London’s Economist magazine, a mouthpiece for British imperial dictates for nearly180 years, this week published a call-to-arms against China, deemed a “more disruptive” challenge to the imperial post-War order than even Russia’s “brazen defiance.” Its seven-article “Special Report” openly argues that China is an enemy to the post-War order, because it puts sovereignty and development before “universal values” and “individual freedoms.”
The entire package is premised on the imperial doctrine associated with the figure of despised, discredited UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, that of an imperial “responsibility to protect” peoples against governments which are not under the thumb of the imperial order.
“This special report will examine China’s challenge to the post-war order. It is more subtle than Russia’s brazen defiance, yet more disruptive,” it wrote. Why? Because “China … seeks to revive old, discredited ways of running the world that put states first, at the expense of individual freedoms.” President Xi Jinping’s “Global Security Initiative” and his organizing around the concept of “a Community of Shared Future for Mankind” infuriate The Economist. These are “coded complaints.” The first is an “attack on alliances, above all America’s defense pacts in
Europe and Asia,” while “a `shared future’ is another way of saying `development first’.”
President Xi, you see, does not even accept that “the second world war created a mandate to draw up a liberal order.” The Economist admits that the problem British imperialism faces, is that “many developing countries see nothing magic about the year 1945 [when that liberal order was supposedly founded], and have limited nostalgia for a time when the West dominated rulemaking.”
Even as brazen British imperialism goes, the article in the package titled “Sovereignty First” is remarkable, baldly holding up NATO’s destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya as pious examples of the empire’s “responsibility to protect"!
“Chinese officials express scorn for interventions by America and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are especially hostile to claims that these reflected a `responsibility to protect’,” The Economist complains. “That doctrine commits states to act when they detect genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity” (a doctrine, it must be noted, studiously ignored when it came to eight years of shelling of Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine).
Furthermore, China opposes NATO moving into the Indo-Pacific as “an unwelcome intrusion.” In 2014, President Xi even dared to bluntly declare: “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia.”
Likewise, “development professionals” worry, because under China’s Global Development Initiative and the Belt and Road Initiative, the “torrent of Chinese loans, offered with no strings attached, was the main threat to `conditionality.’” China’s actions threaten “decades of grassroots campaigns in the developing world, involving anti-corruption lawyers, environmental groups, feminists and other activists.”
Not surprisingly, China is gaining clout in the United Nations around such ideas. The Economist objects, for example, that China has “built a growing coalition of countries opposed to Western sanctions… [and] should China’s clout at the UN continue to grow, multilateral sanctions will become rarer.” Those sanctions, The Economist neglects to mention, are starving peoples in more than 30 countries around the world.
