Can the rise of China reset a broken world order?

The following is the text of the speech given by Ben Chacko, Editor of the Morning Star and a member of the Friends of Socialist China advisory group, at the international symposium on China and Marxism, held in Istanbul on November 18.

Ben starts by recalling how US diplomats had briefed that they would be “encouraging China to take a more responsible approach to international affairs”, when the country’s foreign minister Wang Yi visited Washington in October. He states that he was “a bit taken aback” by this:

“As Israel rains death on Gaza, China has backed resolutions at the UN security council for a ceasefire. It also stressed the need to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. By contrast, the United States vetoed the ceasefire resolutions and has armed and facilitated Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land. When it comes to Ukraine, China again has repeatedly called for a ceasefire and peace talks, even putting out a 12-point plan that could form the basis of such talks.”

“China being ‘responsible’ over Ukraine,” Ben contends, “does not mean trying to find a peaceful solution. No, it means China obeying US policy by joining its efforts to isolate and economically punish Russia. “And China using its influence to avoid escalating the crisis in Gaza doesn’t mean trying to find a peaceful solution there either. It means helping to restrain regional countries with which China has good relations, such as Iran, to allow Israel to do whatever it likes to the Palestinians without provoking a wider war.”

Ben stresses the need to “to demolish the lies about China posing a military or security threat to the West. China, with one single military base overseas (at Djibouti to protect its Red Sea shipping from pirates), is hardly attempting to project military power worldwide like the United States (with over 800 military bases) or even the UK (with 145). When the US raises the alarm about ‘close encounters’ between its forces and those of China, these always occur just off the Chinese coast.”

However, “our second challenge must rest on the sense in which China does pose a threat – that China’s rise will end the worldwide hegemony of an imperialist bloc led by the United States. Here, we need to assess the ‘universal values’ [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken talks about and to what extent the US rhetoric about a ‘rules-based international order’ matches reality: secondly, we need to examine whether China’s rise is simply that of a new aspiring hegemon which wants to replace the US, or whether China’s values are in fact different and its rise could mean a genuine shift to a more democratic, just and peaceful model for international relations.”

Ben develops his arguments by reference to the imperialist wars of aggression against the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, along with former President Obama’s drone warfare against Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, and highlights China’s fundamentally different approach to questions of war and peace and national sovereignty.

He also looks at questions of world trade and the global economy, contrasting the inequitable and predatory behaviour of the IMF and World Bank, and the US’s illegal deployment of unilateral sanctions, to the development of the BRICS cooperation mechanism among major emerging and developing economies, and the great success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also refuting the ‘debt trap diplomacy’ calumny often levelled against China.

Ben further explains that, just as it is the superiority of China’s planned socialist economy that underwrites the success of the BRI, so is it the ‘secret’ behind China’s global leadership in the fight against climate change along with its development and deployment of green technology. This, he explains, is related to Xi Jinping’s shift “away from using economic growth as the main yardstick of progress, instead seeking to build an ‘ecological civilisation’ in which quality of life, something connected to clean air, clean water and green spaces, is measured by more than the accumulation of goods… China’s environmentalist lead is noteworthy not just because it shows a political will to act lacking in the West: it is at least arguable that its achievements would not be possible in capitalist countries.”

Last month when China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Washington, US diplomats briefed that they would be encouraging China to take a more responsible approach to international affairs.

China should use its influence to urge calm and de-escalation over the erupting Israeli assault on Gaza, the White House told the press. It should also do more to avoid escalating the war in Ukraine.

I was a bit taken aback by the US’s criticisms of China in this case.

As Israel rains death on Gaza, China has backed resolutions at the UN security council for a ceasefire. It also stressed the need to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. By contrast, the United States vetoed the ceasefire resolutions and has armed and facilitated Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land.

When it comes to Ukraine, China again has repeatedly called for a ceasefire and peace talks, even putting out a 12-point plan that could form the basis of such talks. It has declined to arm either side in the war, and has brought in new export restrictions to prevent its commercial exports, such as drones, being used in war zones.

