as the West generally does not—the bloody insurgency and fierce repression this inspired, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It led to tens of thousands of deaths in Punjab from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and to the assassination in 1984 of Indira Gandhi, India’s then prime minister, by her Sikh bodyguards.

But Canada is now starting to look rather less isolated than Mr Trudeau’s Indian critics assumed it was. It turns out that some of the intelligence pointing to Indian involvement in the killing was collected—and provided to the Canadians—by America. Both countries are part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing club that also includes Australia, Britain and New Zealand. Mr Biden and other Five Eyes leaders duly raised the killing in private with Mr Modi, earlier in September at the g20 summit in Delhi. Mr Modi saw that confab as the latest great coming-out party for India. The Nijjar row has put a dampener on it.

India probably underestimated the strength of Western solidarity. It viewed Canada as a second-order power in which, if the allegations are true, it felt able to meddle egregiously or, if the allegations are not true, whose concerns it could dismiss out of hand. As Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution in Washington has noted, this was to underestimate the ties that bind America to Canada. The two countries are hand-in-glove security and intelligence allies as well as neighbours. The assassination also has implications for America’s security. It cannot accept foreign-backed hitmen operating in North America. For that matter, there are Sikh communities in America, too. Economist 

New World Order

 

New World Order

China’s Xi Jinping, who has never missed a G20 summit since taking power in 2012 will not attend the years submit . Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-ranking leader, is expected to attend in Xi’s place.

Xi’s expected no-show at the G20 could also signal his disillusion with the existing global system of governance – and structures he sees as too dominated by American influence. Instead, Xi may be prioritizing multilateral forums that fit into China’s own vision for how the world should be governed – such as the recently concluded BRICS summit and the upcoming Belt and Road Forum.

 

To some analysts, Xi’s absence may mark a shift in how China views the G20, a premier global forum that brings together the world’s leading advanced and emerging economies representing 80% of global GDP.

 

China used to see the platform as a relatively neutral space for global governance and placed a high priority on G20 diplomacy, said Jake Werner, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute in Washington DC.

 

Since its first leaders’ summit in 2008, China’s top leader has always attended the gathering – including by video link during the Covid pandemic. And when China hosted its first G20 summit in 2016, it pulled out all the stops to make the event a success and showcase its growing clout on the world stage.

 

Since then, however, relations between the world’s two largest economies have been fraught with rising tension and rivalry. Now, “China sees the G20 space as increasingly oriented toward the US and its agenda, which Xi Jinping regards as hostile to China,” Werner said.

 

About half of the group’s members are US allies, which the Biden administration has rallied to take a tougher stance in countering China. Beijing is also increasingly viewing tensions with other members – such as the border dispute with India – through its difficult relationship with the United States, Werner said.

 

Beijing has bristled at New Delhi’s growing ties with Washington, especially its engagement in the Quad – a US-led security grouping decried by Beijing as an “Indo-Pacific NATO.” “China sees India in the anti-China camp and therefore doesn’t want to add value to a major international summit India is organising,” said Happymon Jacob, a professor of international studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

 

Divisions over the Ukraine war are also casting a shadow over the summit. So far, India has not been able to broker a joint statement in any of the key G20 meetings since it took over the presidency last December.

 

China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion and continued diplomatic support for Moscow has amplified its friction with the West.

 

“China has said that it thinks the G20 should be limited to economic discussions. It shouldn’t be politicized around the geopolitical fault lines that the United States and the Europeans want to push,” Werner said.Chinese analysts concur that Beijing may see the G20 as a platform with diminishing value and effectiveness.

 

Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University, said the G20 has become a more “complicated and challenging” stage for Chinese diplomacy compared with several years ago, as the number of members friendly to China has dwindled.

 

 

Xi last attended the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November last year, when he emerged from China’s Covid isolation and declared his return to the world stage. During the two-day summit, he held diplomatic meetings with 11 world leaders – including US President Joe Biden – and invited many of them to visit China.

 

Since then, a long line of foreign dignitaries have knocked on Beijing’s door to meet Xi, including G20 leaders from Germany, France, Brazil, Indonesia and the EU, as well as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

 

All the while, Xi has only made two trips abroad this year – and both are central to his attempt to reshape the global world order.

 

In March, Xi traveled to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin – an “old friend” who shares his deep distrust in American power. Last month, he attended the BRICS summit of emerging nations in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the bloc announced the admission of six new members.

 

 

BRICS expansion is a big win for China. But can it really work as a counterweight to the West?

The expansion, hailed as “historic” by Xi, is a major victory for Beijing, which has long pushed to turn the loose economic grouping into a geopolitical counterweight to the West.

 

Magnus, the expert at Oxford University, said the expanded BRICS is an example of the alternative governance structure Beijing wants to build – it includes some of the most important countries in the Global South, with China taking a central role.

 

In recent years, Xi has laid out his vision for a new world order with the announcement of three global initiatives – the Global Security Initiative (a new security architecture without alliances), the Global Development Initiative (a new vehicle to fund economic growth) and the Global Civilization Initiative (a new state-defined values system that is not subject to bounds of universal values).

 

While broad and seemingly vague in substance, “they’re designed as an umbrella under which countries can coalesce around a narrative set by China, which is different from the kind of governance structure that prevails under G20 auspices,” Magnus said.

 

Next month, the Chinese leader is expected to host the Belt and Road Forum to mark the 10th anniversary of his global infrastructure and trade initiative – a key element in Beijing’s new global governance structure.

 

Magnus said initiatives like the Belt and Road, BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – in which Beijing is either a founder or a major player – now have a much elevated status in China.

 

“These entities exist as alternative structures to the ones which China has traditionally joined and had to share the limelight with the United States,” he said.

 

“It’s also sending a message to the rest of the world – not just Global South countries but also wavering countries in the liberal democracy world – that this is China’s pitch.”

 

 

The acronym BRIC, which did not initially include South Africa, was coined in 2001 by then Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill in a research paper that underlined the growth potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The bloc was founded as an informal club in 2009 to provide a platform for its members to challenge a world order dominated by the United States and its Western allies. Its creation was initiated by Russia.

 

The group is not a formal multilateral organisation like the United Nations, World Bank or the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The heads of state and government of the member nations convene annually with each nation taking up a one-year rotating chairmanship of the group.

 

 .

 

South Africa, the smallest member in terms of economic clout and population, was the first beneficiary of an expansion of the bloc in 2010 when the grouping became known as BRICS.Together the countries account for more than 40% of the world population and a quarter of the global economy.

 

 

Apart from geopolitics, the group's focus includes economic cooperation and increasing multilateral trade and development. The bloc operates by consensus. All the BRICS countries are part of the Group of 20 (G20) of major economies.

 

 

Over 40 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Algeria, Bolivia, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, and Kazakhstan have expressed interest in joining the forum, according to 2023 summit chair South Africa.

 

They view BRICS as an alternative to global bodies viewed as dominated by the traditional Western powers and hope membership will unlock benefits including development finance, and increased trade and investment.

 

Dissatisfaction with the global order among developing nations was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic when life-saving vaccines were hoarded by the rich countries.

 

Iran, home to around a quarter of the Middle East's oil reserves, has said it hopes the mechanism for new membership would be decided "at the earliest."

 

Oil heavyweight Saudi Arabia was among more than a dozen countries that participated in "Friends of BRICS" talks in Cape Town in June. It has received backing from Russia and Brazil to join the BRICS.

 

Argentina said in July 2022 it had received China's formal support in its bid to join the group.

 

Ethiopia, one of Africa's fastest-growing economies, said in June it had asked to join the bloc, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying the country will continue to work with international institutions that can protect its interests.

 

Bolivia's President Luis Arce has expressed interest in BRICS membership and is expected to attend the summit. Its government said in July it was determined to curb dependence on the U.S. dollar for foreign trade, instead turning to the Chinese yuan, in line with BRICS leaders' stated aim to reduce dependence on the U.S. currency.

