This week the Vatican’s Academy for Social Sciences is holding a workshop on the role of China and India in global affairs, however, changes to the event’s description and speaker list suggest they are now attempting to downplay the Chinese focus.
On June 27 and 28 philosophers, jurists and economists from Beijing, Shanghai and Mumbai at the Vatican for a discussion on the Development Goals set by the UN. Prof. Riccardo Pozzo, among the organizers of the workshop, explains its meaning to AsiaNews:
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Does China want to transform the global order to advance its own interests and to reflect its own image? That may be the most important question in geopolitics today, yet the answers it elicits tend to reveal more about modern biases than they do about what a future Chinese superpower would look like. Those who want to project forward to a malevolent, expansionist China point to evidence of aggression in Beijing’s posture today. Those with a less apocalyptic view highlight more accommodating features in Chinese policy or note that China will face plenty of challenges that will keep it from reshaping the world even if it wants to. Many Western observers see a burgeoning new Cold War, with China serving as a twenty-first-century version of the Soviet Union.