At the Edge of History

"China is number one! We have overtaken America!" So I was recently told by a taxi driver in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. It was the second day of a major public holiday known as Golden Week. For millions of Chinese travelling without any restrictions, it was also a way of celebrating China's success in battling the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the US president and first lady had just been diagnosed with COVID-19 (as my cab driver took the liberty of informing me). Both in America and in Europe, reported infections were rising at an alarming rate, sparking fears of second and third waves. In Britain, daily cases had risen to over 20,000 as university students were being quarantined on their campuses.

The contrast could not have been more stark: The West, an image of chaos and crisis, versus China, a picture of order and normality. And yet it wasn't the first time this year that I had seen this. I recalled a week back in March when the world seemed to turn on its head. No sooner had the outbreak here in China been largely contained, than the rest of the world started to suffer a surge in infections, followed by national lockdown orders. The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, was himself diagnosed and put into intensive care.

Was I imagining all of this? I thought. Or were we really back in what seemed like an almost identical situation, over half a year later? I realised that sadly we were. And I was left struck by the words of that cab driver. It is one of the few times a stranger in China has told me so assertively how their country was advancing over mine. Was this just a provocative guy with too much pent-up patriotism? Or was there more to it?

How Times Have Changed

When I first visited China over a decade ago, things were very different. Beijing was about to host its first Olympics, a source of huge pride for the country and a sign of its growing acceptance within the global community. Most Western countries – including the US under Bush and then Obama – still sought constructive engagement with China, which they believed would eventually become more liberal and democratic.

In 2011, I moved to Beijing for a year of Mandarin language study. In those days, my classmates and I would often hear cab drivers brazenly badmouth people of other nationalities, particularly Africans and Japanese people. Attitudes towards Japan were especially negative at that time due to an ongoing territorial dispute, which culminated in anti-Japanese protests across China.

On 18 September 2012, people demonstrated in over 180 cities to mark the anniversary of Japan's invasion of northeast China in 1931. Rioters overturned Japanese cars, boycotted Japanese stores, and defaced the Japanese consulate in Shenyang. It was clear that, more than six decades after the end of World War 2 in which China and Japan battled for eight long years, tensions between the two countries were still running very hot.

Fast forward back to today, and China's relations with Japan are in a much better place, while its relations with the West have hit a low point. Although there have not been any anti-Western riots, there were protests at the US consulate in Chengdu in July (pictured below), closed by China in retaliation for the US's closure of a Chinese consulate in Houston. And there has been a marked increase in anti-Western propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Credit: Reuters

All of this has left me wondering where our world has got to, and where we might be heading next. Are we standing at the edge of history, poised to enter a period of profoundly different geopolitics? Will we look back on this year as the moment when the Sino-Western coexistence collapsed? Or is it presumptuous and sensationalist to reach such conclusions?

What Comes Next

The truth is, of course, that no one really knows what lies ahead. 2020 is a testament to the inability of our species, advanced though it is, to predict the future with any accuracy. But this year has certainly given pause for thought. A pandemic is a rare, long-term event that prompts thinking in more long-term ways, whether about one's own life or the wider world. The coming US election also compels us to think further ahead into the future.

Pondering such solemn thoughts from my COVID-free vantage point here in China, I've started to consider a possibility, which is this: We may indeed be entering a new chapter in world history, one in which current value systems and power dynamics are going to be transformed. In particular, this new age may be characterised by a decreasingly powerful West on the one hand, juxtaposed with an increasingly influential China on the other.

Now, this is of course a very broad, simplistic statement, and the idea of a more confident China rising over a declining West is hardly new. Huntington famously discussed such ideas in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations, concluding "The era that began with the Western intrusions of the 1840s and 1850s is ending, China is resuming its place as regional hegemon, and the East is coming into its own."

Yet it has taken until this year, 2020, for that idea to become much more of a reality, accelerated as it has been by the global pandemic and the differing fates of these two geopolitical poles (as I wrote about back in March). Through the prism of the ongoing pandemic, I perceive this shift to be playing out before us in the following ways.

An Ascendant China

China's image has suffered following its initial mishandling of an epidemic which, if dealt with better, could possibly have avoided becoming a pandemic. But Beijing's subsequent response and economic performance have been impressive and given the country a status of unmatched order and competence among most of its global peers this year.

"China is winning the global economic recovery," ran a recent headline on CNN. The World Bank's forecast of 1.1% GDP growth in China this year, compared to -5.2% for the world as a whole, will mean Beijing ends 2020 as a more influential part of the global economy than it started. On top of that, Chinese trade flows are at record highs, despite all the talk of countries moving their supply chains away from China.

This chart sums up just how well China has performed in comparison with the major developed economies and India:

Source: Business Today

To complement its robust economic recovery, China's vaccination programme has progressed quickly. In July, before any Western country, Beijing approved emergency use of an experimental COVID vaccine, which has since inoculated hundreds of thousands of volunteers, mostly state employees and soldiers. Now the vaccine is being offered to members of the public in cities around China, as well as developing countries around the world.