 

Algeria said in July it has applied for BRICS membership and to become a shareholder in the New Development Bank, the so-called BRICS Bank. The North African nation is rich in oil and gas resources and is seeking to diversify its economy and strengthen partnership with China and other countries.

Update Sep 9 2023

James M. Dorsey (00:06):

Hi, and welcome to the Turbulent World with me, James M. Dorsey, as your host.

It's a no-brainer to suggest that we live in an increasingly polarised world. Geopolitics are polarised, so are societies. Polarisation marks the transition from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a bipolar world with China, or more likely a tripolar world that includes India, in which middle powers assert themselves more forcibly.

The polarisation is fueled by populism and civilizationalism, led by men with little regard for international law or rules of the game that would limit their freedom of action. To be fair, adherents of the rule of law also ignore international law when convenient. The result is a breakdown in conflict prevention mechanisms; the US toppling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, despite foreseeable disastrous consequences; Russia's invasion of Ukraine; and rising racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and distrust and hostility towards the other as it manifests itself in anti-migrant sentiment.

(01:27):

Polarisation is also driven by a clash between liberal and conservative values in which both sides attempt to impose their definitions of all kinds of rights. Jason Pack, my guest today, argues the coherent management of the world order has been replaced by what he calls the Global Enduring Disorder. Jason suggests that conventional geopolitical theories fail to explain a world in which many states no longer rationally pursue their long-term interests. A Middle East expert focused on Libya, Jason is the host of the Enduring Disorder Podcast out now with Goal Hanger Podcasts, a senior analyst for emerging challenges at the NATO college in Rome, and the author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder published in 2021 by Oxford University Press.

Jason, welcome to the show

Jason Pack (02:36):

It's a pleasure to be back with you. James,

James M. Dorsey (02:39):

Let's start with you telling us your story. What got you interested in the Middle East, and particularly Libya, and how did that lead you to what you call the Enduring Disorder?

Jason Pack (02:51):

Yeah, that is an interesting way to start, but today, looking at the world affairs and how our daily lives play out, it is, as you say, a no-brainer that we live in a polarised and disordered world, and it's such a no-brainer that you have a podcast called The Turbulent World, and I'm going to have one called Enduring Disorder. It was not such a no-brainer when I got into international affairs 20 or more years ago. In other words, it's been a journey for me to come to realise that international actors were not coordinating as they once did, and that we were not reaching optimal outcomes. How I had this realisation has very much to do with how I ended up studying Libya. I'm from Manhattan, that's where I grew up, James, and I was wanting to be a scientist or a doctor or some kind of healing profession, I guess that motivated me try to do good with my life.

(03:55):

But then we had the 9/11 in my senior year of university, and I wasn't there. I was in Massachusetts at university, but I had a sense, oh, this is a big deal. This is going to change everything. And yes, it might be important to work on blood pressure medication, but maybe the most important thing that my society or country needs is Middle East experts. I didn't know how to become one and I had never been to the region, but I moved to Beirut after I graduated college and I grew this really long beard, thinking that that would help me fit in, and within two days I had to shave it off because everyone was like, are you a Shia cleric? And I was like, oh, whoops. Okay, I'm going to have a lot to learn here. So, it's been a really long process. How I got to the idea of the Global Enduring Disorder is more proximal than those heady days of 2001, 2002.

(04:59):

I ran a small trade association with members that no one has ever heard of, like Conoco Phillips and Pepsi and Hess Oil, and that was called the US Libya Business Association, and I had the idea at that time, oh, Libya needs products. It needs not only oil field services, but soft drinks and diabetes medicines and all of that. If we can help the Libyans have these things, this will be good for the Libyans and good for America. It's like a very standard kind of win-win situation. But through my job in Washington running the US Libya Business Association, I came to realise that the businesses were not trying to promote business to Libya and US policy towards Libya was not predicated exclusively on helping the Libyans or helping our companies. Even furthermore, the Italians and the French were on opposite sides of a civil war, and those are EU member states and diplomacy didn't work in the way that I imagined it would work. So, from my perch on K Street in the end of the Obama and beginning of the Trump years, I realised that this disorder was deeper than I had possibly imagined, and that launched me to write my book, Libby and the Global Enduring Disorder, and then to expand that concept into studying things like climate change and tax havens via my Disorder podcast.

James M. Dorsey (06:33):

Before we delve in greater depth into the enduring disorder, let me come at you, for a moment, out of left field. We've known each other for almost a decade, but I only recently realised that we share a passion for backgammon and that you are a backgammon champion. You've written about backgammon and geopolitics. What is the connection between the two?

Jason Pack (06:57):

Wow, thank you for that compliment. Always good to have a little left field action. I also kind of found backgammon randomly when I was living in Syria. I would go smoke hookah at cafes and play what the Arabs called Mahpous, which is where all the checkers start on the ace point, and I discovered Western backgammon a little bit later. I think that backgammon is a really great simulation for many things in life, much better than chess or poker. Why is that? In chess, the one who is better always wins, but that's not the way that life is. Life has a lot of chance. I also don't think life is modelled entirely by poker because in poker you can completely bluff the opponent and win with the weakest hand possible. I'm not sure life is like that, but life is a combination of luck and skill, bluff and the role of the dice, and I think back backgammon models that quite well. So, I've drawn quite a few lessons and I think if you want to explore it, we can talk about how we got in this Ukraine mess can be modelled via game theory.

James M. Dorsey (08:04):

I'd love to come back to that. I think that's a fascinating question. But let's start off with, define for us what you mean with a global enduring disorder. The implication is that great power rivalry is not about creating a new world order, but about permanent disorder and unbridled competition. Is that what you envision?

Jason Pack (08:27):

Not exactly, but you hit on some important points. If I could push back against some traditional views that you might've referenced, I do not think that we're moving from an American-led hegemony to a bipolar struggle or cold war with China. Nor do I think we're moving towards multipolarity with Europe regulating its area and the Indians trying to have a sphere of influence. Those are all things that are envisioned classical IR theory. I see us moving into a different kind of world which is not envisioned by classical international relations theory at all. What I see is major world powers no longer trying to order the globe nor competing with other powers for spheres of influence. Rather, if you look at the US under Trump, Brexit-oriented Britain, Putin's Russia, Xi’s China, a Bolsonaro Brazil, or a post-Bolsonaro, Brazil, Orban’s Hungary, you see many different leaders who are not concerned at maximising their interests nor concerned in ordering the globe or even their near abroad.

(09:38):

I think it's important to make a contrast between the conflict with the Soviets and the conflict with Putin. So, when we in the West had a conflict with the Soviets, Stalin, or Khrushchev, they had a fully formed ideological and economic system. They want to export it to Cuba. They'd like to win in some conflicts in Africa and export their system, and it has an economic logic. It has books and texts like Lenin and Marx, and then commentaries on them. That's a struggle between two different camps who want to order the world in different ways. A Western capitalist, hegemonic, neoliberal, American-led world order and a Soviet Marxist authoritarian one, and you can read the books and subscribe to their economic system. Right now, there are no books about a Putin-led world order. He doesn't want to win in Ukraine to give them a certain economic vision or that they're going to read Tolstoy and go back to an ordered czarist empire.

(10:52):

He's exporting disorder, James. It's not a system, and I think that that's critical. Putin wins by destabilising our elections and destabilising our societies and stirring up racial tension by problematizing Black Lives Matter or having vaccine conspiracies. He's not exporting a world vision or world order. And I see Trump quite similarly and many other actors, some such as international corporations. Facebook wins by selling ads and YouTube and Twitter polarise us. They're not exporting a world order, and this Global Enduring Disorder concept gets at the fact that this may be a novel way of looking at global affairs, of many nodes who are not competing for order, they're competing to disorder the world.

James M. Dorsey (11:46):

In effect, you're describing a world without global leadership. The question is how much of this is also a world encountering the limitations of the nation-state in confronting global challenges and that at the same time is challenged by leaders who think in civilizational rather than national terms.

