I HAD a chance in recent weeks to revisit a published debate held some eight years ago in Canada.
The topic, if anything, gets even more relevant today: “Does the 21st Century belong to China?” It featured a star cast of Dr Henry Kissinger and TV personality Fareed Zakaria against the proposition and Kissinger biographer Niall Ferguson and Dr David Daokui Li, a Chinese intellectual, for it.
In the wake of the People’s Republic of China celebrating the 70th anniversary of its founding on Oct 1 and its continuing inexorable rise, its future and with it the future of humanity is a subject that must animate us all. The debate topic itself already makes a common presupposition that all four panellists do not dispute, that China has and will continue having a great impact on all our lives in this century. The only question is how great the impact exactly.
Especially in the most recent few years when political dysfunction in the West brings with it the unexpected election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the Brexit debacle churning through three prime ministers in as many years in the United Kingdom, one is tempted to speculate if such signs of political decay and maybe even decline are not themselves partly resulting from the whiplash caused by China’s rise.
A global combination of growing Western insecurities and a newly confident China is not exactly the recipe for business as usual and indeed, it isn’t — causing all of us to make possibly wrenching adjustments out of our collective comfort zone.
Unless properly managed, we may be headed for truly turbulent times, especially given the current drought of global statesmen of any note.
The gradual decline of the West is also much in evidence even here on the island of Borneo. Kuching used to host key diplomatic/consular offices of both the US and the UK in the 1960s. Today, a Chinese consul-general each in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu have the field almost all to themselves. Western financial institutions have closed shop in Brunei even as closer economic links are forged between Bandar Seri Begawan and Beijing.
The geo-political circumstances between China and the West have lately become so fraught that Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, now warns that Southeast Asian nations — at the frontline of the growing Sino-US rivalry — may be put through their paces and against their will to choose between the two.
Especially when the two strategic rivals offer such contrasting conversations in their regional interactions. China talks up the huge economic possibilities while the US largely confines itself nowadays to perceived security threats. The US cannot be onto a winning strategy if many ordinary people in this region now point to the history of American wars around the globe and wonder if by focusing on security matters it is not spoiling for another military confrontation, maddening though the idea of a new US-China war sounds to most of us.
What is striking about the above 2011 Munk debate (established in 2008 as a charitable initiative of the Aurea Foundation co-founders Peter and Melanie Munk) on China is how much all four antagonists actually agreed on, perhaps subconsciously.
Two future scenarios can possibly play out: China becoming politically more like the West as it further advances economically or a credible, distinctively Chinese, alternative economic-cum-political global model fully emerges.
The former evolving will obviously not rock the prevailing strategic status-quo. But even the latter future scenario may not necessarily upset the global order that much.
Kissinger somewhat cheekily observed that his antagonists helped argue his case when they at least implied that a China fully emerged and confident only wants what it perceives to be its rightful place at the global table, not the creation of a China-centred new global order. Such a China may even dispute that powerful though it may become, it will “own” this century or necessarily want to.
On the current trajectory and particularly if Western political risks persist, what emerges eventually may be an “exceptional” China rather than one in the Western image.
A sustainable majority can conceivably evolve within China that actually believes in its political “exceptionalism”, relaxing Beijing’s current paranoia but without it losing lingering resentments of only grudging Western respect for it.
Consequently, a reasonably attractive China-centred global order may develop, powered by its irresistible economic allure, and meet the backlash of a jealous West.
The world should reasonably stand to benefit from two competing paths to progress. But that is a brave new world of both promise and perils in almost equal measure.
The writer views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times