Chinese ChessChina is subverting the rules-based order because it is the United States’s order, not just because.
By Micah Meadowcroft
February 21, 2022
The World According to China, by Elizabeth C. Economy, (Polity: October 2021), 304 pages.
More than 130 countries participated in 2017’s first Belt and Road Forum. Heads of state paid their respects to Xi Jinping and his vision of a China that would once again play an appropriately central role in the world for the Middle Kingdom. “Two years later at the second BARF, however, the tone was markedly different,” Elizabeth C. Economy writes in The World According to China. Something about the Chinese Communists’ BARF had gone sour, even before the world caught Covid-19. “In response to criticism over the financing of BRI projects, People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang stated that the government would develop a market-oriented financing and investment system.”
There has been a temptation in certain circles, particularly in response to the pandemic, to present China as especially competent compared to the West. But the CCP as Economy presents it over the last half decade seems no more able to anticipate the actual results of its global policies than the United States. The blind spots may be different, and the CCP indeed has a level of control over its domestic population Western regimes can only envy, but the external myopia is shared. Perhaps all expansive oligarchies are alike.
China wishes to both expand its soft power in the world and play diplomatic hardball, but the Chinese do not seem to understand other civilizations (the strategist Edward Luttwak regularly calls Xi and other Chinese leaders “autistic”), so that over and over again China has miscalculated in ways that burn through what good will it has been given, e.g. during the early days of the Covid crisis, “China reportedly told France that ample PPE would be forthcoming if the latter bought Huawei 5G equipment.”
While not employing this language explicitly, The World According to China illustrates what international relations theorists call “weaponized interdependence.” That is, as Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman wrote in a seminal 2019 essay on the topic for International Security, how the institutions and networks that make up the global order form their own domain of conflict, such that “focal points of cooperation have become sites of control.” Economy highlights the mixed results, if not outright failures, of China’s efforts to build a truly parallel economic network in the Belt and Road initiative, and its various successes at playing power politics within the existing institutions of global governance and trade. She concludes that Xi and the CCP’s agenda “translates into a radically transformed international system,” one where the U.S. “ is no longer the global hegemon with a powerful network of alliances that reinforces much of the current rules-based order.”
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The original mistake of Western elites and especially American leadership was conflating the international system they had built with the liberalism they believed legitimated it. This was to some degree an understandable error, as a “rules-based” global order of nations and a rule of law government of, by, and for people as individuals appear to be the same thing at different scales. The technological portion of those bits of modernity, however, are in fact separable from all the individual rights concocted since 1945 in the name of humanity. Nations can engage in multilateral and bilateral negotiation, trade, and information exchange without expansive human rights having anything to do with it, the same way that there really are illiberal democracies. This confusion led U.S. leadership to embrace globalization with the calculation that a productive American middle class could be traded for a liberalized China, and financialization and consumption would make up the difference. By inviting China to become a central hub or node in the international order, they would prompt it to adopt Western values and play a cooperative role in the global system. Worse than a crime, this was a blunder. Just as domestically the CCP has discovered the technology of markets can be harnessed for the ends of socialism with Chinese characteristics, so too has Xi recognized that globalism itself can be employed for Sino-centric purposes.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinese-chess/
