Pride before a fall: time for arrogant US to realise it’s just another member of the international community
- Zhou Bo says the US has been blinded by a belief in its own exceptional status.
- America’s fighting words and claims of technology theft and election meddling do not reflect China’s efforts at integrating itself into the international system
The US believes it is exceptional. This dates back to 1630 when English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, addressed his fellow colonists in a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity”. Quoting directly from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he told them that their new community would be “as a city upon a hill”, watched by the world.
Watch: Pence accuses China of election meddling
Pence is right on one point: America’s hope that “freedom in China would expand in all forms” has gone unfulfilled. The rise of new economies represented by the rise of the G20 and the decline of the G7, a grouping of the world’s most industrialised economies, tells us that countries can develop and prosper through ways other than by following the Western democracy model.
Watch: Trump gets unexpected laugh at the UN
As a responsible member of the global community, China is stepping up in more ways than one. Over the past decade, the Chinese military has drastically increased its efforts in peacekeeping, counter-piracy and disaster relief overseas to shoulder more international obligations. And in 2017 alone, more than 600,000 Chinese studied abroad.
Thus, US suspicions are largely unfounded. Even if Pence’s speech was aimed at a domestic audience, rather than at China, it further aggravated the Chinese, who were already rankled by the US national defence strategy that named China and Russia as the country’s two strategic competitors. The question is: is Pence’s speech a manifesto of America’s stance in a new cold war?
Unlike the Soviet Union during the cold war, there is no evidence that China is trying to export its ideology or social system to other countries or aligning itself with others to form a bloc.
Non-alliance gives China the moral high ground. If China could maintain its stance of non-alignment decades ago when it was one of the least developed countries in the world, why should it give in now when it is the second-largest economy in the world?
Watch: President Xi Jinping’s vision for China’s place in the world
And it is highly unlikely that the US could gather its allies and partners together for a showdown with China. All of its allies and partners have deep economic relations with China, to say the least.
The future of China-US relations is most probably a kind of “corpetition”, a mix of cooperation and competition. The question is how to make sure cooperation prevails over competition, or, in the worst-case scenario, competition doesn’t spill over into conflict.
This won’t be easy for the US. China is widely expected to overtake it within the next two decades to become the world’s largest economy. For most Americans, this will be the first time that they will see an America that is no longer “first” in the world. This is a sea change.
If ignorance is the father of arrogance, then “a city upon a hill” looks more like pride inflated into prejudice. After all, the US is no more than a member of the international community, like the rest of us. When it admits that, it is the start of its walk down the hill towards the plain, where the weather is certainly less chilly there than on a hill.
Zhou Bo is an honorary fellow at the PLA Academy of Military Science in China