The United States’ role in Ukraine has been different. Its expansion of its military alliance Nato to Russia’s borders, despite promises not to, since the late 1990s crossed multiple Russian red lines; its support for a violent coup against Ukraine’s government in 2014 helped spark the civil war in the Donbass; it dismissed out of hand Russian proposals to defuse the situation in 2021, including a suggested mutual agreement not to station nuclear missiles on third countries’ territory. Since Russia invaded in February 2022, the US has deployed special forces to Ukraine, helped sabotage peace talks according to both Turkish and Israeli politicians, and sent tens of billions’ worth of military equipment to prolong the war.

So how can the US urge China to de-escalate either conflict? The demands only make sense in the eyes of a country that judges other countries solely on how far they submit to itself. 

China being “responsible” over Ukraine does not mean trying to find a peaceful solution. No, it means China obeying US policy by joining its efforts to isolate and economically punish Russia. 

And China using its influence to avoid escalating the crisis in Gaza doesn’t mean trying to find a peaceful solution there either. It means helping to restrain regional countries with which China has good relations, such as Iran, to allow Israel to do whatever it likes to the Palestinians without provoking a wider war.

The United States does not view any country as equivalent to itself: how else could it issue stern warnings about rises in Chinese military spending, when the US spends more on its armed forces than the next 10 countries put together, and 15 times more per head than China?

Identifying hypocrisy from the US is essential when we consider China’s rise. In 2021 US national security adviser Antony Blinken told China’s then foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi that their differences rested on Washington’s determination to strengthen the “rules-based international order.” 

The next year he went further, naming China as “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it,” adding that “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.”

Blinken speaks for the entire Western bloc. The line — that China poses a threat to the global order — is one we are familiar with in Britain. 

We need to challenge this narrative in two ways. The first, of course, is to demolish the lies about China posing a military or security threat to the West. 

China, with one single military base overseas (at Djibouti to protect its Red Sea shipping from pirates), is hardly attempting to project military power worldwide like the United States (with over 800 military bases) or even the UK (with 145). 

When the US raises the alarm about “close encounters” between its forces and those of China, these always occur just off the Chinese coast. The US — and unfortunately now Britain — has warships deployed to the China seas patrolling the Chinese coastline, but Chinese warships never approach US or British coasts. It is absurd to claim that China is threatening the Nato powers: it is the Nato powers which are threatening China.

Similarly, China is a nuclear arms state, and according to the United States is seeking to significantly expand its nuclear forces. But we should not forget that the US has almost 20 times as many nuclear warheads as China. 

Even more significantly, China is the only permanent member of the UN security council with a “no first use” policy committing it not to use nuclear weapons unless they are used against it first. And unlike Britain, France, Russia or the United States, does not maintain a battle-ready fleet of submarines or aircraft which can fire a nuclear missile instantly on receiving the order: indeed it stores its warheads and launching systems separately, to ensure there can be no risk of an accidental launch or one based on misunderstandings in the field, something which the world came dangerously close to at least twice during the original cold war.

It is clear China is not militarily threatening the West. But what about a security threat? Britain, the US and Australia have been rocked by repeated scares over alleged Chinese attempts to gain “influence” over our politics or steal technology. 

Yet these claims should be taken with a pinch of salt. No evidence has been presented that anyone working in the parliamentary estate has passed sensitive information to China, despite a recent arrest. Often — as in the strange case of Christine Lee, which prompted a flurry of anti-China headlines last year — the claims made are so vague as to be meaningless. 

Lee, an Anglo-Chinese lawyer, was labelled a Chinese agent and threatened with deportation. Yet nobody could point to her doing anything against the law. Secret Service briefings told the BBC that the “laws were not in place” to deal with Lee, which translated means she did nothing illegal. MI5 sources, relayed faithfully and anonymously by the British press, said she had been “seeking influence” by “establishing links” with MPs and “may aspire” to establishing an all-party parliamentary group “sympathetic to China.”

All-party parliamentary groups exist for dozens of countries and are completely legal. In any case the idea that Lee was trying to set one up was pure speculation. If a case this thin can prompt a week of hysterical headlines, this strongly suggests that better evidence of Chinese subversion simply doesn’t exist. 

