Opinion | Biden and US hawks must understand China before waving the democratic torch
Viewing the conflict between the US and China as a zero-sum ideological competition between democracy and autocracy overlooks the origin of China’s current governing tradition
The geopolitical map of our time is unsettling. World politics is entering a new phase, and many politicians and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it should be: a clash of civilisations, the end of history, the decline of the nation-state, and the return of traditional rivalries between nations.
In US President Joe Biden’s world view, there exist only democracies and autocracies, all in competition with each other. A polarised political landscape in the US is united by the anti-China campaign. China, however, has recently celebrated its Communist Party’s centenary, doubling down on the conviction of its own path.
The rivalry between the United States and China has been interpreted as one of conflicting ideologies that originated from Western-centric philosophies which developed during the rise of the nation-states. The emerging Biden doctrine is that the tension between democracy and autocracy, with the US and China at opposite ends, is the defining clash of our time. In reality, the world is not binary, and life has many shades of grey.
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Gloves off at top-level US-China summit in Alaska with on-camera sparring
Gloves off at top-level US-China summit in Alaska with on-camera sparring
Humans dominate the Earth by mythmaking, according to Yuval Noah Harari. Religions and ideologies have played important roles in history, bringing hope and despair, prosperity and catastrophe to populations in different parts of the world.
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Given the suffering caused by inflammatory religious ideas and political ideologies in the past, we must exercise caution in using the righteousness of our own moral stories. The map has to fit the terrain. To de-escalate ideological conflicts, we should look into our past, the time and space through which we have travelled and made our history.
China, sits on the Eurasian plate, stretching from Mount Everest to the Pacific, from tropical to sub-Arctic climates. People have always migrated within China, following the seasons and river flows. To survive and prosper, people became more collective in order to capture the seasonal flows of torrential rivers, guide them into dams and graded plains, protect these fields from floods, and defend hard-earned harvests from nomads’ invasions.
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As a result, China has developed mega infrastructure to overcome geographical challenges. This has continued to this day – from the Great Wall and the Grand Canal to the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Diversion Project, which will link up all China’s main rivers, planned for completion in 2050.
China sees more domestic migration than anywhere else – every year before the pandemic struck, during the holidays surrounding the Spring Festival, nearly 3 billion trips were recorded internally. To support this, the country has developed the world’s longest and one of its most extensively used high-speed railway networks.