Jason Pack (12:07):

I think that's a part of it. The nation-state was able to handle most problems that arose until the pre-World War I era because you didn't have massive financial flows and the world was on the gold standard. We didn't have to have international monetary policy and there was no such thing as tax havens. Really, the line of change, of course was in the distant future. So, today's problems are all global. The Chinese emit a lot of pollution, and it affects someone in Iceland, and Russian oligarchs take money out of their own country and they put it in the Cayman Islands, and then the corruption creates jobs in the city of London and influences British politics. We live in a global world where the tech algorithms and the flows of money cannot be solved by the nation-state, and that is 100% a part of the global enduring disorder.

James M. Dorsey (13:04):

And to what degree is the global disorder or the enduring disorder fueled by the lack of attractive governance models? Democracy is in crisis. Western powers are hampered by hypocrisy and double standards and marred by efforts to impose their values. China is faltering and is primarily an economic and trade partner, and Putin's Russia has few, if any, saving graces.

Jason Pack (13:31):

That's a key part of why western Democratic popular votes go for what I call anti-politics. People didn't really want what Trump was offering. They just weren't angry and wanted to vote against someone they perceived as the global elite. A lot of Brexit voters didn't actually think that Brexit would make Britain richer or better, but they were like, screw the Tories, screw David Cameron. So yes, anti-politics is the product of the fact that we in the western liberal democratic elites have not made a great case for how our visions are going to help everyone, and I think that we should take responsibility for that, and we need better communicators. What is quite tragic is that Obama as great a communicator as he was, as appealing as he was to populations in the global south and in the Muslim world, he didn't actually succeed at making the lives of African-Americans or the underclass in America any better, and he didn't assuage the fissures between the West and the non-West. So, we had a chance for a great communicator, and he achieved very little. So yes, there is a kind of idea deficit for how to connect to people. Why would you want to make a sacrifice to help spread democracy? I don't think that many voters in America and Britain really know why they would want that.

James M. Dorsey (15:09):

Which leads me to my next question, which is crafting a new world order is the preserve of elites with vested interests. You argue that one essential ingredient in crafting that world order is grassroots pressure. How would that work effectively, particularly in a world in which popular revolts like the uprisings in the Middle East have failed to achieve sustainable change, counter revolutionist, triumph, political rights are curtailed and authoritarianism and adequacy are riding high?

Jason Pack (15:44):

James, there are lots of problems with grassroots mobilisation, but I think it's the only chance that we have. We need both bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. We need a better than Obama figure who doesn't want to just solve things for the US but wants to work with Chile and Taiwan and Mozambique and work on enforcing limits that will help climate change and curb emissions. But then we needed bottom grassroots up, like those extinction rebellion protests, but actually with concrete solutions that corporations can get behind, whereby the youth have something that they want, but it's pragmatic enough that they're going to get CEOs who are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to actually implement, whether it's the green vision or new kinds of taxes on illicit funds and the problems that we face are of a scope and scale that has never been faced in human history. And when people say, oh, but we had World War II. World War II was a very, very different kind of problem than this and didn't necessitate the kind of global institutional challenges. America and Britain could simply fight the Germans. We are not at a place where the nation-state is going to be the primary locus of solving these challenges.

James M. Dorsey (17:16):

The question is how do you get from A to B? I mean, I fundamentally agree with you, but if we look at civil society, certainly civil society in Western countries, as a matter of fact, many of the non-governmental organisations we talk about are institutions with their own vested interests. So the question is how do you get to a grassroots movement that genuinely is capable of crafting something that is new and that is workable?

Jason Pack (17:52):

This is something we discuss on the Disorder podcast. I got fed up of think tanks that publish articles about this problem, that problem, and then you read the paper and it's this crisis. These people have no solutions. I have many friends who have great podcasts with titles like Power Corrupts and Doomsday Watch, and I realised these are amazing podcasts, but where are the solutions? So, at my podcast, the Disorder podcast, we deal with the problem each episode that might be tax havens, it might be the struggle for global leadership, in other words, issues like what we're talking about. But then at the end we have the ordering the disorder segment where the expert that I have on the show that week proposes an actual solution, and it might be something implementable like here's a tax that can whatever. Or you might be surprised and think that the Russian oligarch should destabilise our elections in this way and that way.

(18:50):

But actually if the EU, the British Empire, Commonwealth States, and the US passed these campaign finance reforms in harmony that would stop this. So, we at the Disorder podcast are prying to propose solutions, some of which are bottom-up, many of which are just simple legislative fixes. Things like when Keir Starmer gets into office, he can simply require that all of the funding that goes to parties in the UK is made transparent. It can be done like that because in Westminster there isn't even checks and balances like we have in the US, and you might not realise that if you added a Labour majority, this problem of illicit financing couldn't be fixed with one vote. So, there are low hanging fruit out there and we are going to need the people to call for them before the politicians will implement that.

James M. Dorsey (19:46):

We recorded a discussion when your book launched roughly 18 months ago, at the time you talked about becoming a NATO Defence College fellow because you wanted to help NATO no longer see itself as an incumbent player, but as a driver in addressing global problems like climate change and tax havens. That raises multiple questions. For one, do you see that as a realistic goal 18 months later, particularly with NATO's focus on supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia? Your NATO fellowship suggests you see your role at the elite rather than the grassroots level, or am I missing something here?

Jason Pack (20:30):

I don't think that's completely fair. I want to just say I don't think that I can change nearly anything, and having a title or a fellowship is not necessarily the way to make change. I think having a podcast and trying to get people behind an idea is much more likely to do that. So, just with that as a preface, I do think that NATO can have a role to play other than just collective defence against Russia. But more importantly, I'm interested in NATO-like institutions, James. In other words, NATO, to my mind, functions better than the UN or the IMF. We can then explore why is that the case? What works about NATO that doesn't work about the UN? Oh, once we've determined those things, could we have a NATO-like institution for something like climate change? Could we have a NATO-like institution for protecting against the dangers of AI taking over the universe? Could we have a NATO-like institution for protecting against misinformation about vaccines or deep fakes online? And my answer to those questions is yes, NATO-like needs to be defined in a very expansive way here, but I want to have popular grassroots driven institutions which address 21st and 22nd century challenges. And not all of those are just going to be shooting and bombing. They're going to be the kind of questions and challenges that we are beginning to face in the mid-21st century and going forward,

James M. Dorsey (22:12):

What is it that makes NATO a better functioning organisation or structure than, for example, the EU? And to what degree is that really replicable given the nature of NATO?

Jason Pack (22:29):

Fantastically worded question, I think that hits the nail on the head. One, NATO is a better institution in many ways than the EU or IMF or UN. Two, it may not be very easily replicable. Now, let me unpack why that's the case. Here's a fascinating statistic that I think a lot of people know intrinsically, but they don't know extrinsically. If you go into the 28 or now 30 NATO member states and you ask them, do you or trust NATO or the leadership or bureaucracy of your own state, in most cases, the populace of the country says, of course, I trust NATO more than the Greek leadership or more than the American leadership. And this is crazy. In the US, Biden and Trump both have negative approval ratings, but if you ask people, Republicans and Democrats, they can't name the NATO leader, but NATO as an institution will have a positive approval rating.

(23:32):

That is unbelievably interesting because it doesn't apply to the UN or the IMF, even though the American electorate also can't name the UN or IMF leader at that time. But they have positive impressions, more than their national leader, of NATO. So, this is extremely relevant to me because it tells me that from Estonia to Canada, including countries with very anti-system politics in general, like say Spain or some Balkan countries, NATO represents a security blanket that they feel that they want. What if we can create an institution which is a blanket for security against, say something like misinformation or cyber threats. It's going to need to have the uncontroversiality of motherhood and apple pie. We talk about this in our NATO episode in Disorder. I interviewed Jamie Shea, the former Deputy Secretary General of NATO. We interviewed Corey Shea, who was at the NATO desk in the Herbert Walker Bush administration, and they said fascinating things about why NATO works.