That sums up the first counter-argument to Blinken’s talk of a Chinese threat. China poses no military threat to the West and there is no evidence it is trying to undermine Western institutions.

But our second challenge must rest on the sense in which China does pose a threat — that China’s rise will end the worldwide hegemony of an imperialist bloc led by the United States. 

Here, we need to assess the “universal values” Blinken talks about and to what extent the US rhetoric about a “rules-based international order” matches reality: secondly, we need to examine whether China’s rise is simply that of a new aspiring hegemon which wants to replace the US, or whether China’s values are in fact different and its rise could mean a genuine shift to a more democratic, just and peaceful model for international relations.

The first task is not difficult.

Launching a war of aggression was identified as the “supreme international crime” at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, which had a formative influence on the whole concept of international law and on the establishment of the United Nations. Yet the United States and its allies have repeatedly launched wars of aggression. 

There was no possible self-defence justification for the Nato attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, or on Afghanistan in 2001. 

The war on Iraq was an even more blatantly unprovoked assault on an independent country which posed no threat whatsoever to the US or its allies, which deliberately cut short time for weapons inspectors to investigate unfounded claims it held weapons of mass destruction.

There were no weapons of mass destruction, as everyone now admits. But even if there had been, there was a clear double standard at work: Britain has weapons of mass destruction, the United States has weapons of mass destruction. This is not a world order in which sovereign states are really seen as equals.

War is the most obvious way in which the United States breaches international law, but it is not the only way. Under President Barack Obama in particular, the US stepped up the targeted killing of individuals using drones. 

Generally those targeted were accused of terrorism, but none faced a legal process nor were these assassinations confined to countries where the US was at war — areas that saw high levels of drone assassinations include Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. 

Drones often cause “collateral damage,” killing bystanders or family members: the case of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the son of a suspected terrorist killed in Yemen in 2011 because he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” according to a US official, caused headlines because he was a US citizen — but thousands of civilians have been killed as bycatch from US drone strikes and it is yet another example of US exceptionalism that its right to kill people in this way is only questioned when it accidentally kills one of its own rather than citizens of other countries.

A seemingly minor incident (in global terms) 10 years ago showcased the very different attitudes of Chinese and US decision-makers when it comes to “rough justice” of the drone variety. The Burmese drug baron Naw Kham, leader of a drug-trafficking gang along the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, had been identified as responsible for the murder of 13 Chinese crew on two cargo ships found adrift on the Mekong river in 2011. 

The hunt for Naw Kham took over a year and faced huge obstacles due to his gang’s power, its corruption of local police officers and the fear in which it was held by villagers in the jungle regions it operated; repeatedly he was able to escape through the forest when Chinese agents had located him. 

Some officials advocated that Naw Kham be taken out by drone. The Chinese anti-narcotics officer in charge of the operation, Liu Yuejin, stated after the eventually successful police operation that superiors had vetoed this suggestion for “international and sovereignty issues,” as well as the need to follow a legal process (he was eventually tried, found guilty and executed in 2013). The New York Times reported: “‘We didn’t use China’s military, and we didn’t harm a single foreign citizen,’ Mr Liu bragged after the arrest in April 2012.” As the journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, the use of the term “bragged” indicates US Establishment disdain for such considerations.

China had the technical wherewithal to take out a notorious drug lord, whose murders of 13 Chinese citizens had sparked national outrage, but prioritised the legal process in a way the US clearly does not.

This is of a pattern with China’s determination to uphold international law and peaceful resolution to conflict. We began with the contrasting Chinese and US attitudes to war in Palestine and in Ukraine today. 

But China notably opposed the string of US wars that began with that on Yugoslavia in 1999. The Libyan war of 2010 may be seen as a turning point after which China began more systematically to oppose the US’s use of military power to throw its weight around. 

China, like Russia, abstained on a UN security council resolution authorising a no-fly-zone over Libya, purportedly to protect civilians from Gadaffi’s air force, but quickly took a stronger stance of outright opposition once it was clear the Nato powers viewed this as a free fire zone in which their own air forces could bomb at will. 

Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan later said that Russia and China held that they were “tricked” by the UN resolution, which was framed as about protecting civilians but was then used to enforce regime change. 

