Embedded in the now dominant US narrative of “Chinese aggression”, Sinophobes claim that China is not only a threat to the American way of life, but also an existential threat to the American republic.
It’s worth noting, of course, that the American way of life has long ceased to be a model to be emulated all across the Global South and that the US walks and talks increasingly like an oligarchy.
Underneath it all is a huge divide, in outlook and cultural beliefs, between the two great powers, as some leaders and writers have attempted to explain.
President Xi Jinping’s speech last week does make it clear that Beijing is engaged in tweaking the rules of the current Westphalian system to truly reflect its reconquered geopolitical and economic power.
Yet it’s hardly a matter of “overthrowing” the system established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. As much as trade blocks are ruling the new geoeconomic game, nation-states are bound to remain the backbone of the international system.
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One of Beijing’s key foreign policies is no interference in other nations’ internal affairs. In parallel, the historical record since the end of WWII shows that the US has never refrained from interfering in other nations’ internal affairs.
What Beijing is really aiming at is what Professor Xiang Lanxin, director of the Centre of One Belt and One Road Studies at the China National Institute for SCO International Exchange and Judicial Cooperation, referred to at a crucial intervention during the June 2016 Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore.
Lanxin defined the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as being an avenue to a ‘post-Westphalian world’, in a sense of a true 21st century geoeconomic integration of Eurasia acted out by Asian nations. That’s the key reason why Washington, which set the current international rules in 1945, fears BRI and now demonizes it 24/7.
