PMore “son of the sky” than ever, as they said of the emperors of China, Xi Jinping wants to impose his vision of world affairs. This ambition is at the heart of the priorities of the Chinese president, who has just been dubbed for a third five-year term at the head of the second largest economy on the planet. But what should the world look like according to Xi?
The question would be academic if it were not a question of a head of state, surrounded by a team of mandarins entirely devoted to him, who concentrates more power than any of his foreign counterparts. Knowledgeable sinologist, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described in the British daily FinancialTimes (October 22-23), “a Marxist-Leninist worldview” – where the political prevails over the economy and where the “struggle”, the “combat”, terms that dot Xi’s speeches, must be the driving forces of Chinese policy.
But against whom? The enemy is designated: Western ideas. They destabilize relations between states and undermine the international system, as much as they can harm China’s internal stability. The objective of strengthening the country’s “national security” presupposes – among other necessities – changing an international order shaped by the United States and which is slowing down Beijing’s rise to the top of power.
In this politico-ideological battle, Russia, all the more aggressive as it is on the decline, is at the side of China. Their shared target is the “liberal order”, this set of norms to which the international system born in 1945 refers. refer.
Evacuate human rights
The “liberal international order” was often neither liberal nor truly international. But its founding texts, the Charter of the United Nations and then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are the product of a culture, very largely Western, and of an era, the post-war period. Americans and Europeans, who remembered massacres and mass killings, wanted to put back at the center of international life the rights of the individual as they understood them – freedom of expression and conscience, in particular.
Beijing does not recognize the universality of these “values” and argues that they are evoked by Westerners who have too often been unfaithful to them. China “rejects any idea of an international order guided by shared universal values”notes the British weekly The Economist in its October 15 edition, titled “The World China Wants.” China denounces a Western invention used to counter its inevitable emergence in the first place. Hence the need, says Xi, to “to lead the reform of the system of global governance”.
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