Long March to the Middle Kingdom

I have felt for a while that we live not in the Information Age but in the Misinformation Age. There is no truly free press even in democracies, and free speech is heavily distorted, with voices muted or amplified depending on the prevailing political winds. The degree of censorship and deplatforming of inconvenient views especially since the start of the Ukraine war has demonstrated how hollow the principle of Freedom of Speech really is. Cancel Culture is now a feature of both the Right and the Left, with both sides justifying censorship by claiming to be fighting "misinformation".

Nowhere is this misinformation more apparent than in the reporting on China. In the West and in India, all news and commentary about China is uniformly negative, with a perceptible undercurrent of hostility, fear, dread and loathing. Seriously? Can there be no good news at all from a country of 1.4 billion people that has delivered unprecedented levels of prosperity to its citizens, achieved world-class technological milestones and emerged in the best shape after managing the pandemic with minimal casualties? Apparently not. It may not be politically correct to use the term "Yellow Peril", but the sentiment is constantly dog-whistled.

I have been pleasantly surprised therefore to find three needles in this swirling haystack of misinformation that provide relatively dispassionate and unbiased analyses of China. All three are detailed, well-researched and most importantly, reassuring. Upon reading these articles, it becomes apparent that we are not in imminent danger of being conquered, enslaved and oppressed by an insatiably expansionist power, as we have been led to believe from every other media, social and establishment source. What we are witnessing is a "phase transition", the likes of which has not been seen in recent history, but there is nothing necessarily sinister about it.

To those genuinely interested in informing themselves about China instead of succumbing to the unceasing, pervasive fearmongering in our media and social ecosystems, I highly recommend that they read these three articles in full. However, since they are quite long, I will provide a Cliff's Notes version here for convenience.

The Old Silk Road and its modern reincarnation, the Belt and Road Initiative. CPC ideologue Wang Huning keeps a watchful eye on developments.

I would structure a study of these three articles as follows:

The Past 500 Years — The Chinese perspective of history, both its own and that of the wider world

"Five Centuries of Global Transformation: A Chinese Perspective" by Yao Zhongqiu of Renmin University (2023)

We've read and heard so much about China from non-Chinese sources. Surely it wouldn't hurt to know what the Chinese think of themselves and of us.
The Past 50 Years — The Chinese government's assessment of the risk posed to its society by modern trends

"The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning" by independent analyst and blogger NS Lyons (2021)

The periodic shifts in China's policies are opaque and unfathomable to outsiders. After "Capitalist roader" (a Mao-era prefix) Deng moved China to a pragmatic, high-growth model, why is Xi Jinping shifting gears again, talking of a more socialistic target of "Common Prosperity", reining in billionaires and unleashing a slew of new rules on Chinese society? A Western analyst has a fascinating — and well-substantiated — hypothesis.
The Past 10 Years — What China is up to with the diplomatic spearhead of the BRI, and Why

"Understanding China’s Belt and Road Initiative" by Peter Cai of the Lowy Institute (2017)

China has been accused of buying its way into influence around the world, while simultaneously trapping vulnerable countries in debt. But could there be less sinister reasons for China pushing the BRI, an infrastructure-building initiative more than ten times the size of the Marshall Plan? An Australian think tank has reason to believe there may be.

Let's go.

1. The Past 500 Years — The Chinese perspective of history, both its own and that of the wider world

Article: "Five Centuries of Global Transformation: A Chinese Perspective" by Yao Zhongqiu of Renmin University (2023)

Prof Yao breaks down his historical analysis into three broad phases. Now, a casual student of Chinese history may be tempted to predict that these three phases must be about (1) when China was a great and thriving civilisation, (2) when China was subjugated by the West in the "Century of Humiliation", and (3) when China is re-emerging as a great power.

However, Prof Yao's analysis is far more sophisticated than that familiar but simplistic arc, which is precisely why his article is worth serious study.