(24:57):

I spoke to Kurt Volcker this week for an episode that's going to air on my show in November, and Kurt Volcker essentially said, it's probably not replicable because we all agree on the fact that we don't want to get blown up in a nuclear bomb strike. We don't necessarily all agree that there even is climate change. We don't necessarily agree that there should be any taxes and therefore even the most basic parts of the solution are disagreed upon because one man's misinformation is another man's truth. Whereas there's a very small constituency for I want to get blown up in a nuclear attack, and therefore NATO addresses a threat which is more globally recognised among Western democracies than these other threats. And these other threats of misinformation or tax havens may be more divisive as threats. I don't think that that needs to be the case. I think we don't want to live in a world where the AI robots run wild or where deep fakes get to such a level that we can't tell what's a speech that our actual political leader gave as opposed to the speech that the political leader gave. And I think we can use lessons from how NATO operates to create institutions that deal with those threats.

James M. Dorsey (26:16):

Just for our listeners, correct me if I'm wrong, Kurt Volcker was US ambassador to Ukraine, if I'm not incorrect.

Jason Pack (26:24):

He was the US ambassador to NATO and he was US special representative to Ukraine during the Trump period and was involved in the impeachment hearings over Ukraine, the first impeachment, the 2019 impeachment.

James M. Dorsey (26:40):

I want to come back to something that you said, early on in the conversation, in which you talked about Ukraine and game theory. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Jason Pack (26:51):

Sure. I mean, I have a sense that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the kind of classical days of gentlemanly diplomacy, the William Pitts and Edmund Burkes, and then, later on, the Castlerays and Tallyrands and Metternichs of the world understood game theory better than we do now that we've invented game theory as a discipline and that we've gone wrong in how we look at diplomacy. We train our diplomats by having them sit in the State Department and read think tank papers. Maybe that's wrong.

James M. Dorsey (27:29):

Let me interrupt you for a second. Tell us what game theory is.

Jason Pack (27:34):

Sure. It's difficult to explain exactly what game theory is, but in 1945, a group of economists, many of whom were central European Jews who had fled to Britain and America, invented a discipline which looked at the psychological dimensions of choice that you might've heard of, something called the prisoner's dilemma or the chicken problem. And these are problems, like if you and I are told that if we both agree to cooperate, we get a good, but if we both agree to fight, neither of us get a good, but if we fight and the other guy doesn't fight, we get twice as much. This thing promotes you to not cooperate. Even though cooperating might maximise the benefit of everyone fighting is in your own personal best interest if you think the other guy's going to fight. Let's look at fishing rights. If Newfoundland and America and France and Britain all agree, let's not overfish, this is in our best interest, but if just the Newfoundlanders overfish, they get more fish and they get more money.

(28:45):

So, these are game theory problems and game theory is a science that economists have developed gradually from World War II to the present. I'm making the contention that although we have more theoretical understandings of game theory and more scholarly papers about it, our politics and our politicians make choices which are very stupid and don't incorporate basic game theory that people who've never studied game theory know anyway. And that in the classical heyday of diplomacy, that 18th and 19th century era when no one had ever heard of game theory, they made decisions that were much more sophisticated and drew on the key principles of this theory beforehand. Now, if we look at Ukraine, you can see this. We all know the dangers of appeasement. Look at what Neville Chamberlain did. He said, oh, no worries. I'll let you have the Sudetenland and it's going to be fine because then we've made a compromise.

(29:52):

But it turns out that giving Hitler the Sudetenland took away 10 Czech legions and gave him access to more economic goods that he could use to raise more armies. In other words, the West was in a stronger position to confront Hitler before it compromised. So, the appeasement made it easier to appease later and harder to confront later. This is what we did with Putin. Essentially, he attacked Georgia in 2008 and we said, well, we understand, don't worry. Just don't push beyond South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Then we had the red line over Syria and with the red line in Syria, Obama said, if there's any chemical attack, there will be a price. There was a chemical attack. We didn't do anything really. We had some very toothless sanctions. We didn't bomb anything. We didn't kick Russia out of the international community. In 2014, the Budapest memorandum of 1994, which to my mind is the most important treaty that ends the Cold War, was violated when the Russians invade Donbas and they annex Crimea because Ukrainian territorial integrity was guaranteed by Britain, the US and Russia in this treaty, this 1994 Budapest memorandum.

(31:14):

And what did we do? Pretty much nothing. We made some sanctions. We said, you are a really naughty boy Vlad. Vlad, you're going to have to sit in your room. The oligarchs can't have all their bank accounts, but then we let all the oligarchs have their bank accounts. So, we got this wrong from a game theory perspective and Putin concluded the West will do nothing. I can even take Kyiv and they'll do nothing. So, he actually also miscalculated as a result of our miscalculations. We appeased him so much that he thought, I can just go in and take Kyiv. They're never going to arm them, they're never going to do anything. And I see this whole situation as entirely avoidable. We could have deterred him in a million different ways and prevented this situation.

James M. Dorsey (32:05):

Put very simply, what you're really saying is that the West should have stepped in at the first moment that Putin was taking these kind of steps and breaking international law, and we should have halted it right then and there rather than let this escalate.

Jason Pack (32:25):

I don't want just policy wonks who produce papers to make my political decisions. I want people who know a little bit about game theory and psychology and are game playing out this into the future. We made decisions that made it more likely that we would have an international crisis with Putin when in fact, if we had threatened him back or said, Vlad, if you do this, we are going to respond by turning the lights out in St. Petersburg. I don't think he would've done it, but we didn't say that.

James M. Dorsey (33:04):

Again, going back to our discussion early last year, but also at the beginning of this conversation, you saw Libya as a test case for reforming the global enduring disorder. Yet, 18 months later, the North African country with floods devastating the east and poorly maintained dams bursting because of looting and poor maintenance. Libya stands as an example of the dire consequences of polarisation, lack of good governance, and foreign intervention.

Jason Pack (33:37):

Exactly. Libya is the place where I see the global enduring disorder in its purest form, and that hasn't changed. So, 18 months ago, and now, I would say Libya is the product of all of the features from lack of international coordination to major Western allies on opposite sides of the conflict to flows of dark and illicit money to cyber misinformation. There are Russian bots who tweet things at Hafter supporters to intervention of medium powers, like having Turkey on one side and the Emirates on the other or the Saudis doing this, and the Qataris is doing that. You mentioned the dam crisis, which I've written about quite a lot in the last week, obviously this is very tragic, and I have many friends of friends who've been killed or the aunt of a colleague of mine, she died in the floods, and I'm very, very sad about all of this, but what's sadder than a natural disaster is an avoidable crisis that was exacerbated by humans.

(34:43):

People have always died in earthquakes and floods, and I can kind of accept that, but I can't accept that 10 million US dollars was allocated in 2020 to fixing these dams, and that money was never spent. It wasn't that the money was corrupted, it was that it was never spent due to inefficiencies and the difficulties in processing Libyan letters of credit. Then, when the rains were happening in southern Greece, James, the mayor of Derna said, we've got to evacuate the city. He said this even before the rains came to Libya. What was he told by the LNA? No,

James M. Dorsey (35:23):

The LNA being the Libyan National,

Jason Pack (35:25):

Excuse me. What was he told by the Libyan National Army and the rogue General Khalifa Haftar, who essentially is an autocrat controlling the eastern part of the country? He was told everyone should shelter in place. We can't have the authority questioned by having people out on the streets. So, that situation was avoidable, and that to me is the global enduring disorder. It's in the best interest of everyone that these people didn't die. It's in the best interest that the dams were repaired and the people were evacuated. It's not like the Libyan National Army actually wanted to kill the people. They didn't. It's not like some corrupt genius was like, aha, I'm going to steal the money for the dam. It's just a constellation of disordered factors leading to a suboptimal outcome, and that is exactly how I see the international system.

James M. Dorsey (36:24):

So, in your mind, what would it take or what would potentially be the one thing that would start to get people thinking differently?

