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How Donald Trump has taken America closer than ever to China
- Trump’s America and Xi’s China are actually in closer agreement than ever on governance. Just as Beijing rejects the need for a separation of powers, the US president has been going to great lengths to discredit the US election process
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The Covid-19 pandemic may have killed about a million people and ripped a hole in the global economy, but at least it hasn’t caused structural damage to the grand United Nations General Assembly Hall.
At the opening of the 75th general assembly, the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful countries delivered speeches full of rhetoric so concussive and reality-defying that some of it might have brought down the hall’s dome had leaders delivered their remarks live from the podium.
If we’ve learned anything from this year’s assembly, it’s that the world is being ruled by two strongmen who no longer try to downplay topics that show them in a bad light.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping, for example, spoke of the need to ensure that “human civilisations remain colourful and diversified”. Coming from a leader whose party has engineered something of a final solution to the culture and languages of ethnic Uygurs, Tibetans, Mongolians and anything else that doesn’t fit in with the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of an economically incentivised Han monoculture, this broke new ground for Chinese propaganda.
He is clearly learning a lot from his American counterpart Donald Trump, who has himself been working hard to adopt China’s model of fusing party and government. This may be the only front on which bilateral cooperation is a success, but we’ll come back to this point.
Before the age of hyper-partisanship that gave us Trump, Xi would have stuck with the usual dour spiel about how people want stability and economic security more than anything.
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