Like cholesterol, great powers can be good, in that they accept the present international order, or bad, in that they do not. China does not, and seeks to overturn the contemporary order the West created. This is the source of what is already the great conflict of 21st century. China is not a status quo great power. But as important as these developments are, there is a greater concern. This is the intellectual framework that China is creating under the guise of ‘a community with a shared future for mankind,’ most recently expressed in the July 2019 defense white paper. This shared future is certain to be dystopian. Any community that the CCP creates will be totalitarian and oppressive by its nature. Any shared future that it seeks to create will be one in which the rest of the world adapts to serve the interests of Beijing.
Much has been made of the return of great power competition. In truth, it never went away, although the great game was so one-sided for a time that almost everyone in the West tuned out, assuming the match was over in perpetuity. It was too boring to contemplate and so attention drifted to other concerns and second- and third-order problems. China’s attention did not deviate, and once again it is a great power.
Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han write in the Spectatorthat like cholesterol, great powers can be good, in that they accept the present international order, or bad, in that they do not. China does not, and seeks to overturn the contemporary order the West created. This is the source of what is already the great conflict of 21st century.
China is not a status quo great power. But as important as these developments are, there is a greater concern. This is the intellectual framework that China is creating under the guise of ‘a community with a shared future for mankind,’ most recently expressed in the July 2019 defense white paper. Precisely what the Chinese Communist party (CCP) means by this concept is deliberately vague and nebulous. But it is clear enough from the more tangible comments defining peace, stability, and prosperity in China with the collective good of the world, as is the equation of a strong Chinese military as a force for world peace, stability and the building of a shared future for mankind.
“This shared future is certain to be dystopian,” Thayer and Han write. “Any community that the CCP creates will be totalitarian and oppressive by its nature. Any shared future that it seeks to create will be one in which the rest of the world adapts to serve the interests of Beijing. The future will be shared only because China’s power is great enough to trap states into it either by seduction or coercion. It will be like Foxconn on a global scale. Beijing’s conception of global governance is a firm hierarchy with it on top. This shared future will be less free, less diverse, and far more oppressive than the present one.”
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