Let me start by borrowing from a core concept guiding the work of the Arab periodical, InterRegional for Strategic Analysis: that interaction between the world’s regions is not just political but also geographical. China’s combined geographic and demographic weight makes it more than a state; it is an entire region, shaped by history, experience and current international realities. Developments in the world today are pointing towards a reversion to a bipolar global order, with the difference that the poles are not the US and the Soviet Union, but rather the US and China. But to equate the two cases beneath the heading “cold war,” one old and the other new, is analytically unwarranted.
The world is changing, but change is not cyclical like the sun rising every morning. Change is a complex phenomenon, and it brings about quite a bit of the new. In the context of Chinese-US relations, the American political scientist Joseph Nye contributed a new term: “cooperative rivalry”. This oxymoron, he writes, requires attention to its antithetical components: competition and cooperation. He then proposes several steps that the US should take in this regard, such as optimising its technological advantages with more research and development, restructuring the military to incorporate the new technologies, and strengthening its historical alliances.
The economy is generally seen as the traditional domain for mutual dependency, through trade, currencies, and interwoven technological processes. Chinese supply lines are now crucial to achieving the economic recovery the US seeks after containing the Covid-19 pandemic. In general, Nye advised Washington to shift to a more dynamic “geo-economic” approach to its relationship with Beijing and away from the conventional geostrategic approach. He therefore cautioned against “decoupling” from China, which he felt would incur great risks and costs.
Then the war in Ukraine broke out. Although Washington continued to treat China as the US’s main global competitor and to reduce trade relations with it, the war has brought the world, and Chinese-US relations along with it, to new and unfamiliar territory. Of pivotal importance, here, is that Beijing and Washington view the world and how to conduct international relations differently. China has become an economic superpower. Its goods and wares reach every corner of the globe, as is the case with the US.
Alongside its economic prowess, its huge industrial and technological progress has brought Chinese GDP close to that of the US nominally and higher than the US’s GDP on the basis of purchasing power parity. China applies a different approach to globalisation. It brings to the world goods, products and technologies that fight poverty and promote growth. The country, itself, offers Arab and other developing nations a model of efficacy and achievement, for those willing and ready to learn from its example. It does not come bearing evangelistic theories such as “clash of civilisations” and “democracies versus autocracies.”
In the past, China was known as the Middle Kingdom. It stood aloof, expecting the rest of the world to come to it. It had no Marco Polos, Ibn Battutas or other such explorers. Today, however, it has opened itself up and the Chinese have gone out into the world, but with a high degree of flexibility. They have close relations with Israel in matters to do with modern technologies, but they are just as close to the Palestinians and Arab nations. If Beijing’s relations with Tehran are strong, its relations with Riyadh and other Gulf states are equally strong.
China subscribes to the need to revise the international order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War, an order characterised by US-dominated globalisation and the hegemony of the US and the US dollar. It expressed the need for change in a joint declaration with Russia on 4 February. But Moscow stretched the meaning of the declaration through its invasion of Ukraine which, in turn, paralysed the global economy.
Sitting across the table from China in the summit in Riyadh is the Arab world. But this Arab participant is also new, as its delegation hails from the Arab reform countries. Suffice to say that 2015 ushered in sweeping change in the Arab region. Some developments were an extension of the collapse that afflicted many countries in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Others were borne of the waves of reform grounded in the principles of the nation state, sovereignty, national integrity and shared historical identity among citizens with equal rights, and based on an ambitious, nationwide development programme implemented through various mega projects aiming to build and modernise infrastructure and means of production. Arab countries in the process of such reforms understand the nature of the Chinese polarity. It can not be viewed through the lens of mutually exclusive alternatives between great powers or outmoded forms of nonalignment that try to play East and West against the middle.
China is aware that the world is already more complicated than a Chinese riddle and that the only way to untangle it and make the world less fraught is for countries to find common ground based on the pursuit of interests and potential benefits with other countries with which they may differ in every respect apart from the fact that they all have geopolitical circumstances to deal with, geostrategic interests to safeguard and geo-cultural properties that distinguish them from each other. Yet when the Chinese and Arabs get together, they have no need to solve puzzles. They merely need to be ready to exchange goods and explore ways to cooperate without presuming that this means allying against a third party.
This type of interregional interaction is a new addition to international relations in the post pandemic era and in the era of the Ukrainian war which both the Arabs and Chinese believe has diverted the international order from global priorities such as the fights against disease and climate change and is wreaking untold harm on countries that have nothing to do with that war and the questions of food and energy supply caught up in it. Like the Arab world, China shares the view on the need to act responsibly at a time when global threats are of such magnitude that mankind cannot afford to wait until wisdom returns.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 15 December, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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