Jason Pack (36:35):

Well, I know this is depressing, but I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. And those of us who have podcasts called things like The Turbulent World or Disorder or Doomsday Watch or Power Corrupts, we're going to be in business for quite some time because, I think, people need to get so fed up at the nation-state level that they stop voting for neo-populists and nationalists and that they vote for internationalists and institutionalists, but we don't even have that on the left. It's not like Biden is running as an internationalist institutionalist. He's only running as an anti-Trump. He says, I want to return to how America was. He's not presenting a vision of mid-21st century American leadership. We don't really have an offer, a new globalist vision. And I think that that's the reason why Hillary (Clinton)was so unappealing to people, and this might seem like old hat to your non-American listeners, but I think it's really important because American political decisions reverberate out to the globe.

(37:48):

Hillary was maybe the best opportunity for win-win, optimal, really thought through policy solutions, but she couldn't sell them to the American people because she had no vision, and she had no way of explaining why is this good for you. And we're just not there yet. We are not there as a global society whereby Italians and Germans who are fleeing to the AfD, the Alternative for Deutschland, or Georgio Maloney's, neo-populist, essentially neo-fascist party in Italy, see that the Italy First and Germany First and America First doesn't work. America First puts America last. Trump says, I will build the wall and you will have no migrants. He has one term in office and we have more migrants. Think about that, and the wall isn't even built. So, people on the Trumpian side need to probably get so disillusioned, and I don't think that's going to happen until we have more neo-populists who fail spectacularly, and that's depressing. So, whether or not Trump wins the next election, we are going to have more disordering neo-populists, whether they are called DeSantis or Liz Truss or whatever, but it's going to require a much more comprehensive repudiation before we get to any kind of solutions.

 .

 The Chinese government released a white paper on Tuesday to introduce the theoretical base, practice and development of a global community of shared future, as by presenting China's vision of the course of human development, it counters the hegemonic thinking of certain countries that seek supremacy. 

The white paper, titled "A Global Community of Shared Future: China's Proposals and Actions," introduced the background for China to raise the concept of a global community of shared future as the world is undergoing changes on a scale unseen in a century with various problems posing unprecedented challenges for human society. The zero-sum game is doomed to fail, the white paper said. But certain countries still cling to this mindset, blindly pursuing absolute security and monopolistic advantages, which will do nothing for their development in the long run but create a major threat to the world. 

It is increasingly obvious that the obsession with superior strength, and the zero-sum mentality are in conflict with the needs of our times, the white paper said, pointing out that the new era calls for new ideas. 

To build a global community of shared future is to pursue openness, inclusiveness, mutual benefit, equity and justice, the white paper said. The goal is not to replace one system or civilization with another. Instead, it is about countries with different social systems, ideologies, histories, shared rights, and shared responsibilities in global affairs. 

The vision of a global community of shared future stands on the right side of history and on the side of human progress. It introduces a new approach for international relations, provides new ideas for global governance, opens up new prospects for international exchanges and draws a new blueprint for a better world, according to the white paper. 

Such important vision transcends outdated mindsets such as zero-sum game, power politics, and Cold War confrontations. It has become the overall goal of China's major-country diplomacy in the new era, and a great banner that leads the trend of the times and the direction of human progress. 

The concept of a global community of shared future has deep roots in China's profound cultural heritage and its unique experience of modernization. It carries forward the diplomatic traditions of China and draws on the outstanding achievements of all other civilizations, the white paper said. It also manifests China's time-honored historical traditions, distinct characteristics of the times, and a wealth of humanistic values.  

The white paper also pointed out the direction and plan to build a global community of shared future including pressing ahead with a new type of economic globalization in which countries need to pursue a policy of openness and explicitly oppose protectionism, the erection of fences and barriers, unilateral sanctions, and maximum-pressure tactics, so as to connect economies and jointly build an open world economy. 

Some countries are seeking to decouple from China, enclosing themselves in "small yards, high fences," which will ultimately only backfire, the white paper said. Also, some people overstate the need to "reduce dependence" and "de-risk," which is essentially creating new risks. 

The direction and the plan also include following a peaceful development plan, fostering a new type of international relations, practicing true multilateralism and promoting the common values of humanity. 

Over the past decade, China has contributed its strength to building a global community of shared future with firm conviction and solid actions. 

For instance, by July 2023, more than three-quarters of countries in the world and over 30 international organizations had signed agreements on Belt and Road cooperation with China. The BRI originated in China but the opportunities and achievements it creates belong to the whole world. It's an initiative for economic cooperation, not for geopolitical or military alliances, and it's open and inclusive process that neither targets nor excludes any party, the white paper said. 

Among those BRI projects, for example, the China-Laos Railway began operation on December 3, 2021, with 167 tunnels and 301 bridges built in 11 years along its total length of 1,035 kilometers. The railway construction created more than 110,000 local jobs, and helped build about 2,000 kilometers of roads and canals for villages along the railway, benefiting local people. 

Besides the BRI, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative have evolved into a crucial cornerstone for building a global community of shared future, offering China's solutions to major challenges pertaining to peace and development for humanity. 

Facing constant flare-ups of hotspot issues, China has been committed to fulfilling its role as a responsible major country, pushing for the resolution of international and regional flashpoints, such as the Korean Peninsula, Palestine, the Iranian nuclear issue, Syria and Afghanistan, the white paper said. 

On the Ukraine issue, China has actively promoted talks for peace, put forth four points, four things that the international community should do together and three observations, and released China's position on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis and has dispatched the special representative of the Chinese government on Eurasian affairs to engage in extensive interactions and exchanges with stakeholders on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. 

Also, through the mediation of China, Saudi Arabia and Iran achieve historic reconciliation earlier this year, setting a fine example for countries in the region to resolve disputes and differences and achieve good neighborly relations through dialogue and consultation, and catalyzing a wave of reconciliation in the Middle East. 

China has also proposed a range of regional and bilateral initiatives on building communities of shared future and working with stakeholders to build consensus and expand cooperation, there by playing a constructive role in promoting regional peace and development. It also boosts international cooperation in fields including fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing disorder in cyberspace governance and dealing with the global climate challenge. 

Over the past decade, the vision of a global community of shared future has gained broader support. More countries and people have come to the understanding that this vision serves the common interests of humanity, represents popular calls for peace, justice and progress, and can create the greatest synergy among all nations for building a better world, the white paper said. 

 Xi Jinping has a plan for how the world should work, and one year into his norm-shattering third term as Chinese leader, he’s escalating his push to challenge America’s global leadership — and put his vision front and center.

 

“Changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before,” Xi told his audience at the Belt and Road Forum. China, he said, would “make relentless efforts to achieve modernization for all countries” and work to build a “shared future for mankind.”

 

Xi’s vision — though cloaked in abstract language — encapsulates the Chinese Communist Party’s emerging push to reshape an international system it sees as unfairly stacked in favor of the United States and its allies.

 

Viewed as a rival by those countries as its grows increasingly assertive and authoritarian, Beijing has come to believe that now is the time to shift that system and the global balance of power to ensure China’s rise — and reject efforts to counter it.

 

In recent months, Beijing has promoted its alternative model across hefty policy documents and new “global initiatives,” as well as speeches, diplomatic meetings, forums and international gatherings large and small — as it aims to win support across the world.

 

For many observers, this campaign has raised concern that a world modeled on Beijing’s rules is also one where features of its iron-fisted, autocratic rule — like heavy surveillance, censorship and political repression — could become globally accepted practices.

 

But China’s push comes as American wars overseas, unstable foreign policy election-to-election, and deep political polarization have intensified questions about US global leadership. Meanwhile pressing issues like climate change, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s assault on Gaza have sharpened discussion over whether the West is taking the right approach to respond.

 

All this coincides with longstanding calls from countries across the developing world for an international system where they have more say.

 

Many of those countries have substantially enhanced their economic ties with Beijing during Xi’s rule, including under a decade of his up to $1 trillion global infrastructure building drive, which leaders gathered to celebrate last month in the Chinese capital.

