Moving Rainbow (1998-2001), artwork by Chinese artist Xiong Wenyun.
By Vijay PrashadĀ –Ā Mar 30, 2023
On 20 March 2023, Chinaās President Xi Jinping and Russiaās President Vladimir Putin spent over four hours in private conversation. According toĀ official statements after the meeting, the two leaders talked about the increasing economic and strategic partnership between China and Russiaāincluding building the Power of Siberia 2 pipelineāand the Chinese peace initiativeĀ for the war in Ukraine. PutinĀ said that “many of the provisions of the peace plan put forward by China are consonant with Russian approaches and can be taken as the basis for a peaceful settlement when the West and Kiev are ready for it.”
These steps towards peace have not received a warm welcome in Washington. Ahead of Xiās visit to Moscow, John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US National Security Council,Ā declared that any “call for a ceasefire” in Ukraine by China and Russia would be “unacceptable.” As details of the meeting emerged, US officials reportedly expressedĀ fear that the world might embrace China and Russiaās efforts to secure a peaceful resolution and end the war. The Atlantic powers are, in fact, redoubling their efforts to prolong the conflict.
On the day of the meeting between Xi and Putin, the United Kingdomās minister of state at the Ministry of Defence, Baroness Annabel Goldie,Ā told the House of Lords that “[a]longside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armour-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium.” Goldieās statement came on the twentieth anniversary of the US-UK invasion of Iraq, in which the West used depleted uranium on the Iraqi population to deleteriousĀ effect. In reference to the UKās provision of depleted uranium to Ukrainian forces, PutinĀ said that “it seems that the West really has decided to fight Russia to the last Ukrainianāno longer in words, but in deeds.” In response, Putin saidĀ that Russia would deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.
Within China, Xiās visit to Russia was widely discussed with a general sense of pride that Chinaās government is taking leadership both to block the ambitions of the West and to seek peace in the conflict. These discussions, reflected in journals and on social media platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, LittleRedBook, Bilibili, and Zhihu, emphasised how China, a developing country, has nonetheless been able to overcome its limitations and take on a leadership position in the world.
These discussions within China are largely unavailable to people outside the country for at least three reasons: first, they take place in Chinese and are not often translated into other languages; second, they take place on social media platforms that, in addition to being in Chinese, are not used by people from outside the Chinese-speaking community; and third, growing Sinophobia, stemming from a longstanding colonial history of thought and exacerbated by the New Cold War, has deepened a disregard for discussions in China that do not adopt the Western worldview. For these reasons, and more, there is a genuine lack of understanding about the range of opinions in China concerning the shifts in the world order and the countryās role in these shifts.
Within China, there is a rich tradition of intellectual debate that takes place in journals inspired in one way or another by Chen DuxiuāsĀ XÄ«n QÄ«ngniĆ”n, orĀ New Youth, first published in 1915. In the first issue of that journal, Chen (1879ā1942), who was a founding member of the Communist Party of China, published a letter to the youth which included a list of admonitions that seems to have set the terms for the intellectual agenda of the next hundred years:
- Be independent and not enslaved (čŖäø»ēčéå„“é¶ē)
- Be progressive and not conservative (čæę„ēčéäæå®ē)
- Be in the forefront and not lagging behind (čæåēčéééē)
- Be internationalist and not isolationist (äøēēčééå½ē)
- Be practical and not rhetorical (å®å©ēčéčęē)
- Be scientific and not superstitious (ē§å¦ēčéę³č±”ē)
The experience ofĀ New Youth set in motion journal after journal, each with an agenda to build more adequate theories about developments in China that seek to establish the countryās sovereignty and lift them out of the so-called “century of humiliation” (ē¾å¹“å±č¾±), a period that was characterised by Western and Japanese imperialist intervention. In 2008, several leading intellectuals in the country founded a new journal, Wenhua ZonghengĀ (ęåēŗµęØŖ), which has increasingly become a platform to debate what XiĀ called the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (äøåę°ęä¼å¤§å¤å “). The bi-monthly journal features the countryās leading voices, who offer various perspectives on important issues of the day such as the state of the post-COVID-19 worldĀ and the importance ofĀ rural revitalisation.
Last year, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research andĀ DongshengĀ began a conversation with the editors ofĀ Wenhua Zongheng which led to the production of a quarterly international edition of the journal. Through this partnership, select essays from the Chinese editions of the journal are translated into English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and an additional column is featured in the Chinese edition that brings voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into dialogue with China. We are proud to say that the first issue of this international edition (vol. 1, no. 1) launched this week, with the theme “On the Threshold of a New International Order.”
This issue features three essays by leading scholars in ChinaāYang Ping (editor of Wenhua Zongheng), Yao Zhongqiu (professor at the School of International Studies and dean of the Centre for Historical Political Studies, Renmin University of China), and Cheng Yawen (dean of the Department of Political Science at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Shanghai International Studies University), as well as my brief editorial. Both Professors Yao and Cheng discuss the changes in the current international order, mainly the decline of US unipolarity and the emergence of regionalism. Professor Yaoās contribution, which goes back to the Ming dynasty (1388ā1644), makes the case that the changes taking place today are not necessarily the creation of a new order, but the return of a more balanced world system as China “revives” its place in the world and as the ambitions of the US find their limits in the emergence of key countries in developing countries, including China, India, and Brazil.
All three essays focus on the importance of Chinaās role in the developing world, both in economic terms (such as through the ten-year-old Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI) and in political terms (such as through Chinaās attempt to restart a peace process in Ukraine). Editor Yang Ping is firm in his view that “Chinaās historical destiny is to stand with the Third World,” both becauseādespite its major advancesāChina remains a developing country and because Chinaās insistence upon multilateralism, as Professor Cheng argues, means that it does not seek to displace the US and become a new global hegemon. Yang ends his account with three considerations: first, that China must not be led merely by commercial interests but must “prioritise what is necessary to ensure strategic survival and national development;” second, that China must intervene in debates about the new international system by introducing the BRIās principles of “consultation, contribution, and shared benefits,” which include seeking to expand the zone of peace against the habits of war; and third, that China must encourage the creation of an institutional mechanism beyond economic cooperationāsuch as a “Development International”āto promote the genuine sovereignty of nations, the dignity of peoples faced with the International Monetary Fundās debt-austerity trap, and a new internationalism.
Yang, Yao, and Chenās perspectives are essential reading as part of an important initiative for global dialogue. We look forward to your feedback about the first international edition ofĀ Wenhua ZonghengĀ and are currently working on the second edition, which will focus on Chinaās path to modernisation.
As the United States pushes for a major power conflict in the Asia-Pacific, it is essential to develop lines of communication and build bridges towards mutual understanding between China, the West, and the developing world. As I wrote in the closing words of my editorial, “[i]nstead of the global division pursued by the New Cold War, our mission is to learn from each other towards a world of collaboration rather than confrontation.”
Vijay Prashad
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations: A Peopleās History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution(University of California Press, 2016), and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGĆ¼n.