Annan explained that this experience was why both countries took a much harder line against Western engagement in the Syrian war a couple of years later. Yet we should not confuse the Russian and Chinese positions that emerged in the years since. 

Russia’s conclusion that the Western powers ignore international law and use force to achieve their goals was used to justify similar action on its own part: its decisive military intervention in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad may have been at that country’s request and therefore legal, but its invasion of Ukraine, however provoked, is a clear violation of the UN charter. 

China, in its responses to the Ukraine conflict, has stressed the need to uphold the UN charter and the territorial integrity of individual countries, even while pointing to Nato’s role in provoking the war. 

Russia is now a state that acts on interests that are opposed to those of the West: but with China, we can argue that it acts on principles that are opposed to those of the West. 

This is very hard for Western media to grasp, as coverage of the Naw Kham case showed, with US newspapers only reporting fearfully that China now had the power to kill people in third countries by drone, rather than dwelling on the significance of the fact that it decided not to use that power. 

In the English fantasy epic the Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf explains that the Dark Lord Sauron will never guess the good guys’ plan because he assumes all other players behave in the way he would, and will be seeking like him to use the Ring to rule the world themselves, not to destroy it so everyone can be free. 

We see a similar blind spot when it comes to media coverage of China in the West: it is assumed that if China is strong enough to use force to get its way it will do so because that is what we do, but this is not how the Chinese government thinks.

This becomes clearer still when we look at international trade. A key motivation behind the Brics alliance of developing countries is that up to now, Western powers have written the rules around international trade. 

The principles on which organisations like the World Trade Organisation are based were decided in Washington, London and Paris. A huge array of subsidiary trade treaties entrench Western control of the resources of third world countries; we are currently seeing some of these dismantled by military juntas set up in anti-France coups in west Africa, but this merely shines a spotlight on one region’s set of “unequal treaties” with Western governments and/or corporations.

Tribunals enforce Western patents, trying to prevent developing countries from producing generic medicines in order to prop up the huge pharmaceutical companies that make fortunes from controlling drugs: something we saw play out during the Covid pandemic.

The system of international finance is dominated by Western stock exchanges and two global institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 

The former is always led by a US citizen and the latter by a European, while each is structured so that the United States can never be outvoted (in the IMF, for example, reform requires an 85 per cent majority vote while the US has a 16.77 per cent vote). The IMF is well known for tying its loans to economic reforms which reduce state regulation of economies and open them up to foreign corporate exploitation.

It is this model, much more than the US’s military dominance, which has begun to break down as a result of China’s rise. 

The “rules of the game” are not adhered to with any consistency by the rule-makers as it stands, at least not by the US. Washington’s imposition of unilateral sanctions against other countries, often extraterritorially enforced, breaches international law, most blatantly in the crippling economic blockades of Cuba and Venezuela. The US’s theft of Iranian oil en route to Venezuela, or seizure during the Covid pandemic of Chinese shipments of medical equipment bound for Cuba, were acts of straightforward piracy. 

But even when the rules apply, they act to block or retard development as often as to advance it. In the European Union in particular, enforcement of competition law is used to prevent national governments acting strategically, for example allowing private companies to sue the German or Italian governments for hundreds of millions of dollars for taking political decisions that affect their profits — Germany’s to phase out nuclear power plants, for example (the Vattenfall lawsuit) or Italy’s to protect coastal seabeds from drilling (the Rockhopper lawsuit). 

Recently, we have seen competition law deployed to obstruct sale of Chinese-produced electric vehicles, on the grounds that China’s political decision to subsidise EV technology, taken to accelerate the shift to greener transport, distorts the market: an episode that presents in a nutshell the contradiction between capitalism’s interests and the planet’s.

China’s spectacular economic growth over the past four decades is now beginning to reshape the international system.

China is now the biggest trading partner of a majority of countries, and its Belt & Road Initiative overtook the World Bank as the largest lender of development finance in 2019. Western media present Chinese investment in “third world” countries as a debt trap or a new imperialism. 

But as Carlos Martinez notes in The East is Still Red, developing countries’ debts to China are a small fraction of their debts to Western financial institutions. More importantly all Chinese investment and lending is focused on infrastructure projects, which help to raise countries’ level of economic development, a contrast to the resource-extractive “investment” pursued by Western corporations. 

