A Collision of Worldviews

In October 2019 I was invited to speak at a private function in Shanghai - a city where I always feel among friends. The audience was a mix of party and city bureaucrats, senior academics, journalists, and entrepreneurs, including one of the founders of Tik-Tok. My talk was supposed to focus on the future of China within Asia. Given the luxury of three hours for our conversation, however, it was inevitable that I would veer off track and follow my usual habit of provocation, particularly when asked to comment on the escalating trade war with the US.

At the subsequent dinner, where I was guest of honour, I was somewhat taken aback when a high-ranking party official challenged my views as being too lenient on the impacts of Chinese domestic policy, and my criticism of the US far too harsh. This was from a person I know well, who trusts my analysis, is intensely self-critical, and is daily enmeshed in high-level dialogues.

I left the reception that night feeling bemused. Was I allowing prejudice to colour my analysis? Were my predictions about the most likely outcomes of the trade war way off the mark when identical views, rigorously researched and similarly expressed just weeks before to a very well-informed group in Los Angeles, met with unreserved agreement?

It got me thinking. Events slithering on the surface of our awareness are often misleading, as are the semiotics of images embedded within ideologically-constructed narratives. Not only that but objective analysis is made far more complicated today by the propensity to broadcast fake news. It is simple to persuade people to believe one thing when they are actually viewing something different. Thus, most people will be easily convinced they are seeing indisputable proof of Chinese abuses of Uighur Muslims if they are shown video footage, repeatedly told it is that, and are inherently inclined to believe anti-China narratives. It is impossible to know the truth in these circumstances without access to the source documents and validation that these have not been tampered with or altered. In fact, it is easier to believe the pervasive narrative originating from those we know personally, or are told we can trust.

As I suggested recently, in a piece called Nothing Is What It Seems, not everything we read, see or hear can be believed. I returned from Shanghai determined to interrogate my personal biases far more methodically in the future before making any more predictions about China-US relationships.

The clash of civilizations was a thesis proposed by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in a 1992 lecture. His research concluded that contradictory cultural and religious factors would become the most likely source of conflict between the superpowers in the post-Cold War era.

At the time this seemed unlikely. Other scholars took issue with Huntington's conclusions, mainly because they ran counter to the official narrative and information at the time. Today's tectonic power shifts, buffeted by additional disruptive factors, are generating an implicit crisis in which Huntington's thesis deserves to be re-examined.

At a surface level, this crisis is exemplified in the deteriorating relationship between Beijing and Washington over trade and human rights, as both nations jostle for global hegemony and the ownership of radically new digital technologies. On this basis alone Huntington's research would probably assume an imminent confrontation between the predominantly theological world-system set within occidental cosmology, as typified by Cartesian logic, scientific realism, and free-market neoliberalism, and a secular sinic culture interpreted around Confucian ideals by successive Chinese leaders. I do not for one minute think it is as simple as that, although surface events are certainly a factor. I am far more concerned with what lies hidden under the surface of our perceptions.

In many respects, US perceptions today are strangely unchanged from those expressed during the cold-war with the Soviet Union. Rules of exceptionalism and righteousness, and the fervent synthesis of a desire-faith on the part of the US that economic and military power puts them in a paramount position to protect the world from those who would seek to destroy democracy, still stand. At first tacit, but increasingly bellicose, this strategy has underpinned American foreign policy for at least the past 75 years.

The cold-war between the US and Soviet empires was one of ideology, mostly aggravated by speculative intolerance. Since then, ideology has been the unifying motivation behind every conflict involving the US - from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq, Yemen, and the numerous proxy conflicts being fought today.

But in spite of the continued preservation of conjectural inaccuracies from many observers in the West, fueled by the propaganda from Western media, China has no ideology to speak of, no religion, and certainly no official moral code that would accord with occidental beliefs. It does have an ancient past, however, in which dynastic values and familial modes of relating are inculcated.

Whereas in my experience Chinese views about the West are relatively discerning, Western views about China are quite often distorted, driven by a broad anti-China sentiment than by any kind of pragmatic analysis. China is no more socialist today than the Pope is agnostic, only slightly more militaristic than Belgium, Spain, or Canada, and no more ambitious for its civic society than almost every developed nation.

Nor is it particularly helpful to dwell on respective military capabilities - though that remains a fixation for mostly uninformed commentators. Since the US was founded in 1776, it has been at war for 214 out of the 235 years of its existence - on various fronts for the past six decades. During that time, in spite of its inability to actually win any conflict it started, the US has built up an arsenal of conventional and nuclear weapons larger than any other country, spends more on its armed forces than China, Russia, France, and England combined, and maintains nearly 800 military bases in over 70 countries and territories abroad.

Putting aside recent incursions along the long-disputed Galwan Valley border with India - an opportunity to exert new tactics provided by the COVID-19 smokescreen - Chinese territorial ambitions are very limited by comparison. Patiently playing a lengthy waiting game, Chinese goals have been achieved by relatively peaceful means, and without the benefit of Hollywood movies to reinforce soft diplomacy.

Surprisingly though, neither the US nor China is among the most militarized. While China is currently ranked 87th in global rankings, the US barely makes it into the top 30 of militarized nations. That prize goes to other countries like Israel, Singapore, South Korea, and Russia.

