Has China Defeated The West In The Era of Pandemic ?
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa
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To those who once asked, and answered, if “China has won ?,” only to answer in the affirmative, as seen in the works of Kishore Mahbubani, or, perhaps even Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group, whose company creed is “Politics First”, neither of them seemed to have taken into account the gravity of other factors. Factors that are critical in deciding whether China can rise to the top, and stay there, without any resistance.
Take the recent introduction of the National Security Law on Hong Kong on June 30 2020, for instance. China did not anticipate that the world would “push back,” or side with the unruly protestors in Hong Kong, some of whom did engage in acts of violence against Hong Kong police and civilians.
Yet, when the National Security Law on Hong Kong was passed at 11 PM, just one hour prior to the commemoration of the 23rd anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China from the United Kingdom (UK) on July 1st 1997, China began to face the world challenging China’s legal stance.
This is the case since the law puts the citizens of many countries who visit Hong Kong in legal jeopardy of extra judicial detention.
Nor did China anticipate the dramatic increase in the odd weather patterns that have triggered drought, and floods, of varying intensities across the country in 2020. Indeed, in the southwestern part of China, not excluding Wuhan too, floods have become China’s top headache this year.
More recently, China has had to struggle with the possibility of a G4 swine flu virus becoming the next pandemic.
The Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan, has also warned of another deadlier “pneumonia” springing up in the neighboring state. To be sure, Kazakhstan has denied the severity of the disease. Yet, Almaty is a critical ally of China, and it is a key point of the Belt and Road Initiative of China too.
The fact of the matter is, in a world still wobbling from Coronavirus and increasingly climate change, the trajectory of China’s economic growth would just be as uncertain as the world’s own globalization. Unless a vaccine is found (for all), no country would know who would be up, or, down.
This is due to the inter-nexus of the two, or, more dimensions. China needs the world, to export its goods, while potentially, China also needs the good will of the world to visit Hong Kong and the mainland without any iota of fear; especially when the relationship of China and the United States were to go sour, or, perhaps, with Canada and Australia too.
Real or fictive, it remains a fear factor that could be intimidating, since two Canadians were indeed attested when the daughter of the founder of Huawei was detained in 2019, and will now be facing trial to be extradited to the United States.
Australia, fearing the worst, has issued a travel warning to its own citizens to China.
As these issues are taking place, swirling increasingly swiftly in China’s relationship with its pan Indo-Pacific neighbors, the United States, has described the keen rivalry with China as a “marathon”; something not likely to thaw easily even if there is a new American president in November 2020 or 2024.
Sensing the increased geopolitical tempo and risks, reputable academics such as Professor He Kai has urged China to reflect on its foreign policy, since China does indeed need the world, and vice versa, to ensure a peaceful concert of powers.
Elsewhere, China has to contend with a “debt bomb,” within its midst, just as other great powers have to face the same. Thus, it is not easy for anyone, whether the person being a scholar or strategic thinker to speak of a uni-linear “rise” of China.
China’s historical dynamics, as Professor Wang Gung Wu at the East Asia Institute in Singapore likes to point out in all his works, is “cyclical,” if not supremely complex, in nature. As the first opening phrase of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms acclaimed “What may unite under the Heaven may divide, what may divide under the Heaven may unite.” In other words, there is a long way to go for China to be permanently lodged as number “one.” China knows it too.
Even the United States and the West, after more than five hundred years of dominion, have begun to understand that the power of the pandemic may essentially rest in how the state is shaped, or made, to withstand the full power of the virus, with many more waves of different viruses to come.
Thus, the state must be able to work with others, as Foreign Minister Wang Yi himself has conceded. This is the reality facing China and also all rising or great powers.