The three phases in brief

The first phase of the last 5 centuries of world history, from around the 1400s to around the 1700s, was a period of internal churn in both China and the West. This was also the period when the two civilisations made contact and began to trade — as equals. The two sides influenced each other in equal measure in a relationship that was balanced and not one-sided.

The second phase of world history, from the early 1900s until recent times, was a period where relations between China and the West see-sawed. This phase encompassed both the Century of Humiliation as well as China's post-colonial rise, right to the point when a tipping point has once again been reached.

The third phase of world history is what we are currently living through. There is a phase transition underway, and other scholars have interpreted this period in terms of the Thucydides Trap. Prof Yao however concludes that military conflict between the US and China is unlikely, and describes the New World Order that China is inexorably ushering in.

The three phases in greater detail

The latter part of the first phase witnessed a little-known inter-civilisational interchange. While neither Europe nor China could be described as rationalist at the time, the Chinese belief in "heaven" was more a notion of human accountability to a higher power than a belief in a single anthropomorphic God. This notion of accountability crucially included its Emperors, and served to enshrine an ideal of good governance that transcended any single dynasty. It was a civilisational concept.

In contrast, Europeans had believed for centuries that religion, i.e., Christianity, was the only basis of morality. However, when Jesuit priests from Europe went on proselytising missions to China, the reports they sent back on Chinese society and philosophy prompted European thinkers such as Voltaire to question many of the ideas that had been taken as self-evident truths until then. The ideas of meritocracy rather than inherited privilege, the separation of church and state, and other radical ways to organise and govern a society, influenced the European Enlightenment. This is an important facet of history to remember today, since it seems to be an article of faith that the West is civilisationally superior to the East on account of the values of the Enlightenment. Not so. The West owes many of these very ideas to the East, specifically to China.

The first part of the second phase was characterised by the West leveraging the newfound technological edge afforded by the Industrial Revolution to subjugate and colonise other civilisations. Colonial exploitation provided the cheap raw materials that enabled the West to gain an exclusive lock on the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Without the crucial leverage of colonialism, the knowledge and inventions of the Industrial Revolution, just like knowledge in earlier eras, could have spread to other civilisations, enabling them to keep up with the West and stay equal. As it happened, thanks to this extreme power imbalance, the weakness of the state in all of the West's colonies prevented large-scale investment in technology even though technology was visible and available. Development in the West, and non-development in the East (better described as the Global South), became self-perpetuating.

The latter part of the second phase saw the unwinding of colonialism, and since then, the underdeveloped countries of the Global South began a gradual recovery. China in particular began to progress with increasing speed.

The third phase is mainly characterised by the deindustrialisation of the West. The financial control of the world's systems lulled the West into believing it could continue to control the generation of wealth regardless of where industrial production was located. The shift in industrial power has been a decades-long trend, but the tipping point has only recently become apparent. However, even as the West has realised with panic that its former edge has been lost, it lacks the unity to act in cohesion to arrest this trend. The commercial logic that drives policy in Western governments acts to keep every Western country self-interested, disunited and incapable of acting on a coherent strategy that will benefit them all.

The conditions are therefore ripe for a new world order. China is the main driver of this change, and since it is civilisationally very different from the West, the new world order is going to look very different from the old.

Is the coming New World Order something to fear?

Moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar is always inherently scary, but is fear justified in this case? Prof Yao offers a number of arguments why not, and where these are abstract, I will provide substantiation through well-known examples.

The first is the geopolitical reality that the Western order is a maritime one since its dominant power (the US) is situated outside the Eurasian heartland. The centre of gravity of the world has been artificially moved out of the Eurasian landmass through the US's maritime power. With the rise of China, the centre of gravity returns to Eurasia. The change is however unlikely to be a wrenching one because China has historically been both a land-based power as well as a maritime one, and hence the links that the rest of the world have with Eurasia will not be disrupted. On the contrary, development will be more balanced and even. The Belt and Road Initiative, which has both overland and maritime elements to it, is the reincarnation of the old Silk Road that delivered prosperity to many kingdoms in an era of stability.

