People-First Approach Deserves a Prominent Place in History
December 31, 2021
About the author:
Digby Wren
Political Analyst, Deakin University Non-Executive Director,
Institute of Media & Communications Chief News Commentator,
China Radio International, World Today, and Beijing Hour
Empires and nations rise and fall. For the French philosopher Fernand Braudel, history followed a five-hundred-year civilizational cycle of social, cultural and material change – la longue dureé.[1] When measured against Braudel’s theory, China’s historical trajectory is unique in global history. For over three millennia of recorded history, China has experienced at least four turns at the apex of civilizational achievement. China’s most recent ascent can be pinpointed to the founding of the Chinese republic in 1911, the establishment of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921, the consolidation of the modern Chinese state under the Communist leadership in 1949, and the post-Mao period of peaceful development and reform. The recently concluded Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC and, for only the third time in its history, the Party adopted a Historical Resolution that confirmed China’s path to national rejuvenation - the Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century, which emphasizes the great strides China has made in economic development and national security.
The importance of such resolutions lies not only in the confirmation of historical facts, but the correctness of China’s adherence to policies of reform and opening up and peaceful development. For supporters and critics alike, the transformation of China under the CPC’s leadership has lifted more than 750 million people out of poverty and eradicated absolute poverty, propelled the nation into the world’s most innovative industrial and manufacturing nation and the second largest economy in GDP and/or the largest in PPP terms,[2] and ensured the country an important position on the global stage.
In the current “rejuvenation” period following its accession to the WTO, China has consolidated the gains of the past century and attained the organizational, scientific, technological, and infrastructural basis to achieve the key goals of socialism with Chinese characteristics. These include achievement of the first centenary goal of transforming China into a “moderately prosperous society in all respects [and] historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty.”[3] China has developed a set of “structural siblings” - Belt and Road Initiative, Ecological Civilization, Digital Transformation, and Dual Circulation - that together constitute a new sustainable economic development model that balances internal and external circulations via a digital superstructure supported by the BRI substructure of connectivity and China’s proven capacity for high-tech innovation at speed and scale.
The historical achievements of China and the rising tide of anti-China sentiment in Anglo-America is the subject of much debate. Unlike the former imperial and colonial powers, China has managed its rise without unleashing an ideological and military assault on the existing global order. China’s rise is inextricably linked with global expansion of trade and investment, which also lifted the national wealth of the advanced economies and featured a more equitable distribution of wealth to the Global South and large proportions of the world’s population.
This explains, in part, why Anglo-America is so concerned over the expansion of the United Nations to 193 countries, primarily composed of the formally colonized nations of the Global South, and in particular, Asia and China.
China holds the United Nations to be the core of the global system and has aligned its economic development initiatives with UN initiatives. For example, China’s response to the vast shortfall in the provision of global public goods, the free and open BRI, has generated significant trade and investment flows for its 140 partner countries and proved particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as maritime trade was severely curtailed.
However, the alternate US and EU infrastructure initiatives, which were launched after the worst of the pandemic, are framed as countering China and protecting the developing economies from Chinese exploitation. Anglo-American notions of economic development, however, seem not to stretch far beyond their own borders or those of their military alliance partners. As such, they are not free and open or aimed at global economic development, they promote internal infrastructure and external territorial control. This is particularly evident in the discourse propagated by Anglo-America in the free and open Indo-Pacific concept.
“Chinese civilizational wisdom is historically grounded
in the idea of mutuality and reciprocity.
This is most simply understood as yin-yang
and is widely recognized in the notion
that balance and harmony are necessary
for humanity’s peaceful coexistence.”
Sovereignty underpins the United Nations charter, yet the legacy liberal states, which are also the former imperial powers, ignore the rules which they themselves formulated. If changing the rules is permissive amongst the founders of the UN, why are they so opposed to adjusting the formula for global economic development and collective security to suit the majority of the world’s nations and peoples – is that not global democracy? How have constant wars and invasions, political subversions and economic sanctions and embargoes furthered the goals of peace, economic development and security? How do the legacy liberal states’ narrow views on “values” equate to the moral and ethical teachings that are demonstrably shared by the vast majority of the world’s populations, nations, religions and political movements? In China, the values of Confucianism and Daoism intersect at many points with the value systems generated by other civilizations, most notably Buddhism and Marxism.
Chinese civilizational wisdom is historically grounded in the idea of mutuality and reciprocity. This is most simply understood as yin-yang and is widely recognized in the notion that balance and harmony are necessary for humanity’s peaceful coexistence.
However, the source of Anglo-American apprehension to China’s rise is not related to this notion. Rather, it is related to an acknowledgement that China’s consequential and continuous civilization has both organizational depth and material sustainability. This explains, in part, why the European, African, and Asian nations are less attracted to Anglo-American ideas about China’s status in the global order, because they too have experienced severe disruption to their historic continuity.
