My Take | How a seminal paper in 2012 predicted our world today
- Professor Wang Jisi’s ‘go west’ thesis not only anticipated and articulated the rationale of the Belt and Road Initiative, but also warned of the tensions and confrontations between China and the United States today
If you ask real experts who are “in the know’ to list the top 10 most influential international politics publications in the last decade, Wang Jisi’s 2012 seminal paper, ‘‘Going west, rebalancing China’s geostrategy”, will almost certainly rank high.
Published exactly a decade ago, it not only formulated the economic and geostrategic rationale for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but also accurately predicted the tensions and confrontations between China and the United States today. Whether it’s the evolving partnership with Russia, anti-terrorism in Xinjiang and Tibet, rising risks of military confrontation with the US in the Far East, the need for an alternative expansionary policy in Central Asia, and the growing importance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Wang’s paper provides a big-picture framework to understand the increasingly dangerous world we live in today.
Rare is a piece of contemporary writing, especially in fast-changing international relations, which has not only avoided being dated, but become even more relevant as the years go by.
Why go west?
There are numerous versions of the paper by Wang, who is president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University and is one of the country’s most influential advisers to the official foreign policy establishment. Here, I will use the one he first published in Global Times in October 2012 because that’s the only one not behind a paywall. There are various English language versions but you will have to subscribe and pay for them.
Here is a series of choices and dilemmas China faced and still faces: being a land power and/or a sea power; rich coastline provinces in the east and south vs poor or underdeveloped provinces in the west; and how to respond to the US pivot in the Pacific and its withdrawal from Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. In the South and East China seas, China’s maritime ambitions are checked by the US, its allies and partners.