 

It remains to be seen how many would welcome a future that hews to China’s worldview — but Xi’s clear push to amplify his message amid a period of unrelenting tensions with the Washington elevates the stakes of the US-China rivalry.

 

And as the procession of world leaders who have visited Beijing in recent months, including for Xi’s gathering last month, make clear: while many nations may be skeptical of a world order pitched by autocratic China — others are listening.

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping poses for a group photo with distinguished guests attending the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 18, 2023. Xi on Wednesday attended the opening ceremony of the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation and delivered a keynote speech. (Photo by Shen Hong/Xinhua via Getty Images)

 

A more than 13,000-word policy document released by Beijing in September outlines China’s vision for global governance and identifies what it sees as the source of current global challenges: “Some countries’ hegemonic, abusive, and aggressive actions against others … are causing great harm” and putting global security and development at risk, it reads.

 

Under Xi’s “global community of shared future,” the document says, economic development and stability are prioritized as countries treat each other as equals to work together for “common prosperity.”

 

In that future, they’d also be free of “bloc politics,” ideological competition and military alliances, and of being held responsible for upholding “‘universal values’ “defined by a handful of Western countries,” the document says.

 

“What the Chinese are saying … is ‘live and let live,’ you may not like Russian domestic politics, you might not like the Chinese political regime — but if you want security, you will have to give them the space to survive and thrive as well,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von de Leyen meet in Beijing on April 6, 2023.

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This vision is woven through three new “global initiatives” announced by Xi over the past two years focusing on development, security and civilization.

 

The initiatives echo some of Beijing’s long-standing talking points and are largely short on detail and heavy on rhetoric.

 

But together, analysts say, they present a case that a US-led system is no longer suited for the current era — and signal a concerted push to reshape the post-World War II order championed by it and other Western democracies.

 

That current international framework was designed to ensure, in theory at least, that even as governments have sovereignty over their countries, they also share rules and principles to ensure peace and uphold basic political and human rights for their populations.

 

China has benefited from that order, supercharging its economy off World Bank loans and expanded opportunities under the World Trade Organization, which Washington backed Beijing to join in 2001 in the hope it would help liberalize the Communist country.

 

Just over two decades later, Beijing is chafing under it.

 

The US and its allies have watched warily as Beijing has not only grown economically competitive, but increasingly assertive in the South China Sea and beyond and more repressive and authoritarian at home.

 

This has driven Washington’s efforts to restrict Chinese access to sensitive technology and impose economic sanctions, which Beijing sees as bald-faced actions to suppress and contain it.

 

The US and other nations have decried Beijing’s intimidation of the self-ruling democracy of Taiwan and tried to hold it to account for alleged human rights violations in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, the latter of which a UN human rights office last year said could amount to “crimes against humanity” — a charge Beijing denies.

 

 

In response, Xi has ramped up longstanding efforts to undercut the concept of universal human rights.

 

“Different civilizations” had their own perceptions of shared human “values,” Xi told leaders of political parties and organizations from some 150 countries earlier this year as he launched China’s “Global Civilization Initiative.” Countries wouldn’t “impose their own values or models on others” if China were setting the agenda, he implied.

 

This builds on Beijing’s argument that governments’ efforts to improve their people’s economic status equates to upholding their human rights, even if those people have no freedom to speak out against their rulers.

 

It also links to what observers say is growing confidence among Chinese leaders in their governance model, which they see as having played a genuinely positive role to foster economic growth globally and reduce poverty — in contrast to a US that has waged wars, sparked a major global financial crisis and faces fraught politics at home.

 

“All this makes China think America is quickly declining,” said Shanghai-based foreign policy analyst Shen Dingli, who says this feeds Xi’s drive not to overturn the existing world order, but revamp it.

 

Beijing, he added, sees the US as merely “paying lip service” to the “liberal order” to hurt other countries.

 

“(China asks) ‘who is more prone to peace and who is less capable of leading the world?’ This has beefed up China’s self-image, (and this idea that) ‘We are great and we should be greater — and we should let the world realize it’s our time,’” he said.

 

Who’s listening?

For strongmen leaders and autocratic governments, Xi’s vision has obvious appeal.

 

While Russia’s Putin, accused of war crimes and continuing his brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine, and Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders are shunned in the West, both were welcomed to Xi’s table of nations in Beijing last month.

 

Just weeks earlier, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — who has been accused of using chemical weapons against his own people — was feted at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, where he arrived on a Chinese-chartered jet and visited a famous Buddhist temple.

 

A headline in the state-run Global Times portrayed Assad’s visit as one from the leader of a “war-torn country respected in China amid Western isolation” — providing a glimpse into the through-the-looking glass scenarios that could become the norm if Xi’s world view gains traction.

 

But Beijing’s broader argument, which implies that a handful of wealthy, Western countries hold too much global power — resonates with a wider set of governments than just those at loggerheads with the West.

 

Those concerns have come into sharper focus in recent weeks as global attention has focused on Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza following the October 7 attack on its territory by Hamas. The US has been in the minority opposed to broad global backing for an immediate humanitarian truce — and its support of Israel is seen in much of the world as enabling the country to continue its retaliation, despite mounting civilian casualties.

 

 

In recent years, even some countries that have for decades embraced a close partnership with the US have drawn closer to China and its vision.

 

“Pakistan aligns with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that a new global era is emerging, characterized by multipolarity and a departure from Western dominance,” said Ali Sarwar Naqvi, a former Pakistani ambassador, now executive director of the Center for International Strategic Studies in Islamabad.

 

But there are also many governments that also remain wary of its politics and ambitions, or of appearing to side with Beijing over the West.

 

“We’ve kept our relationship with all nations open,” Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape told CNN on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum last month, where he delivered a speech calling for more green energy investment in his country under the China-led initiative.

 

“We relate to the West, we relate to the East … We maintain a straight line, we don’t compromise our friendship with all people,” he said.

 

And while others may be ready to back China in calling for a more representative international system — there are questions about what that means under Beijing’s leadership.

 

“China can count on Brazil day and night to say that multilateralism is important, and we have to revisit global governance … however, there’s a very important ‘but,’” according to Rubens Duarte, coordinator of LABMUNDO, a Brazil-based research center for international relations.

 

He points to questions circulating within some countries, like Brazil, about why China is now championing concepts promoted in the Global South for 70 years — and claiming them as its own.

 

“Is China really trying to promote multipolarity — or does China just want to (become a) substitute (for) US influence over the world?” he asked.

 

 

Expanding ambitions

For decades, China has built its international influence around its economic clout, using its own rapid transformation from a deeply impoverished country to the world’s second largest economy as a model it could share with the developing world.

 

It was in this vein that Xi launched his flagship Belt and Road financing drive in 2013, drawing dozens of borrowing nations closer to Beijing and expanding China’s international footprint a year after he became leader with the pledge to “rejuvenate” the Chinese nation to a place of global power and respect.

 

“China’s traditional (foreign policy) thinking was very heavily focused on economic capability as the foundation for everything else. When you become an economic power, you also naturally acquire greater political influence and soft power, et cetera — everything else will fall in line,” said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington.

 

But as China’s economic rise has come alongside geopolitical friction with the US and its allies, Beijing has seen the need to expand its vision “and tackle geopolitical issues as well,” Zhao added.

 

The war in Ukraine has only heightened this dynamic. China’s key economic partners in Europe tightened ties with the US and reassessed their relationships with Beijing after it refused to condemn the Kremlin’s invasion, while at the same time Washington shored up relations with allies in Asia.

 

This “served as a wake-up call to the Chinese that the great power competition with the United States, ultimately, is about (winning over) the rest of the world,” said Sun from the Stimson Center in Washington.

 

 

Then, faced with mounting pressure from the West to condemn Moscow’s invasion of a sovereign country, Beijing instead used the moment to argue its own view for global security.

