Towards Confrontation

In the past, the EU and U.S. have urged China to further open its markets and ensure a level playing field. Now, in addition to those trade-related tensions, the West is heading for more confrontation. It has started to denounce China as a competing system that is not compatible with the West. According to Sigmar Gabriel, former vice-chancellor and foreign minister of Germany, ‘China is developing a comprehensive alternative system to the Western world, which does not build on our model of freedom, democracy, and individual human rights’.

The rhetoric in the U.S. has been much fiercer and has clearly reached a turning point. For the first time since the rapprochement of the 1970s, an American president has referred to China as a ‘rival’, a ‘revisionist power’, and a ‘primary threat to U.S. economic dominance’. President Donald Trump’s election campaign was built on hostility towards China. He is threatening them with a trade war and blames China for the tremendous trade deficit between both countries. Yet, America’s trade deficit is mainly due to its domestic macroeconomic policies. Hillary Clinton also called China, like Russia and Iran, an ‘existential threat’ that triggers ‘anxiety’ and ‘worries’.

[The West] has started to denounce China as a competing system that is not compatible with the West.

Despite the easy temptation to think China will coerce the world with its economic, technological, and increasing military power and that President Xi will be able to control order at his will, one should not overlook the possibility that those representations reveal more about the West than about China. They also reveal how deeply rooted Western hegemony is and how it reduces the capacity to reflectively assess the consequences of the West’s own relative decline and inability to adapt to an emerging multipolar world.

Slavoj Žižek argues that not only did communism fail in the 20th century but so did liberal democracy in terms of coping with the disruptions of global capitalism. Neither the short-lived Fukuyamaist welfare state of the 1990s nor the push towards post-Keynesian policies in the early 21st century have helped to avoid the steady rise of income inequality.

People have lost trust in established political parties and figures and blame them for not addressing their concerns about the perceived loss of security, culture, and identity. Globalisation, liberalisation, and digitalisation have weakened the nation state and slowly undermined the capacity of governments to address those disruptions. Charismatic populist leaders have increasingly capitalised on people’s rage throughout Europe and America.

Populism poses the greatest threat to liberal democracy. As highlighted by David Runciman, who teaches politics and history at Cambridge University, populists address the right struggles and fears but provide false answers, promising a quick return to an allegedly intact and culturally homogenous past. Their rhetoric polarises society and drives fear, which fuels rather than helps to overcome the public’s rage. The legitimacy crisis, which has led to the initial rise in populism, is aggravated by an intentional ‘disintegration of public morality’ and ‘manufacturing consent’ (see US philosopher Noam Chomsky). What makes populism so dangerous is that it does not question but slowly erodes the institutions of democracy, such as free elections, free press, and the rule of law. Equally dangerous is that liberals continue to believe in the functioning of democracy, even though they know it has ceased to do so. Populism is not its own cause but the result of a broken process of equal wealth creation and dignity, which populists perpetuate in the West.

Income inequality and stagnation, unemployment, insecure employment, heightened risk of poverty, and social exclusion are the main reasons behind it.

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that the prolonged impact of the West’s own marriage between liberal democracy and capitalism has caused the slow and relative demise of the West. China is portrayed as a scapegoat in order to distract from the West’s economic and legitimacy crisis and lack of vision on how to renew the liberal order and its promise of dignity and equal wealth creation. There is no new vision because the West has increasingly lost confidence in the liberal order, which has made protectionism a populist solution. The U.S.’s volatile Trump administration and protectionism, and the prolonged debt crisis in the European Union with its deeply divided economy and refugee crisis, have only exacerbated the current lack of confidence and undermined Western liberalism as a desirable transformation path.

Peter Nolan was right. China did not need liberal democracy to maintain four decades of successful reforms and cope with the disruptions of capitalism. It is questionable, however, whether a conceptual link to an ancient past will help modern China manage its future challenges in a globalised and digitalised world for which history offers no reference. However, it might help to explain why, unlike other authoritarian governments, China’s government continues to be morally obliged to serve its people and exercise benevolence. 

China’s modern bureaucracy, which existed long before the rise of the West, may not be sufficient to cope with an increasingly demanding civil society. However, recent history has questioned whether Western liberal democracy will serve its function effectively in the future. Western governments have become much more technocratic and interventionist in order to try to prevent market failure or cushion its disruptive impact. A stronger state might well become the norm rather than the exception.

China has clearly manifested its otherness under President Xi, and the West no longer believes in China’s self-Westernisation, but China has still become more Western than the West has become Chinese.

On a gloomier note, according to Israeli historian Yuval Harari, the rise of liberalism could well cause its downfall. Technological advances, not political interventions, may bring the end of liberalism. A stronger state may become unavoidable or even desirable, in the long run. In the meantime, the ideological differences between China and the West are prone to complicated diplomatic and economic relations. It might well be an ideological battle between China’s ‘benevolence’ and Western ‘liberalism’.