Understand what the World makes of China
Understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. The rise of China has been one of the most important developments of the past half-century. Now it wants nothing less than to reshape the global order. But the years ahead hold many challenges for the ruling Communist Party, which has grown more authoritarian at home and more assertive abroad.
The internet in China is often a brutal place. It offers little room for liberal voices: armies of censors crush them. Chest-thumping nationalists held sway. Yet look carefully and you can make out important differences among those who fill China’s social media with anti-Western, anti-liberal vitriol.
On one of the most popular messaging services, WeChat. Their members are nationalists. They are fiercely anti-Western, but they also criticize capitalist tendencies in China. They want the country to return to a more egalitarian path. On June 3rd I received an alert from one of these groups about an event later that day. It was an online lecture by Huang Jisu, a scholar and dramatist. A play he co-authored, “Che Guevara”, was a hit when it toured theatres in 2000 and 2001. Audiences could relate to its anti-American tone and veiled attacks on social injustices in China. Mr. Huang was also a co-writer of “Unhappy China”, a book published in 2009. It, too, was hugely popular.
The book aimed to tap into what the authors saw as widespread public disgruntlement with the West. China, they said, “has the power to lead the world and the necessity to break away from Western influence”. Three years later, Xi Jinping became China’s leader and crafted a message that sounded very similar (though he told America’s visiting secretary of state, Antony Blinken that China did not aim to “replace America”). So Mr. Huang’s lecture, titled “Trends of Thinking in Today’s Society and Related Ideas”, was not to be missed.
I’m
glad I listened in (he used VooV, a Chinese video-conferencing service, but did
not appear on camera). In his nearly two-and-a-half-hour talk, Mr. Huang was
strikingly critical of the turns that Chinese nationalism was taking—veering,
as he described it, towards a “frenzied, extreme kind”. He cited the recent
remarks of one online commentator, Li Yi, who had suggested that Chinese people
wouldn’t mind if one-tenth of the Chinese population were to die in a war against
Taiwan. Mr. Huang called such views “fascist”. And he offered some
self-criticism. “Friends sometimes ask me, ‘A few years ago you used to make a
lot of nationalist remarks, didn’t you? To some extent, you were a trailblazer.
You had some impact on the way things have turned out.’ In truth, I feel it’s
worth reflecting on this.”
Among nationalists, Mr Huang is not alone in
wondering whether online sentiment is getting dangerously overheated,
especially concerning Taiwan. I also refer to recent research suggesting that
public support for war in the near future is much lower than observers might suppose
given netizens’ frequent demands for one. That is a ray of sunshine. Let’s hope
that China’s leaders are paying attention.
Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, writes in Foreign Affairs that China is not trying to revise the existing world order or replace it with something else. Rather, the Chinese leadership is waiting for it to fail. Chinese strategists “increasingly define their goal as survival in a world without order”, he writes.
In El País, Andrés Rugeles of Oxford University looks at how the Sino-American rivalry is playing out in Latin America. He claims that the US and EU have failed to pay enough attention to the region, and that “China has seized the opportunity and filled an empty space”.
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