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Working together to bring long-term gain to world
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AS the world marches into 2015, the international landscape augurs just another year of what history wonks refer to as Pax Americana. A “Chinese Century” foreseen by Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and many others has not begun.
Even if — a big if given the inaccuracy of economic estimates — China has overtaken the United States as the largest economy, over-interpretation would be unnecessary. Foremost is the fact that China is a vast country blessed with a large, hard-working, peace-loving and creative population determined to make full and wise use of its enormous resources to pursue a better life not only for its own but for the whole world.
Most Chinese are cool-headed. Although they value the opinion of prestigious economists like Stiglitz, they are not dizzy with the crown he has placed on China. A recent online poll conducted by Xinhua International, a Xinhua new media outlet, and Tencent, a Chinese Internet giant, shows that 53 percent of the some 65,000 respondents do not think 2015 marks the opening of a “Chinese Century.”
With China’s per capita GDP still equaling merely a third of Western Europe’s and a quarter of America’s, and with such outstanding problems as imbalance and inequality still far from being tamed, China’s top priority remains to deepen reform, secure sustained healthy economic development and maintain social stability and harmony.
In the Xinhua International/Tencent survey, 63 percent say China should continue to focus on promoting economic development and improving people’s well-being.
Only by putting its own house in good order, not least keeping its economic engines up and humming, can China continue to play the role of a responsible major country on the international stage.
History is fraught with conflicts between emerging and existing empires. US scholar John Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism, expounded in his masterpiece “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics,” strikes a chord with a good many. But what seems relevant is not necessarily right.
For one thing, the world did not suddenly fall down a rabbit hole. Despite repeated bouts of Western decline, Western dominance and US preeminence remain deeply entrenched, not least in the political and security spheres. Most global institutions are still skew in favor of the West, and the US military budget dwarfs those of the next 10 largest defense spenders combined.
Less Westernized
For another, the current reshaping of the international order is, at root, repairing and improving, instead of disrupting and upending. It is not that the West is declining but that the rest are catching up, and taking up what they deserve but has long eluded them.
And what is most important is that a less Westernized, more equalized world actually benefits the West as much as the rest. It might sound off-putting to Western chauvinists, but only on an international platform that is based on equality and cooperation — not hegemony and exploitation — will the world realize permanent peace.
As for the seemingly doomed China-US rivalry, history is by no means a magic crystal ball. The two global heavyweights should not reduce themselves to prisoners of outdated wisdom, but join hands to make history by blazing a new, win-win trail of major-country relations.
China benefits from a United States that is sober and sound, just as a prosperous and strong China serves the interests of the United States.
Although it borders on delusion to imagine a frictionless interaction between the pair, it does not strain credibility to conclude that their engagement does not have to wind up in confrontation and tragedy, especially in view of the ever-deepening economic globalization and the nations’ ever more entwined interests.
The author is a Xinhua writer.
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