 

Two months after Russian troops poured into Ukraine, Xi announced China’s “Global Security Initiative,” declaring at an international conference that “bloc confrontation” and “Cold War mentality” would “wreck the global peace framework.”

 

It was an apparent reference not to the Russian aggressor, but to NATO, which both Moscow and Beijing have blamed for provoking the war in Ukraine.

 

Xi’s words were far from new for Beijing, but Chinese diplomats in the following months ramped up their promotion of that rhetoric, for example calling on their counterparts in Europe’s capitals, as well as the US and Russia, to build a “sustainable European security architecture,” to address the “security deficit behind the (Ukraine) crisis.”

 

The rhetoric appeared to catch on, with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva days after returning from a state visit to China this spring calling on Washington to “to stop encouraging war.”

 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands after signing joint statement during Xi's state visit to Moscow in March 2023.

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This gets to the heart of Beijing’s aims, which experts say are not to build its own alliances or use its military might to guarantee peace in volatile situations, as the US has done.

 

Rather, it looks to cast doubt on that system, while projecting its own, albeit vague, vision for countries ensuring peace through dialogue and “common interests” — a phrasing that again pushes back against the idea that countries should oppose one another based on political differences.

 

‘“If a country … is obsessed with suppressing others with different opinions it will surely cause conflicts and wars in the world,” senior military official Gen. Zhang Youxia told delegations from more than 90 countries attending a Beijing-led security forum in the capital last month.

 

Beijing has said its model is already successful, pointing to its role brokering a restoration of ties between longtime rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in March. It also dispatched an envoy to the Middle East following the outbreak of the latest conflict, pledging to “make active efforts” to de-escalate the situation — though Beijing’s readouts of his trip made no mention of any stop in Israel or Palestine.

 

But Xi’s rhetoric falls flat for many countries that see China and its rapidly modernizing military as the leading aggressor in Asia and which question its support for Russia despite Moscow’s flagrant violation of international law as it invaded Ukraine.

 

Speaking to CNN in September, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. accused China of bullying smaller countries as it expanded control of disputed areas of the South China Sea in violation of a ruling from an international tribunal.

 

“If we don’t (push back), China is going to creep and creep into what is within our sovereign jurisdiction, our sovereign rights and within our territory,” he said.

 

Alternative architecture

Beijing’s effort to broadcast its vision to reshape the world order is enabled by an extensive network of international organizations, regional dialogues and forums that it has cultivated in recent decades.

 

Bolstering those groups — and positioning them as alternative international organizations to those of the West — has also emerged as a key part of Xi’s strategy to reshape global power, experts say.

 

This summer both the China and Russia-founded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security grouping and the BRICS group of emerging economies increased their numbers – and acted as a platform for Xi to promote his brand of geopolitics.

 

Countries should “reform global governance” and stop others from “ganging up to form exclusive groups and packaging their own rules as international norms,” Xi told leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa after they invited Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join BRICS — the group’s first expansion since 2010.

 

Weeks later, he appeared to underline his preference for his own alternative architecture — skipping out on the Group of 20 summit hosted by New Delhi, where US President Joe Biden and other Group of Seven leaders were in attendance.

 

But besides the splashy, high-profile events on China’s diplomatic calendar, officials are also broadcasting China’s vision and pitching its new initiatives throughout ministerial or lower-level regional dialogues with counterparts from Southeast Asia to Latin America and the Caribbean — as well as topical forums on security, culture and development with international scholars and think tanks, official documents show.

 

So far, China has appeared to have little trouble getting dozens of countries to at least cursorily back aspects of its vision — even if it’s typically not clear who all these supporters are or whether their backing comes with any tangible commitment.

 

Russia's President Vladimir Putin (L), China's President Xi Jinping (2nd L), Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro (C), South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa (2nd R),India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) pose for a family picture during the 11th BRICS Summit on November 14, 2019 in Brasilia, Brazil. - Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro walked a diplomatic tightrope, as he seeks to boost ties with Beijing and avoid upsetting key ally Donald Trump, on the eve of a summit with their BRICS counterparts from Russia, India and South Africa. (Photo by Sergio LIMA / AFP) (Photo by SERGIO  

China’s Foreign Ministry earlier this year claimed more than 80 countries and organizations had “expressed approval and support” for the Global Security Initiative.

 

According to Beijing, the economic-focused “Global Development Initiative,” launched in 2021 to support United Nations sustainability goals, boasts some 70 countries in its “Group of Friends” — hosted under the auspices of the UN.

 

This chimes with China’s long-held strategy to win broad backing for its position against that of Western countries in the UN and other international organizations, where Beijing has also been pushing for a bigger role.

 

But in addition to how much tangible support Beijing can garner, a key hanging question also remains over whether Xi’s ambitions are limited to efforts to dominate the global narrative and shift the rules in China’s favor or if he wants to truly assume a role as the world’s dominant power.

 

There is a broad gap between China’s power and military capacity relative to that of the US — and the potential for an ailing economy to slow its rise.

 

For now, experts say, China appears focused on shifting the rules to undercut American credibility to intervene or hold countries to account for domestic issues — be they civil conflicts or human rights violations.

 

Success doing that could have implications for how the world responds to any potential future move it could take to gain control of Taiwan — the self-ruled, democratic island the Communist Party claims.

 

But China’s actions in Asia, where its military has become increasingly assertive, while decrying US military presence, suggest to many observers that Beijing does hope to dominate the region.

 

They also raise questions about how a more militarily and economically powerful China would behave globally, if left unchecked.

 

China, however, has denied ambitions of dominance.

 

“There is no iron law that dictates that a rising power will inevitably seek hegemony,” Beijing said in its policy document in September. “Everything we do is for the purpose of providing a better life for our people, all the while creating more development opportunities for the entire world.”

 

Then, in an apparent reference to its own belief, or hope, for the trajectory of the US, it added: “China understands the lesson of history — that hegemony preludes decline.”

 

 Ever since China abandoned its zero-COVID policy at the end of last year, Beijing has been involved in a flurry of engagements from East to West.

 

A summit in India’s Goa, military drills in Singapore and South Africa, visits by the German chancellor and the French president as well as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s own visits to Russia and Saudi Arabia are just a few examples of Beijing’s recent whirlwind diplomacy.

 

 

 

And while Western leaders have talked about decoupling or de-risking economic ties with China, the nation remains deeply integrated with the world economy and is the largest trading partner of more than 120 countries.

 

Long gone are the days when China was an isolated loner or the Chinese government seemed satisfied with observing world affairs quietly from the sidelines. Now, Beijing is reaching for the diplomatic status that matches its position as the world’s second-biggest economy.

 

In a speech at a United Nations conference held to mark the 50-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China’s joining the UN, Xi addressed China’s diplomatic rise and spoke of Beijing’s commitment to a world order defined by the pursuit of peace, democracy and human rights as well as the rejection of unilateralism, foreign interference and power politics.

 

In mid-March, at a so-called dialogue meeting between global political parties in Beijing, Xi reinforced his commitment to the same principles.

 

In his keynote speech, Xi introduced the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) as a way of formalising these principles with the added purpose of encouraging countries to “fully harness the relevance of their histories and cultures” and “appreciate the perceptions of values by different civilizations and refrain from imposing their own values or models on others”.

 

 

With the previously proposed Global Development Initiative (GDI) and Global Security Initiative (GSI), the GCI appears to encapsulate – although in amorphous terms – much of the Chinese president’s overall vision for a new international order.

 

 

Yao Yuan Yeh teaches Chinese Studies at the University of St Thomas in the United States. According to him, such an order would partly supplant and partly remould the international system into a new set of structures that better align with the worldview of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

 

“It would be a world order that does not constrain communist China but contributes to its rise,” he said.

 

An alternative narrative

The purpose of the dialogue meeting in March was, to some extent, to act as a Chinese counterpart to the Summit for Democracy that the United States held for a second time that month as part of an effort to rally the world’s democracies.

