The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions
BY
February 13, 2021
.
W
hile the United States focused on conflicts and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, China assiduously worked to promote and advance its model for the international order. Beijing’s attempts to reshape the world through foreign investment, foreign policy, and a truly whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach are defining the early 21st century. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, courting of politicians and civil society alike, paranoid cultivation of its national image, aggressive expansion of its military, and the use of Chinese state-owned and state-backed companies, Beijing’s reach is felt in nearly every corner of the globe.
Advertisement
Perhaps no other topic agitates the contemporary strategic imagination more than the implications of China’s rise not just for the future of the ruling regime in Beijing but also for Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. But in the recent past, nervous apprehension (mixed with considerable excitement) about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitions has given way to another sentiment, that China may be inching toward overreach both economic as well as geopolitical as public opinion across many Western democracies coalesces into China skepticism, if not outright antagonism.
In a recent book, “How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions” (Oxford University Press, 2021) Luke Patey presents a tour d’horizon of China’s expanding global footprint as well as growing backlash against Beijing’s grand schemes and geostrategic jostling across continents. Drawing on research and travel across Africa, South America, and parts of the Asia-Pacifi
There is no reasoning with someone who has built an entire worldview around the conviction that, as George Bernard Shaw put it, a particular country is the best in the world because they were born in it.
1 Shaw’s stinging put-down was actually meant as a definition of patriotism, but it works just as well, or better, when applied to what Orwell once called “the great modern disease of nationalism.” No honest debate on world affairs is possible with an interlocutor who keeps switching into competitive mode, deciding in favour of their nation from the outset, and looking only for evidence to support that nation’s supposed superiority. In most situations, this is mildly frustrating; a benign disease. But when heads of state are suffering from the malignant version, then these failures of logic can become everyone’s problem.
Home America’s big China question
America’s big China question
Resetting relations will be near the top of President Biden’s inbox. Three new books point to the scale of the challenge ahead and how to master it
World Economy News
20 Jan 2021 • 7 min read
Before his death in 1994, Richard Nixon reflected that his much-acclaimed diplomatic masterstroke the opening of US relations with China might have been a mistake. “We may have created a Frankenstein,” the former US president said in an interview.
The comment represented an early inkling of what has become a deep foreboding. As Joe Biden takes office as America’s 46th president, a huge China challenge is sitting in his inbox.