My Take | Punctured illusion behind US hostility to China
- In a recent essay, former HKU vice-chancellor Wang Gungwu puts today’s relationship between two countries down to the rejection of ‘the great convergence’
When you puncture someone’s deepest illusion, you can expect to be met with the greatest hostility. I wonder whether that’s not the reason why the United States is now bringing everything to bear – short of starting a war, at least for now – to contain and restrain China from going anywhere, both literally, in terms of its naval encirclement and the tech war, and metaphorically, to discredit contemporary China, led by a one-party – and nominally communist – state that has emerged as the world’s second-largest economy.
Roughly, it is the Western – specifically American – belief that the “economic and technological convergence of globalisation” would lead to “a singular cosmopolitan order” whereby everyone everywhere would more or less think, dress and even look alike.
This is ultimately the basis of a general belief that Western-defined values are universal, leading to what Wang observes as “the universalist claims of a liberal world order”, led by the US. Yet, when what is claimed as “universal [is] conflated with national interests, the world becomes a dangerous place”.
When the dominant power keeps asserting its own national interests and security and phrasing them in terms of universal values and interests, it cannot but be accused of being hypocritical, and rightly so. That has been the fate of the US; and as its global power and influence decline relative to the rest of the world, this can only get worse in a vicious cycle.