The second is the shift from the Western system of economic relations, which is essentially a capitalist model, to a more hybrid one. To take a specific example, Western lending institutions such as the IMF and World Bank impose structural conditions on borrowing nations that discourage socialistic mechanisms in favour of purely capitalistic ones. Most countries that borrow from the IMF have demonstrably not emerged out of poverty or developed sufficient infrastructure of their own. The investment that entered their economies has kept ownership of productive assets in Western hands, ensuring that its returns continue to flow mainly to the West. It's a self-perpetuating cycle of Western economic dominance.

China's decade-old BRI is attracting increasing numbers of partner nations, since its benefits are seen to be quite dramatic. China's loans are at lower interest rates than comparable ones from Western multilateral or private lenders, and come with no strings attached in terms of how the borrowing nation needs to structure its economy. Infrastructure that has not been built in the 70 years since European colonialism is now mushrooming across the Global South. As China moves up the production value chain, it is transferring entire factories to other countries to kickstart their industrialisation. Additionally, in contrast to the debunked smear campaign of "debt-trap diplomacy", many BRI loans have in fact been forgiven. Instead of selling fish as the West has been doing, China is teaching the Global South to fish.

The third factor is that the West has acted as a moralising force (albeit one with selective blindness), which seeks to impose its values on other countries. In recent years, the cynicism surrounding its support of democracy, freedom and human rights has become more blatant. Not only are these virtues claimed to be universal rather than just Western, they are also weaponised so as to justify the punishment of countries that don't toe the line. In contrast, China does not seek to export its system of government, or even its values, to other countries. Dealing with China imposes far less of a burden on countries than dealing with the West does. Chinese culture emphasises harmony when dealing with difference, in contrast to the enforced uniformity demanded by the Western-dominated international order.

Summary of Article 1

Prof Yao's article essentially provides the historical context that paints a far less threatening picture of China. The image of China as a bogeyman is a Western creation, and the reasons are not far to seek. The West's days of free rent from its colonial past are about to end, and the country most responsible for ending them must therefore be demonised in the eyes of the rest of the world. However, as Nelson Mandela once famously told a Western journalist, "Your enemies are not our enemies". China's track record over the last few decades shows that it favours diplomacy, rapprochement and economic partnership rather than forming military blocs, exporting weapons or fomenting conflict, and this augurs well for the future.

2. The Past 50 Years — The Chinese government's assessment of the risk posed to its society by modern trends

Article: "The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning" by independent analyst and blogger NS Lyons (2021)

The premise in a nutshell

Lyons's analysis is striking because his study uncovers a counter-intuitive conclusion reached by an influential Chinese government ideologue, an éminence grise called Wang Huning. People in the West and in India are used to viewing China as "the other", i.e., focusing on the differences between the two systems that they tend to characterise as "democracy versus autocracy". That preconclusion prevents them from even considering similarities between the two.

The startling conclusion that the Chinese government appears to have agreed on internally is that Chinese society has begun to resemble that of the West in a concerning and potentially dangerous aspect — liberalism, or the "Liberal International Order".

Again, what a casual reader understands by the term "liberalism" is likely to involve democracy, freedom, individual human rights, free markets, and other socio-economic aspects that are accepted as good and positive. However, the interpretation of the term "liberalism" by the Wang Huning-influenced Chinese government deals with the problems of excessive individualism and alienation from community and society, a hedonistic consumerism bereft of values, and a consequent breakdown of social cohesiveness and national unity. In these aspects, the Chinese government sees its own society as starting to resemble that of the West in a very concerning way, rather than being different.

The shift of gears by the Chinese government in recent times, away from "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" (a barely disguised term for Capitalism) to the genuinely more socialistic objective of "Common Prosperity", the crackdown on celebrity culture and other "moral engineering" initiatives, is driven in large part by the perceived need to arrest a downward social spiral.

