China Insists That It Understands History
“Xi Jinping has a plan for how the world should work,” writes Simone McCarthy at CNN, “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.”
What is that vision?
Though it is obviously to become a world player, the Chinese tyrant insists that leadership is not hegemony. In a “more than 13,000-word policy document released by Beijing in September,” the principles, such as they are, seem to deny any conception of universal human rights while maintaining — in some obvious tension with China’s current brinksmanship on its borders — a more laissez faire attitude towards differing national cultures.
But the general tenor was a critique of America’s current role: “Some countries’ hegemonic, abusive, and aggressive actions against others . . . are causing great harm,” explains the document.
China, we learn, “has denied ambitions of dominance.”
“There is no iron law that dictates that a rising power will inevitably seek hegemony,” insisted Beijing in its September document. “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.”
This echoes the early non-interventionist declarations of America’s founders, “no entangling alliances” and all that — which went by the boards over a century ago.
So if Americans now express skepticism, especially of a government that enforces tyrannical rule within its own borders, none should express surprise.
Yet Chinese strategists do understand something of ancient wisdom: “China understands the lesson of history,” the September declaration states, “that hegemony preludes decline.”
But it is hard not to see how China’s domestic hegemony does not presage precisely that, too.
