China wants to rewrite the rules of the world order. With a four-stage plan, Xi Jinping wants to become the one superpower around which everyone else revolves. It is far from certain whether it will really work out in the end.
What is behind China’s ambitions, behind Beijing’s aggressiveness and the inhumane policies embodied by ruler Xi Jinping? To a question people are asking around the world, a new book gives this answer:
“The Chinese Communist Party has embarked on an epic project to rewrite the rules of world order in Asia and far beyond. China does not want to become a superpower, one pole among many in the international system. China wants to be the superpower, the geo-political one sun around which everyone else revolves.”
That is the conclusion of Hal Brands and Michael Beckely in Danger Zone: The Emerging Conflict with China.
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Xi Jinping is the architect of this superpower strategy, although not its inventor, as the authors suggest. Under him, however, the ambitions of his predecessors were condensed into a four-stage plan:
Of the 1.4 billion Chinese, “only” 92 million are party members. That means a relatively small group creates, controls, and maintains the structures that oppress over 1.3 billion people. In the process, Xi and his disciples are driven by the fear of their own downfall. They see the fall of the Soviet Union as a deterrent. Under the impression of the falling Iron Curtain, ruler Deng Xiao-ping, who is remembered in the West primarily as the economic reformer of the People’s Republic, crushed the freedom movement in China and had thousands of students massacred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Today, Xi is holding a million people in the northwest, in Xinjiang, in camps where they have to live in atrocious conditions for fear the Muslim-inhabited province would turn its back on central power in Beijing.
Xi wants territories. Just like his predecessor Mao, who conquered Tibet, Xi wants to annex Taiwan. In the eyes of the authors, the downgrading of Hong Kong and the humiliation of its inhabitants is also a power trip by the egomaniac Xi. Beijing today has territorial conflicts with 15 of its neighboring countries. Xi is making claims on the entire western Pacific, which he wants to snatch from world trade and bring under his thumb. The actions against Hong Kong and Taiwan show that the man will only stop when this goal has been achieved.
Xi’s ideology is not the first, nor is it the only one, to see the ideals of freedom and human rights, which she believes must be fought, embodied in the United States. Moreover, America is indeed the partner and ally of quite a few of the countries Xi wants to subjugate in the western Pacific. He sells his drive to drive America out of this part of the world with a slogan that reads “Asia to the Asians.” Behind this is the cynical belief that the nations of Asia are better off being dominated by another Asian nation than by a “foreign” nation.
Xi, who wants to be proclaimed president for a third time in October, is taking up the Confucian doctrine that “everything under heaven” is governed from the center in a harmonious and hierarchical order. The center is China, whose name translated from Chinese means “Middle Kingdom”. Even the Chinese emperors, in whose direct successor Xi sees himself, saw themselves as “son of heaven” in the sense of Confucius’ teachings, who would have received a “mandate to rule” from just that heaven.
This belief in election is also not a specialty of the Chinese ruler. But Xi now heads the second largest army in the world, which has the largest fleet on the planet and would therefore be able at any time to turn this ideology into realpolitik. The state-controlled media have been preparing the people of China for this step for a while. They refer to what is to come as “a people’s war”. At its end, in 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, there will be the “rejuvenation of the nation”, which will be complete when Xi’s imperialist ambitions, above all the conquest of Taiwan, have become a reality.
Red Alert: How China’s aggressive foreign policy in the Pacific is leading to a global war
The authors rightly point out that Xi and his nomenklatura want to avoid war if they can. They use a mix of deterrence and trade. Countries like Thailand or Cambodia know what is meant. On the one hand she bullies Beijing because it wants land, on the other hand she courts her and promises trade agreements. These are intended to interweave the said countries in China’s sphere of influence in such a way that in the end they can no longer take any foreign, security and economic policy steps without Beijing’s approval.
According to the authors, the USA has become the number one enemy of Xi and his strategists for another reason: in their eyes, America, with its ideals of freedom and democracy, has had many empires in recent history of the type that Xi has wants to build defeated: the German and Japanese empires, Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” and the already mentioned Soviet empire, the USSR.
If history continues as it has, then the end of Xi’s empire is only a matter of time. For the free world that would be cause for celebration and bell ringing, but for China it would be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 21st century.
Alexander Görlach is Honorary Professor of Ethics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian is currently working on a project on “digital cosmopolitanism” at the Internet Institute at Oxford University and the Faculty of Philosophy at New York University.
Alexander Görlach was a Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the USA and Cambridge University in England. After stints in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for East Asian democracies in particular. He has recently published the following titles: “Red Alert: Why China’s Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Western Pacific Is Leading to a Global War” (Hoffmann
From 2009 to 2015, Alexander Görlach was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of the debate magazine The European, which he founded. Today he is a columnist and author for various media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the New York Times. He lives in New York and Berlin.