In short, China does not primarily see the West as a military threat, but as the spreader of a dangerous social pathogen.

Excerpts

Some sections of this highly readable article are worth reproducing here.

In a 1988 essay, "The Structure of China's Changing Political Culture," Wang argued that society's "software" (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its "hardware" (economics, systems, institutions).

Wang Huning's argument above actually challenges communist orthodoxy, which is also known as "dialectic materialism". His triumph as an ideologue is the fact that he managed to get the CPC to accept and act on this idea.

Examining China in the midst of Deng's rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country "in a state of transformation" from "an economy of production to an economy of consumption," while evolving "from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture," and "from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture."

Meanwhile, he believed that the modernization of "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. "There are no core values in China's most recent structure," he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.

His conclusion was, "We must create core values".

At the time, the liberalism of the West was considered to be an acceptable set of societal values. But when Wang actually visited the US on a 6-month scholarship, what he saw quickly changed his mind.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book 'America Against America'. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an "unstoppable undercurrent of crisis" produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

Wang's conclusion was that Americans' problems "are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism."

The real cell of society in the United States is the individual, he finds, because the family has disintegrated. The glamour of high commodification abounds. This commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems. In the end, the American economic system has created human loneliness as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality (emphasis mine). As a result, nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America's atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with an insurmountable problem because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

Although he had once been idealistic about America, Wang returned to China in 1989 as an opponent of liberalisation. His new idea was to "blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism."

When Chinese people look at the US today, they "no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future."

Instead, they see Wang's America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.

And this is where the definition of liberalism comes in.

It's true that China never remotely liberalized — if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism's essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern "consumer."

From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what's happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang's nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.

Wang Huning's impact on China has been by convincing the government to slam the brakes on liberalism and shore up Chinese culture instead.

This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that "We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider," and warning that "achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party's governing foundations."

This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China's top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed China's internet and social media companies. It's why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with "996" overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It's why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It's why the government has announced "excessively high incomes" are to be "adjusted."

And it's why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the "spiritual opium" of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. [...] The purpose of Xi's "profound transformation" is to ensure that "the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture."

In the end, the campaign represents Wang Huning's triumph and his terror. It's thirty years of his thought on culture made manifest in policy.

I would add that while it's not certain whether the Chinese government will succeed in its attempt to revive and rejuvenate its society in what is essentially another Cultural Revolution, the US is structurally incapable of reversing its own slide. Any attempt by an American government to reduce inequality, for example, will be decried by its critics as "communism" and invariably stymied.

Without getting into the Left vs Right, Liberal vs Conservative debate, I just have to say that Wang has a point. A society that is too individualistic and consumerist isn't actually healthy. Social alienation, lack of purpose, and various mental health issues are the result. Of course, any prescription from social Conservatives to avoid a cultural vacuum is likely to be problematic too, since Conservatism's active ingredients are generally bigoted and regressive. Frankly, all modern societies are facing this problem of "liberalism", and yet none has found the answer. The West isn't even trying. But China is, and the rest of the world has a vested interest in China's success. If China finds a solution to the problems caused by "liberalism", other countries could potentially apply these ideas to their own circumstances.

Summary of Article 2

Lyons's article has shone a light on an influential but little-known Chinese ideologue who seems to have stumbled upon a corrosive social phenomenon called liberalism that afflicts most modern societies, not just the US and China. Under Wang's urgent prodding, the Chinese government is enacting a series of steps that may seem needlessly authoritarian from the viewpoint of democratic societies, but could potentially save China from an existential crisis.

This article provides an important insight because what looks like mindless repression by an authoritarian government can alternatively be seen as a desperate attempt to save a society from an insidious social threat. The problems of liberalism identified by Wang pose a potential threat to the survival of other societies as well, and so the Chinese experiment, if successful, could be of immense benefit to the world.