Clearly, it remains to be seen how effective and safe the Chinese-made vaccines will be. But based on its record so far this year, Beijing has every reason to be confident.

A Degenerate West

By comparison, the optics for Western countries have been awful throughout this pandemic. The UK has completely failed to contain the virus re-entering its borders and spreading internally, despite a long national lockdown. It is a remarkable failure for an island nation which could have controlled arrivals more strictly, as New Zealand did.

The US tried to do just that, closing its borders to travellers from China and other hotspots very early on. But those closures appear to have been made redundant by the subsequent lack of any coherent policy for disease control internally, not to mention a frank disregard for the severity of the illness at the highest levels of government, where it was described as a "hoax".

In both the US and UK cases, the pandemic has exposed a serious problem with the state of our liberal democracies: that governments are in a perpetual state of campaigning instead of governing. It has been felt acutely in Washington during this election year, as well as Westminster, where many of the people in power seem to have rich experience in political campaigns, but not so much in administration.

Above all, the UK and US governments have failed because they have politicized the pandemic, dealing with it primarily as a PR crisis, rather than the humanitarian catastrophe that it is. This approach has had disastrous effects, leading to confusing messages, ineffective policy measures and uncontrolled outbreaks that have even infected the countries' heads of government and the people around them.

This graph shows just how badly many Western countries have performed against China and other Asian peers, both in terms of COVID-related deaths and economic contraction:

Source: FT

The Challenge to Liberal Values

But at least the West still has its freedom! Or does it? The way this pandemic has unfolded has challenged assumptions about what freedom really means. China's initial lockdowns severely limited personal freedoms for a time, mainly in Wuhan. But following that, people have been able to enjoy a fairly normal level of free movement and social interaction for the majority of this year.

In the Free World of the West, however, the virus has still not been contained to any degree of success after half a year of trying. Some people have refused to wear masks or undergo quarantine, saying that such measures violate their freedom. The result is, ironically, that people's most important freedoms – to move around and live their lives as normal – have continued to face restrictions for a much longer period of time.

But why does 'freedom' matter so much anyway? Put simply, because it is the idea which our modern world order is based on. For the past 75 years or so, we have been living in a post-World War 2 world. That conflict in the mid-20th century was so terrible and all-encompassing, that its lessons have lived long in the memory.

In truth, the war was fought for different reasons by the major allied powers. But the narrative which came to dominate the collective memory of WW2, the one which we all learned in school, was about freedom conquering fascism. And it is that freedom narrative which came to characterise the world order that emerged out of that war, an order that now finds itself in a very fragile state.

Towards a Post-Western World

The thing about 'post-' periods is that while they don't really end, they eventually get swept up by other events. Thus, while we still live in a post-WW2 world founded on freedom, we are also simultaneously in a post-Cold War world, and a post-9/11 world, in which other values have also come to be important. We are now entering a post-pandemic world (and, perhaps sooner rather than later, a post-Trump World). But are these 'posts' just milestones in a bigger epochal shift, towards a post-Western world?

The world order is not going to shift overnight. We will not wake up on 1 January 2021 in a universe that is suddenly more Chinese than it is American. Freedom will continue to be an important narrative. But gradually so too will be an emphasis on order, control and other values associated more with East Asia and especially China.

In saying this I am by no means stating a hope or a desire. As a Westerner, it is not my wish to see the downfall of the system which has made me who I am. Rather, I believe it is in everyone's interests to consider this shift a very serious possibility, and prepare for it in the best way they can, regardless of how they may feel about it.

At the same time, people should not give up hope in their own value systems. I for one still have some faith in the institutions of liberal democracy. They are a valuable asset that Western countries have and which China doesn't. Consumerist authoritarianism (which is what the Chinese system boils down to!) remains unattractive to much of the world. This constitutes a big problem for Beijing as it seeks to formulate an equivalent to the American dream, to win over both its own citizens and a global audience.

Final Thoughts

Without an attractive vision for the future, Chinese attempts to cultivate soft power and international influence have not yet been very successful. But the pandemic has created a rare opportunity for China to grow its soft power, one which Beijing is keen to exploit. So far, though, there has been little traction from Chinese propaganda efforts, many of which have actually been counterproductive.

Rather, the best soft power for China has been the unspoken force of its pandemic response and economic recovery. Even accounting for inaccuracies in the data, the broad trends of low infections and rebounding growth speak to an incredible success. And if these positive trends continue, while the West continues to struggle, then it will say much more about China's rise than any words can.

Thus for now, the best thing for China's leaders may be to not say very much, but simply (and humbly) let their positive results do the talking. For Western governments, the most important task (apart from dealing with the pandemic) is to recognise that they may be in a world that is changing much more rapidly than they thought.

For the rest of us mere mortals, all we can do is sit back, relax and enjoy the season finale of the dramatic year that has been '2020'.