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US-China relations
ChinaDiplomacy

US-China rivalry: Beijing should stop picking ideological battles with Washington, academic says

  • Keeping ideology out of their disputes can ‘help avoid proxy wars’, Yan Xuetong, one of China’s leading international relations scholars, says
  • Chinese diplomats and officials should ‘have the awareness to respect other people’s political systems and suppress their arrogance’, he says

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China should stop trying to prove the superiority of its political system, an intellectual says. Photo: EPA-EFE
Jun Mai
China should stop fighting ideological battles with the United States and trying to prove the superiority of its political system, according to a Chinese intellectual.

“There are more than 200 political entities in the world and only an extremely small number have the same ideology and political system as China,” Yan Xuetong, dean of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Modern International Relations in Beijing, said in an article published in the latest issue of its Quarterly Journal of International Politics.

“Thus, avoiding ideological fights with any country will bring more benefits than costs.”

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Yan, who is one of the country’s leading international relations scholars, said China could benefit from avoiding such confrontations because most countries had political systems similar to that of the US.

Very few of the world’s political groups share Beijing’s ideology, academic Yan Xuetong says. Photo: AP
Very few of the world’s political groups share Beijing’s ideology, academic Yan Xuetong says. Photo: AP
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In the past China had benefited from playing down the ideology debate as it reduced obstacles to international cooperation and helped to maintain stable relations with countries that had undergone regime changes, like Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.

Also, if Beijing continued to pick ideological fights with the US, it might find itself locked in proxy wars with nations backed by Washington, Yan said.

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