3. The Past 10 Years — What China is up to with the diplomatic spearhead of the BRI, and Why

Article: "Understanding China’s Belt and Road Initiative" by Peter Cai of the Lowy Institute (2017)

[The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was previously known as "One Belt, One Road (OBOR)", which is the way Cai's 2017 article refers to it.]

Any discussion of the BRI in the West and in India tends to be negative, playing up a so-called "debt-trap diplomacy" and focusing on the few failures and political scandals associated with some of its projects. However, not only have the various allegations been repeatedly debunked, but the number of successfully completed projects under the BRI's belt (pun unintended) has steadily risen. BRI has become increasingly popular in the Global South. About 150 developing countries have signed up to it, a notable exception being India.

Why did China embark on this initiative? Was it altruism, a pragmatic win-win strategy, or something diabolically sinister?

Peter Cai's article provides the answer with three fairly mundane and reasonable domestic drivers in addition to the geostrategic one that foreign analysts focus on to the exclusion of everything else. I will change the naming and order of his points to make them a bit easier to understand, and readers can check the original article to verify that I have not materially altered his argument.

So why is China pushing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)?

Need to move up the manufacturing value chain
"China has developed an impressive reputation as the 'world's factory' over the last three decades. In recent years, however, its comparative advantages in manufacturing, such as low labour costs, have begun to disappear. For this reason, the Chinese leadership wants to capture the higher end of the global value chain."
Excess capacity
China has surplus funds from years of favourable trade balances that demand to be invested profitably, and it also has excess industrial and construction capacity that it cannot fully utilise domestically. China's growth is in danger of stalling, with adverse social consequences, unless its war chest can be productively invested to ensure continuous growth. Lending for infrastructure development projects overseas using Chinese expertise, labour and materials solves both problems at one stroke. Cai adds an important point that "in terms of addressing the excess capacity problem, OBOR is less about boosting exports of products such as steel and more about moving the excess production capacity out of China." More on this later.
Re-balancing internal development
The pro-capitalist policies launched by Deng yielded economic growth that was rapid but unbalanced, increasing inequality between regions. The coastal provinces of the East became far richer than those of the interior, which remained backward and underdeveloped. To head off social tensions and to unlock further growth potential, it has become necessary to invest in developing these interior regions, and crucially, to link them with international trade routes that do not involve a costly and time-consuming round-trip through congested Eastern ports and the Malacca Straits. The BRI thus also funds development projects within China, mainly in its underdeveloped Western provinces, and links them to Central Asia, West Asia, South Asia (through the CPEC) and Europe. The economic development of Xinjiang province can also help to reduce the sporadic Islamic extremism witnessed there. High-Speed Rail is yet another economic multiplier that will pull distant parts of the country closer together and hasten the amelioration of inequality.
Making China the Indispensable Nation
This is the only one of the drivers for the BRI that is not domestic but geo-economic or geostrategic. China would like to entrench itself at the heart of the world's trade network while also climbing the technology ladder to own standards rather than just manufacture products or specialise in technologies.

As we can see from the above, the BRI is an elegant solution to three of China's critical domestic problems, and so the business case speaks for itself. The geostrategic value of the BRI in enhancing China's position in the world is just icing on the cake.

The geostrategic value of standards

To my mind, China's push to control standards as it moves up the value chain is actually geostrategic rather than domestic, although Cai's article categorises it otherwise.

China is not just trying to export higher-end goods through OBOR but to encourage the acceptance of Chinese standards. The Chinese Government's focus on exporting its technological standards must be understood in terms of its broader ambition to become an innovation-based economy and a leader in research and development.

There is a popular saying in China that "Third-tier companies make products, second-tier companies make technology and first-tier companies make standards".

The focus on high-speed rail also illustrates Beijing's goal of gaining acceptance of Chinese standards. If countries across the region accept Chinese high-speed railway technology as their national standard, it could become the de facto standard across a vast geographical area. This means Chinese manufacturers and suppliers would enjoy a strong, first-mover advantage over other competitors, especially Japanese producers of high-speed rail.