So, if it is no longer ideology or military competition, what are the real points of provocation between these two great nations? Is it as Huntington imagined? The answer is embedded in diverging civilizational models - one advocating a distributed market economy based upon individualism, the other pursuing a centralized model of state capitalism aimed at benefitting the whole of society. Closer scrutiny reveals flaws in both models. The collapse of neoliberal economics is happening in full view in countries like the US and Britain, whereas weaknesses in the autocratic Chinese model are less visible because of strict state media controls. But that does not mean they do not exist.

Occasionally perceived differences do conceal some unanticipated correspondences. While authoritarianism exists in both China and the US, for example, there are significant variations. In China, it has been used to advance self-confidence and social harmony, marred in part by the CCP's approach to ethnic minorities, on the back of a highly submissive communitarian culture. In the US, where it masquerades as a devotion to entrepreneurship and individual liberties, it has led to increasing division, hatred, corruption, and gun-toting craziness.

In technology, too, there are more similarities than not. Surveillance, for example, operates in both the US and China. In the US, like almost every other activity, it is applied to the creation of wealth. Many of our perceptions and choices are shaped by algorithmically-curated marketing which nudges us in directions favoured by those who employ the programmers who write the code. This leads to misinformation, a dumbing down of society, and belief bubbles that help fortify current prejudices.

In China, AI-enabled surveillance technologies are used to monitor and manage the society. Facial recognition is able to dispense social credits for good behaviour, facilitate improved traffic flows, and eliminate petty street crime. While most people in the West are concerned to depict such realities as being lifted from an Orwellian nightmare, for most Chinese citizens this policy imparts a feeling of public security and safety.

Since the era of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leadership has abided by the dual approach of engaging in international openness while policing domestic subservience to the state. Due to this policy, China has imported remarkable amounts of knowledge, mainly through a diaspora of students who choose to study in the West but return to live in China generally unmoved by liberal values. In this way, China has become affluent while remaining impervious to Western influence - its guiding principles unaffected by overt criticism. US strategy, on the other hand, is invariably captivated by financial opportunities - methodically exporting manufacturing and jobs to China, doing deals whenever a few cents could be saved, yet always in the realisation there were no vexing health and safety constraints to deal with. These two approaches depict a clear divide between the quest for societal progress and the pursuit of financial liberalism.

The sharing of power works as long as certain key factors remain stable. Most importantly an understanding of how hegemonic power works to sustain mutual interests is crucial. If or when a hegemonic power becomes overly confident, convinced of the stability and durability of its hegemony, they risk losing it. The US is teetering on the edge of that cusp today.

Mutual tolerance and trust are imperatives in this regard of course. Although the US and China are still joined at the hip economically speaking, and it is in their best interests to preserve amity, dual threats have emerged that could threaten this equilibrium - particularly given how quickly perceptions in the field of international relations can morph in a bizarre fashion.

First, even though global superiority is still feigned, the occidental world-system is becoming unhinged, a bureaucratic mess of competing interests that constantly patches up the present lacks a long-term vision, is hostage to corporate capital, and destroyed any moral authority it might have had on 6th and 9th August 1945. The presidency of Donald Trump and the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exploited cracks in Western society have merely accelerated this collapse.

Second, the rise of Xi Jinping must be put into the context of a fragile global environment. Sensing an opportunity to immortalize his celebrity, President Xi has maneuvered himself into a paramount position of authority, stifled dissent within the party, and set a course for the nation to benefit from the disruption and turbulence that will characterize the coming decade. Convinced China can prevail against any odds, a legacy of patience has fallen to precipitous action. This raises the stakes with the US and could yet become a massive miscalculation.

Although the US appears to be on the brink of civil conflict, its economic and military strength is not to be trifled with. History demonstrates that empires often strike out wildly in their death throes, and US views regarding China's expansionism extend far beyond the ultra-right-wing hawks in the Republican party. The Pentagon has elaborate plans for a nuclear war with China, and with evangelical fanatics like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in charge, we must assume that preparations for such a war are already taking place.

The next three years could be an incendiary period if China persists on its current trajectory. Many countries are trying to hedge, but the scope for neutrality is narrowing. Meanwhile, any ability to navigate between the US and China is becoming harder each day. Sooner or later they will be forced to take sides. Regrettably, rival power blocs were a late 20th-century experiment can not work in today's context.

Allowing for the fact that a democracy of humanity, rather than a jumble of competing states, exists in a fantasy between wishful thinking and an empty promise, and assuming capitalism can be reformed and democracy purged of its corruption, a wiser move from the West would be to embrace China's traditional aspirations while denying President Xi his more perverse demands kindled by delusions of self-glory.

For that to happen the US and its allies must avoid regarding today's situation as a replay of the cold-war with the Soviet Union. They would need to rediscover their civilizational impulse, be more open to a distributed world order, drop their demands for an economic decoupling while eliminating all belligerent rhetoric against China, and help to craft a narrative that makes peace between all nations, not just possible but the most compelling proposition.

In the meantime, China will need to reconsider its political ploys in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, so that US-China rivalry does not continue to escalate.

We are fast approaching a geopolitical inflection point. It began when Donald Trump decided to launch a popularity contest against China without fathoming out a strategy for managing the fallout. It is estimated that around 20 percent of the world population would be willing to join an anti-China alliance. But the rest are not. Emerging markets in particular do not consider this a practical proposition.

Should the US try to inhibit China’s legitimate rise, or China seeks to build an exclusive sphere of influence across Asia, the two countries would further deepen the global divide and begin a sequence of altercations that could last decades or end in disaster for humanity as a whole.

As the Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci correctly stated when reflecting on a previous interregnum: The old world is dying, and a new one struggling to be born. Now is the time for monsters.