Former Liberian minister W Gyude Moore notes that “China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries.” Furthermore, loans from China are increasingly preferred to those from the IMF and World Bank because they are not tied to conditions relating to state economic policy. 

China’s doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign countries applies economically as well as militarily, so the growth of Chinese finance on a scale where it is beginning to exceed the financial firepower of the West is giving birth to a non-coercive international financial system, replacing one which keeps the third world indebted and underdeveloped. 

This non-coercive model helps us better understand the nature of the Brics, a group which unnerves Western powers as a potential rival bloc, but which appears contradictory — since the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is by no means an anti-Western alliance — indeed, a core member like India is simultaneously part of a US-led military co-operation agreement targeting China (the Quad). 

The Brics are not a “Chinese camp” analogous to the Warsaw Pact bloc of pro-Soviet countries in the cold war. Membership is not even a sign of leaning more to Beijing than Washington, as the case of India shows. 

Rather, being part of the Brics is a declaration of autonomy, a signal that the countries involved do not want to continue submission to the US and the old European powers. 

And the rise of China, rather than a straightforward case of one power growing to supplant another, is actually the most significant instance of a wider process in which global South countries are refusing to be dictated to by the West any longer: the most significant because China is economically and technologically the only peer competitor to the United States, but also because unlike some of the others it is ideologically committed to a different, socialist vision based on peace and co-operation abroad and planned economic development at home.

China’s planned economy has been instrumental to the runaway success of the Belt & Road Initiative: because the Chinese state can direct lending and resources on a scale capitalist states cannot.

And its planned economy is the reason too that China has made so much more progress than Western countries on addressing climate change.

Of course, Western media will point out that China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases: ignoring both its role as the manufacturing centre for most goods consumed in the West, and the fact that its per capita emissions remain much lower than those of the United States.

But China — which has built 40,000 kilometres of high-speed rail in the time it has taken Britain to build one new high-speed track between London and Birmingham — is the only country so far to work towards a transport infrastructure that significantly reduces reliance on aeroplanes or cars, while simultaneously leading the world in production of electric vehicles.

China dominates every single green technology field, accounting for close to 90 per cent of the manufacturing supply chain for solar and wind power products globally. A third of renewable energy generated worldwide is generated in China.

Why? Because the Chinese economy is planned on behalf of the country as a whole, and therefore has not allowed the energy transition to be managed — and thus effectively crippled — by giant companies dependent on the continuing flow of profit from fossil fuels, as Western governments have. It is not in hock to an oil lobby, an aviation lobby or a motorists’ lobby. And it can direct investment into currently unprofitable research and production if it has a longer-term goal in mind.

Western media like to carp at China’s slowing growth rates, though Chinese growth continues to outpace every Western country easily. 

What they do not consider is the stated shift under Xi Jinping away from using economic growth as the main yardstick of progress, instead seeking to build an “ecological civilisation” in which quality of life, something connected to clean air, clean water and green spaces, is measured by more than the accumulation of goods. 

There are various ways this quest for a happier and healthier population has affected policy, from changed education policy to China’s unique concern as to how the internet affects young people’s development: we have no time to consider these. But we do know it motivates the “green wall of China,” a huge reforestation project, and the 10-year ban on fishing in the Yangtze river, an ecological moratorium on a grander scale than anything attempted in the West — and one only palatable to the millions who worked the river because a planned economy can provide alternative work, retraining or early retirement to ensure locals do not lose out.

China’s environmentalist lead is noteworthy not just because it shows a political will to act lacking in the West: it is at least arguable that its achievements would not be possible in capitalist countries. 

There are two existential threats to humanity that loom large in the 21st century. One is climate change; the other is war, given the capacity of nuclear war both to kill billions of people directly and to render the planet uninhabitable.

China, the only great power addressing climate change as an urgent problem and the only one committed to a consistent pro-peace policy, does therefore have a claim to be humanity’s greatest hope in the present age.

Recall those words of Blinken’s: that China is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”

Well, we’d better hope so.