Telecommunications is another important sector in terms of gaining acceptance of Chinese standards. China boasts two world-class telecommunication equipment makers: Huawei and ZTE. The former derives 70 per cent of its sales revenue from outside of China and is particularly successful in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Huawei, ZTE, and China Mobile are closely involved in developing 5G technology, which includes setting and designing international technical standards.

Exporting excess capacity

Cai's thesis that China is not just seeking to export products but to move out production capacity itself is an interesting one.

OBOR is another way for Chinese policymakers to address the excess capacity problem, although not in the way that some observers believe.

In terms of addressing the excess capacity problem, OBOR is less about boosting exports of products such as steel and more about moving the excess production capacity out of China. OBOR projects are currently too small to absorb China's vast glut of steel and other products. Instead, Beijing wants to use OBOR to migrate whole production facilities.

Moving factories with excess capacity to OBOR countries helps China reduce the supply glut at home while helping less developed countries to build up their industrial bases.

"On the one hand, we should gradually migrate our low-end manufacturing to other countries and take pressure off industries that suffer from an excess capacity problem. At the same time, we should support competitive industries such as construction engineering, high-speed rail, electricity generation, machinery building and telecommunications moving abroad." — Hu Huaibang, Chairman of the China Development Bank

This resonates with the idea in Prof Yao's article that China is not just selling fish to underdeveloped countries but teaching them to fish.

While Cai's article also dwells on some risks for the BRI, in the 6 years since the article was written, BRI has only attracted more partners and become an unqualified success, even with the economic downturn of the pandemic.

Summary of Article 3

Peter Cai's compelling in-depth analysis of China's Belt and Road Initiative tells us that even without its geostrategic and geo-economic value to China, it would have had to be done. The domestic drivers for it were simply too strong, and understanding these compulsions makes the BRI seem a far less sinister undertaking.

Conclusion

While these three articles were written by different people at different points in time and from widely different perspectives, they are all remarkably congruent in the picture they paint of China.

What's clear from a study of these articles is that China takes a measured view of itself and other civilisations, has a unique civilisational model of good governance that even influenced the Western Enlightenment, yet does not believe in proselytising its cultural values to other nations. Its approach to cultural difference is harmonious coexistence, not enforced uniformity to a "universal" standard. China has historically been a trading nation, and has always sought stability both domestically and abroad, since conflict hampers trade and impacts prosperity.

What may appear to external observers as a repressive system could alternatively be viewed as one where the government is making a conscious and farsighted effort to fight debilitating cultural trends in society and bring about positive social change. This could provide other societies facing the same challenge with ideas and tools to sustain themselves.

Finally, the massive diplomatic initiative of the BRI may not be a giant and cynical geostrategic ploy by China to take over the world, but a logical and elegant solution to some pressing domestic issues. The geostrategic advantages to China exist, but in a win-win configuration.

Taken together, from the perspective of the Global South (if not the US and its Western allies), the picture of China now seems very different from the shrill fearmongering constantly pumped out by the media. Far from being a threat, the Chinese vision for itself and the world as partners in progress is a welcome one, especially in contrast to the existing world order that only serves to entrench and perpetuate the dominance of the West.

中国加油!

Long March to the Middle Kingdom

Saturday, 21 September 2024

Why China Scares The World

Sunday, 9 July 2023

A Pun In Mandarin

Monday, 26 June 2023

Another Minor Triumph Of Understanding

Friday, 23 June 2023

超级英雄可以办任何事情 - Superheroes Can Do Anything

Thursday, 4 May 2023

Guns In China Go "Pào! Pào!"

Sunday, 9 April 2023

Inscrutable No More - Three Uniquely Insightful Articles That Demystify China For The World

Monday, 6 March 2023

A Chinese Saying I Read (Natively) At An Adelaide Restaurant