My Take | World politics today is more complicated than the Cold War
- While a Chinese official counsels Beijing to seek rapprochement with Western democracies, Washington has been busy making nice with autocrats around the world to isolate Russia economically and China eventually
People outside China often think everyone thinks the same way, at least publicly, as dictated by the Communist Party. That can’t be further from the truth. Intellectual dissent and critical debate are as lively as in any country with a substantial presence of university scholars and public intellectuals.
In the highly acrimonious information war over Ukraine, China has taken a controversial stance for neutrality. Against this official foreign policy, it’s interesting to consider the contrarian views of a university scholar and official with the Counsellors’ Office of the State Council.
A Chinese mind’s journey to the West
Hu Wei, who is vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Centre under the Counsellors’ Office, has reached a conclusion almost exactly as what may be called “the Western consensus” on the war and predicted a grim future for China with few good options unless it tries to “liberalise” – Westernise? – its foreign policy. It’s worth considering his take at some length, which could well have been written by someone within the US foreign policy establishment in Washington. I don’t think he is right or even original at all, but it’s fascinating to me that someone in his position would take such a view.
Writing in the US-China Perception Monitor, Hu said: “The United States would regain leadership in the Western world, and the West would become more united … [T]he war would in fact bring France and Germany, both of which wanted to break away from the US, back into the Nato defence framework, destroying Europe’s dream to achieve independent diplomacy and self-defence. Germany would greatly increase its military budget; Switzerland, Sweden, and other countries would abandon their neutrality … The US and Europe would form a closer community of a shared future, and American leadership in the Western world will rebound.
“The unity of the Western world … will have a siphon effect on other countries: the US Indo-Pacific strategy will be consolidated, and other countries like Japan will stick even closer to the US, which will form an unprecedentedly broad democratic united front.