 

While leaders from Mongolia, Serbia and South Africa were invited to both events, the US summit mostly included traditional Washington allies, while the gathering in Beijing included leaders from Kazakhstan, Russia, Sudan and Venezuela.

 

The Chinese leadership and state media portrayed the CCP’s dialogue meeting as part of China’s vision of embracing countries across the world, which includes maintaining or even deepening diplomatic contact with nations like Russia and Myanmar.

 

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The Chinese government’s willingness to engage with a variety of world actors has indeed been on display in recent months.

 

A view of the hall for the forum titled Chinese Modernization and the World. There are two large screens showing a formal portrait of Xi Jinping

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang reads a letter from Xi Jinping at the Chinese Modernization and the World Forum in Shanghai in April [File: Ng Han Guan/AP Photo]

Chinese diplomacy played a role in the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March. Also in March, the Chinese foreign minister visited Myanmar coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, while Xi travelled to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

In April, Xi held a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and, last month, his envoy attempted to build support for a Beijing-led plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. Beijing has also been mentioned as a potential peace broker in conflict-ravaged Sudan.

 

Andy Mok, a senior research fellow at the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, says the Chinese approach to international relations is defined by a live-and-let-live mindset.

 

“It is less defined by shared values and more defined by a shared future,” he told Al Jazeera.

 

That means that while Western countries sometimes condition interactions and cooperation on adherence to a set of values, China wants to base its engagements on the potential for development and future benefits, Mok said.

 

The policy largely follows a CCP conviction that development and prosperity do not have to lead to adopting these – so-called Western – values. The Chinese leadership has frequently criticised “certain countries” for supposedly imposing their principles onto others and lacking respect for the ways non-Western nations with different cultures and traditions run their affairs.

 

 

 

Beijing’s world order would be defined by multipolarity, according to Mok, who says China has no plan to be a dominant power.

 

“I don’t see a change in the world order being a case of a new boss simply replacing the old boss.”

 

Reconfiguring the existing world order

Although the Chinese leadership regularly opposes the imposition of Western values, this does not mean Beijing wants to discard democracy, human rights and the rule of law on the global stage, according to the Chinese government.

 

 

Using China as an example, Xi has claimed that China is “democratic” because the CCP and the state represent the people and run the country on behalf of the people to promote the will of the people. Chinese state media have insisted that liberal democracies neglect the needs of the people by measuring democracy “only” on the basis of electoral cycles.

 

Beijing also points to its poverty alleviation and strategy against COVID-19 as examples of the government’s commitment to human rights.

 

“They see these values as more relative terms and have in their own view provided a more inclusive definition of them with freedom from hunger and freedom from fear for your life being seen as examples of more basic human rights,” Mok said.

 

The modern understanding of human rights can be traced back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which details a set of basic rights and freedoms seen as inherent, inalienable and applicable to all people.

 

 

 

Adopted in the early years of the UN, the rights were enshrined into the foundation of the international system. Since then, more than 70 human rights treaties have sprouted from the UDHR, many of which have been signed and ratified by China.

 

Trying to reinterpret the language on human rights and democracy is therefore not something to be taken lightly, according to Elaine Pearson, the director of the Asia division of the rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW).

 

“It is not up to individual states to redefine human rights as they like,” Pearson told Al Jazeera.

 

“Totalitarian North Korea also calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea – simply saying something doesn’t make it true.”

 

HRW warned in 2020 that Beijing was trying to bring about change within the UN, not only by trying to redefine established principles but also by hampering investigations and diluting condemnations of human rights abuses around the world.

 

 

 

Its efforts come at a time when international NGOs and UN bodies have expressed deep concern about the violation of basic freedoms and rights in China.

 

Beijing has fired back at such concerns.

 

When a UN report was released last year detailing possible “crimes against humanity” by the Chinese state against the mostly Muslim Uighurs in the far western Xinjiang region, Beijing responded with a report of its own. It accused alleged anti-China forces in the US and other Western countries of feigning concern for human rights and claimed they wanted to use the Uighur issue to “destabilise Xinjiang and suppress China”.

 

A vote in October at the UN’s Human Rights Council to debate the issue, however, was narrowly defeated.

 

Following the vote, human rights group Amnesty International accused the council of failing to uphold its core mission: protecting the victims of human rights violations everywhere.

 

 

 

“The Chinese government has gained more global influence in recent years and has been able to turn that influence into a greater sway at established international institutions,” Liselotte Odgaard, a professor of China Relations at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, told Al Jazeera.

 

Additionally, Beijing has used its veto power in the UN Security Council to block resolutions and statements condemning the military coup in Myanmar and hinder new sanctions on North Korea, while abstaining from condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

 

 

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Besides developing a greater say in traditional global institutions, Beijing has also founded new institutions to further its credibility as an international player.

 

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund have all been spearheaded by China, have headquarters in China and have been called alternatives to established global institutions such as the UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

 

But they should not necessarily be seen as an attempt by Beijing to replace existing international institutions, according to St Thomas’s Yeh.

 

 

 

As UN cases show, Beijing has channelled considerable effort into reshaping established institutions as well. At the same time, China is the second-biggest donor of funds to the UN and one of only five members of the security council with permanent veto powers.

 

“We are seeing Beijing working both inside and outside established structures, depending on what is most conducive to their goals,” said Yeh.

 

Pursuing the Chinese Dream

The ultimate goal is achieving the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation also known as the Chinese Dream – a vision closely associated with President Xi since his early days in office.

 

The Chinese Dream represents Beijing’s quest to regain its prestige – damaged in the ‘Century of Humiliation’ by the imperial powers in the late 19th and early 20th century – and turn China into an advanced, world-leading nation by 2049.

 

This includes developing China internally but also expanding the territory under the PRC into areas currently beyond its direct control that are nonetheless considered inalienable parts of the Chinese nation.

 

 

This includes disputed territory along the land border with India and Bhutan, the Senkaku islands (that China calls Diaoyudao) administered by Japan in the East China Sea as well as most of the South China Sea where Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam have rival claims.

 

Above all else, however, China’s rejuvenation means unification with Taiwan and Beijing has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this goal.

 

When the Chinese military conducts large-scale exercises around Taiwan or when Chinese vessels intercept ships from other countries in the South China Sea, Beijing argues these are not breaches of China’s international pledges but examples of China upholding sovereignty over territory that rightfully belongs to the Chinese nation.

 

On the world stage, the Chinese government has repeatedly condemned violations of national sovereignty, foreign interference in other nations’ affairs and the unilateral use of economic sanctions.

 

But at the same time, it reserves the right to look past international rulings that go against it – such as the 2016 international court ruling that its historic claim to the South China Sea had “no legal basis” – and take action against those perceived to stand between Beijing and its path towards national rejuvenation.

 

 

 

When Lithuania in 2021 allowed the opening of a “Taiwan Representative Office” rather than the usual “Taipei Economic and Cultural Office” in Vilnius, Beijing was furious. Seeing such a naming convention as encouraging Taiwanese independence, it imposed severe economic sanctions on the Baltic state.

 

 

 

In Canada, a leaked intelligence report revealed in early May that Chinese authorities had allegedly been involved in an intimidation campaign against a Canadian MP and his family in Hong Kong after he sponsored a successful motion declaring the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs a genocide.

 

Previous Canadian intelligence leaks have led to allegations that Beijing attempted to interfere in the Canadian general elections of 2019 and 2021 to secure the defeat of anti-Beijing candidates.

 

Chinese diplomatic staff have also been accused of election interference in Denmark, while consular staff in Manchester, England’s second-biggest city, were accused of employing physical violence to disrupt a demonstration outside the Chinese consulate.

 

 

 

In all these cases, Chinese officials have denied engaging in any sort of tampering, claiming instead that forces with “hidden agendas” were “fabricating lies” to “smear” China. At the same time, the Chinese government says it reserves the right to defend its sovereignty and act against those that attempt to interfere in China’s domestic matters.

 

As Xi allegedly told US President Biden regarding US engagement with Taiwan during a phone call last year: “Those that play with fire get burned.”