While the United States has its religious and ideological roots in European thought, its population is less homogenous. As such, notions about religious, political, racial. and gender equality were propounded by its politicians to ensure the “melting pot” of mass migration that populated North America would not resist Washington’s political oversight. For almost its entire history after European settlement, the fledgling states and the later republic was at war expanding its territory, excluding European powers from the western hemisphere through the Monroe doctrine, and building its economy on slavery, the extermination of native populations, and natural resource extraction.
For almost a century following the US Civil War, the social and political cohesion of the continental republic was maintained by constant economic and territorial expansion at the expense of the older European and Asian empires. Yet the two oceans that protect the US republic also isolated it from the dire consequences of its continued efforts to evangelize its philosophical and religious ideas via hegemonic military, economic, and cultural practices.
China’s century of humiliation at the hands of the former imperial powers, including the U.S. and Japan, is not a fabricated narrative designed to exclude modern Europeans, Americans, and Japanese from interacting with a rejuvenating China.[4] Rather it is a reminder for the Chinese and other victims of imperial aggression and colonial subjugation that nations can rise again as responsible stakeholders within the international system.[5]
In fact, only Russia and China escaped complete colonial subjugation, and this in part explains the continuing efforts by successive US governments to subvert and contain those two nations.[6] The Anglo-American rejection of self-determination for both Russia and China, as they discarded the shackles of decrepit royal dynasties, reminds us of the military interventions by the European powers when revolutionary France set about remaking itself based on Cartesian enlightenment.[7] Often forgotten is that Napoleon did not start any of the wars in which he emerged victorious. The eventual defeat of Napoleonic France was in large part due to the British naval power. The Americans, safely ensconced between two oceans, correctly determined that naval power would also greatly increase their economic and military influence.
Today, the American naval power is manifested in the concept of the Indo-Pacific. However, it is not free and open in the sense that the Belt and Road is free and open. Rather, the US Indo-Pacific strategy is designed to appropriate China’s ability to guarantee its own territorial sovereignty and Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs).[8]
Moreover, the US constant incitement of separatist forces in Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong has been accompanied by sanctions, embargoes, and subversions. Diplomatic campaigns, mass media propaganda, technological apartheid, allegations, and accusations of human rights abuses and forced labor are falsely generated to justify yet more sanctions and propaganda. These hegemonic activities are couched in narratives about soft and hard power generated in Academia and think tanks with the sole purpose of undermining foreign powers and sustaining US hegemony.
The practice of neo-liberalism and interventionism by the U.S., under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has set the U.S. on a course of domestic political polarization and obscurantism vis-à-vis internal governance and factual evidence about the rise of China. In The Discourses, Machiavelli posits that freedom produces prosperity greater than either tyranny or corrupt republics.[9] In The Leviathan, Hobbes discusses the notion that freedom is the power to act without interference – where the absence of interference, by external actors, is what confirms the presence of freedom.[10] These proto-realist arguments support China’s statements and claims to the importance of non-conflict, non-interference, and non-aggression as pillars of its foreign policy.[11]
China is the sole historical civilization and non-liberal society to resist and overcome the Anglo-American onslaught. Yet, even today, China patiently seeks to harness peaceful development and multilateralism to offset the worst excesses of American exceptionalism and its increasingly polarized political system.[12] China seeks to demonstrate globally what can be achieved through sustained economic reform and opening up, diplomatic engagement, the provision of global public goods, and the adoption of innovation at speed and scale.
(Source: www.brookings.edu)
For the multitudes of the world’s population still living in destitution, impoverishment, and famine, China’s unique people-first approach requires a prominent place in the historical record. It is not too late for the United States to correct the error of its ways. The political, economic, and social structural faults that beset America are not necessarily permanent. However, the intensification of US economic, diplomatic, and military pressure on China and other developing nations that choose their own paths to development has become the sole unifying force of the failing US republican experiment. In the age of planetization, where all peoples are able to accrue knowledge and gain information to protect against global pandemics, climate change, and natural disasters, China’s vision of global development and for a shared future for mankind hold increasing importance and hope for humanity.
This article is from the December issue of TI Observer (TIO), which is a monthly publication devoted to bringing China and the rest of the world closer together by facilitating mutual understanding and promoting exchanges of views. If you are interested in knowing more about the December issue, please click here:
[1] Fernand Braudel. “Histoire Et Sciences Sociales: La Longue Durée,” in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. Plon, 1958.
[4] Scott David, China and the international system, 1840-1949: power, presence, and perceptions in a century of humiliation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008).
[6] Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2018).
[8] Marc Lanteigne, “China's Maritime Security and the “Malacca Dilemma,” Asian Security, no. 4 vol. 2:143-161. doi: 10.1080/14799850802006555
[9] Cecil H. Clough, The discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli. Translated by Leslie Joseph Walker. Routledge and Paul, 1975.
[10] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. First Avenue Editions, 1651.
[11] Yang Jiechi, “Respect History, look to the future and firmly safeguard and stabilize China-US relations.” China Daily. Aug. 7, 2020. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202008/07/WS5f2d3932a31083481725f02f.html
[12] Richard H. Pildes, “Why the Center Does Not Hold: the Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in America,” California Law Review: no. 2, vol. 99: 273-333.
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