Back in April, China’s President Xi Jinping gave a speech before the Boao Forum in Singapore. In Xi’s keynote address, he proposed a new “global security initiative” that, in his words, would reject the Cold War mentality and focus on “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable” security. Xi’s new global initiative would be a “world encompassing” security mechanism. Unfortunately, Xi was short on details about this new Initiative.
After the speech, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin again provided sparse details. Wang outlined how Xi’s initiative is a broad framework of ideas that cover nearly all concerns in the Asia-Pacific. One Asian diplomat stated that Xi’s speech was “typical China,” in that they always come out with an excessively large framework that no one could reasonably object to. The idea is that even if countries don’t agree with everything, at least they can’t fully oppose it. Then, bit by bit, the framework gets peeled away to reveal the primary objective – diminishing U.S. power and increasing Chinese power across the globe.
In May, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi elaborated on Xi’s new security initiative with four major points that he said comprised China’s new official Global Security Initiative (GSI). China would commit to the following:
- Security. Maintain peace and stability, uphold the U.N. charter. Abandon America’s Cold War mentality. Oppose Western unilateralism. Reject foreign military alliances in the Asia-Pacific. Pursue a vision of common cooperative and sustainable security and pay attention to the legitimate security concerns of all countries. The new GSI would oppose those who inflate tensions in the region.
- Economic Prosperity. Promote economic development. Speed up integrated development of the region. Create Asia-Pacific trade agreements and an open economy. Strive for an unrestricted world economy.
- Cooperation. Combine strengths for win-win cooperation. Further coordinate China’s development policies. Use Asia-Pacific nation’s respective strengths and deepen practical cooperation in the areas of poverty reduction, food security, COVID control, green energy development and a digital economy. Forge greater synergy, and Asia-Pacific contributions to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
- Peace. China would agree to firmly safeguard peace in the Asia-Pacific.
Xi envisions a gradually weakening America replaced by a multipolar world in which China is the major player. Currently, Xi is playing to a largely domestic audience ahead of the Chinese Communist Party national congress this fall where Xi will seek a third term as president. Should Xi be granted a third term, he can be expected to take the GSI from its current domestic audience to a global audience as an alternative to the U.S.-led “rules-based international order.”
Examining the words of Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng at the May 2022 conference Seeking Peace and Promoting Development: An Online Dialogue of Global Think Tanks of 20 Countries, we can glean what Xi’s argument will be for a new world order led by a China-Russia alliance. Le Yucheng stated:
“According to statistics, the U.S. and other Western countries have launched over 10,000 sanctions on China, Russia and other countries. One in every ten countries has been targeted by U.S. sanctions. This has compounded the enormous strain on global food and energy supply, finance and supply chains. Crises are lurking in the international political, economic and security order, presenting unprecedented challenges to peace and development, the underlying theme of our times”
Chinese officials point out that the U.S. seeks to create a “second front” in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and bring the conflict to the Asia-Pacific. Or short of that, they say the U.S. continues to flex its muscles on China’s doorstep, creating exclusive groups (i.e., alliances) against China and inflaming the Taiwan question to test China’s redlines.
At the June virtual BRICS summit, Xi hit all the right multilateral buttons for the BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and made it clear that he intended to use the GSI to supplant what he considers the failed Western model of global governance.
China, and most likely Russia are content, for now, to allow the U.S. and its western allies to make errors and pursue questionable outcomes in their proxy fight against Russia in Ukraine. By doing this, Xi is letting the West shape itself into the antithesis of the China-Russia alliance that is represented by the allegedly multilateral, multipolar GSI. The worse the global economic conditions become, the more acceptable the GSI will likely appear to countries facing sovereign debt crises, hyperinflation, food insecurity and civil unrest that China continues to blame on unilateral sanctions from the United States. This is the point at which the China-Russia alliance could become unrestrained in its geopolitical objectives.
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