Pivot to the Third World? China Shouldn't Focus on West Amid Rising Tensions, Beijing Adviser Says
© AP Photo / Andy Wong
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As tensions with the United States continue to rise, China shouldn’t make the nuclear superpower its sole focus, Huang Ping, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China’s top political advisory body, told Chinese media recently.
While it is important to carefully manage its relationship with Washington, including cooperating where possible, Beijing should focus on building friendships with “emerging nations,” whose economic growth has already surpassed that of the West.
“[This is] no longer a unipolar world, no longer a world in which the West has the final say,” he said.
As part of what Washington has called “great power competition,” it is seeking to isolate and strangle countries like China, Russia, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). According to the US, these countries are trying to upend the “rules-based international order” created after the Second World War, in which the US stood dominant over the world and its European allies held vast swaths of the Third World in colonial subjugation.
However, with China 70 years into an upward path from the “Century of Humiliation” when it, too, was dominated by foreign imperial powers, it is inevitable that this vastly larger country will one day eclipse the United States, which has just one-quarter of its population. The US says it welcomes competition, but as it has shown with its rhetoric and its policies, it only wants the kind of competition it can win.
29 November 2022, 16:42 GMT
The myth of “debt-trap diplomacy” has grown out of that goal. Even though the Washington, DC-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) forces pro-Western free market policies onto nations who accept loans from it, the Western media has largely painted Chinese loans to those countries as the ones supposedly intent on controlling them through secretive clauses and manipulation. This, despite China regularly forgiving large debts and offering nations credit on terms more respectful of their sovereignty than the IMF.
Huang’s comments come after Beijing held its first-ever China-Arab summit in Riyadh last week, at which Chinese President Xi Jinping met with 21 Arab League nations, all of whom “agreed to make all-out efforts to build a China-Arab community with a shared future in the new era,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a readout of the event.
Among the most momentous developments of the summit were the potential creation of a China-Persian Gulf free trade zone, and Xi’s appeal to Arab states to settle oil and gas trades in the Yuan, China’s currency. Such a move would both undermine the so-called “Petrodollar,” which helps to buttress the US economy, and transfer that stimulus to China as a “Petroyuan.” It was reported in March that Riyadh was already considering the move.
China has also dramatically expanded its partnerships with Third World nations in other ways, ranging from supplying them with COVID-19 vaccines after Western nations refused to lower their prices, to massive infrastructure investment under the aegis of the Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI has helped developing nations to build ports, highways, power plants, and other critical infrastructure after decades of colonialism and underdevelopment.
21 November 2022, 18:38 GMT
China's long history of friendship with the Third World extends back to the 1950s, when the newly founded socialist state looked to show solidarity with other people struggling to free themselves from colonial rule. Later, China became affiliated with the Non-Aligned Movement, which rejected the US-Soviet Cold War and included many formerly colonized nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
However, Huang noted that China cannot simply turn its back on the US, regardless of its hostile anti-China policies. The adviser stressed that the US-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. The two nations have the two largest economies, two of the three largest populations, are two of the world’s nine nuclear weapons states, two of the five permanent members and veto-holders in the United Nations Security Council, and together they straddle the Pacific Ocean.
He noted that important areas of cooperation with the US include on combating climate change, encouraging a peaceful solution to the conflict in Ukraine, and managing the tense situation on the Korean peninsula, where a US-backed state and a China-backed state have yet to reach a permanent peace treaty 69 years after the end of the fighting.
