To the fleeing enemy, a silver bridge. As USA abandons his leadership of the international order created after the Second World Warthe People’s Republic of China Take advantage of that void.
The Administration of Donald Trump breaks with its international commitments, imposes duty arbitrary and political, withdraws the bulk of development aid funds (a source of soft power in poor countries) and attacks its traditional allies, especially the Europeans, forcing them to look east to forge new alliances. Meanwhile, the regime of Chinese Communist Party maintains or increases its participation in international institutions, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization (it has just renounced the benefits of its developing nation status within the institution). and win soft power in the “global south” with its formula of infrastructure development and trade agreements without the burden of demanding progress in human rights or in the fight against corruption.
This geopolitical game of chairs was evident in the last United Nations General Assembly.
Trump took the stage to attack the UN, reaffirm his break with the Paris climate agreements (a “scam”; and green energy, “a fraud”) and lay out his vision of peace based on force rather than international law and multilateral agreements. It wasn’t a surprise. His Secretary of State, Marco Rubiohad already stated starkly in his confirmation speech before the Senate that the order actual actual It is obsolete because it does not benefit the United States and needs to be reconfigured, returning to a world of nation-states as power blocks, rather than global institutions.
On the other hand, the Chinese president, Xi Jinpingannounced at the same international event new and ambitious climate objectives for 2035: a cut of between 7% and 10% of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the peak. In her speech, she established herself as a potential defender of sistema multilateral that represents the United Nations: “There is only one legitimate international system, the one that has the UN at its center; a single international order, that supported by international law; and a single set of rules, the basic norms of the UN Charter,” he said in an intervention by videoconference from Beijing.
“I think there is no doubt that China is taking advantage of the vacuum left by the United States. He already played that strategy during the first Trump Administration. In it Davos forum 2017Xi Jinping gave a famous speech in which he presented his country as guarantor of the international economic order in the face of a protectionist United States, and also as a responsible actor willing to contribute to the fight against climate change, in the face of a clearly denialist administration,” he tells this newspaper. Mario Estebanprincipal researcher for East Asia at the Elcano Royal Institute.
The Beijing Consensus
In 2004, the international relations expert Joshua Cooper Branch formulated the term “Beijing Consensus” to refer to the type of diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China in particular with respect to developing countries, and especially with regard to African countries: carry out business based on the interests of the parties and without generic or principled conditions, unlike the West.
The interesting thing, point out Mario Estebanis that now that old consensus seems to be the new normal. “The United States above all, but also the European Union, are increasingly moving towards what China proposes: pragmatic relations, very focused on development and economic interest, without entering into the internal affairs of political values of the countries,” the expert adds. “What China advocates is a relativist vision: the idea that each country, each people, can seek the political, social and economic model that it considers best, with a very strong defense of the sovereignty as something sacrosanct; “they do not involve interference or transfers of political models on others.”
This resonates especially in poor and developing countries, which are the majority. They feel that the “Washington Consensus”, that kind of liberal proposal economically and politically, has failed them.
“China is taking advantage of the vacuum left by the United States. It exploits Western double standards, for example the double standard what is proving West in the war in Gaza in front of that of Ukraine“, he says in conversation with EL PERIÓDICO Julio Ceballos, consultant specialized in relations with China and author of ‘The Star Gauge: Chinese Learnings for the West in the 21st Century’. “While The United States becomes unpredictable“China proves to be a stable, predictable and serious partner, offering financing and technology without the moral ties or ideological demands of the West.”
Campaign for the story
The Republican President Ronald Reagan He defined his country as a “shining city on a hill,” a kind of beacon of freedom and opportunity for the world. Trump has broken with that metaphor. In each intervention he makes it clear that the world is a place from which to extract benefits for the interests of the United States, while closing the country to opportunities for those who want to take refuge on that hill. With Trump, the United States has also abandoned battle for the global narrative, the attempt to capture minds and hearts for the Western cause that until now dominated with that mixture of public defense of human rights and stories of good and evil from Hollywood movies.
Meanwhile, the Chinese model propaganda multipliesespecially on social networks. There is an entire genre that praises Chinese megastructures, skyscrapers and the neon-filled modern cities of Chongqing or Shanghai, sometimes in videos that also show the decadence of American ones, especially the New York subway, full of rats and leaks.
Terrifying Chinese AI autonomous military robots shown. Western influencers travel to the cities of the Asian giant to pay attention to the luxury of its shopping centersthe speed of your trains or the care in spas, to make it clear that China is a superpower. Some even praise the ubiquitous presence of cameras to highlight the security that exists in the country, ignoring that they are also used for repression in what is an authoritarian system run by the Chinese Communist Party with an iron fist. All of this is having measurable effects on the Western public imagination.
“There is a change in how younger generations view China. In the case of the United States, Generation Z views China less and less negatively, compared to older generations. According to the latest Pew Research Center survey, only 21% of those under 30 see China as an enemycompared to half of Americans overall,” says Ines Arcoresearcher of CIDOB expert on East Asia and Chinese politics. “And this also has to do with certain elements of more traditional soft power at the cultural level that China is doing: the push for Chinese mobile applications, streamers who show their life there, the use of TikTok, Chinese electric cars, the boom of Chinese Labubu dolls… all of this is generating a consumption of content about China that makes many young Americans think: ‘this is not the China that has been explained to me.'”
In Spain, a decline in the reputation of the United States has also been noted at the expense of that of China. The sympathy of the Spanish towards the American country has plummeted since the arrival of Donald Trumpand is now below that expressed towards China, according to the latest barometer from the Elcano Royal Institute.
President Trump gets a very low rating, 2.5 out of 10, lower even than Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the global fight between the US and China, support for the US decreases substantially, falling from 35% to 11%.
A one-party dictatorship
The Chinese story is full of contradictions, and the regime’s respect for the international order is selective: it excludes, for example, humanitarian legislation, and ignores United Nations rulings on human rights.
China is the largest prison for journalists in the world (at least 121), there are no elections and the level of corruption is high. Officially, it is defined as a “democracy with Chinese characteristics” with their own vision of human rights: they reject the universality of the concept itself (embodied in international agreements, international humanitarian law, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court), to affirm that in each country, in each culture, some rights may take precedence over others. And they argue that prosperity and development are also human rights, which they prioritize above everything else.
Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, at the last multilateral meeting. / Associated Press/LaPresse / LAP
“I don’t think that the Chinese model will end up taking root as a model to emulate. If there is something that interests developing countries, it is success, more than the political model. And China is not promoting for the rest of the world a Marxist-Leninist system or a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, like the USSR in the Cold War,” concludes Arco.
What it has drawn is an axis of resistance. It emerged at the recent Tianjin summit, where Russia, India and China itself They staged a common front to resist Washington’s dictates and promote an alternative world order. And it was seen in the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the Chinese victory over Japan in World War II, in which Xi surrounded himself with global autocrats, from the Russian Vladimir Putin to Belarusian Alexander Lukashenko or the north korean Kim Jong-un.
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