China’s Conceptualization of Global Order
- Historical Evolution: China’s global order has shifted from a Sinocentric worldview to advocating for sovereignty and peaceful coexistence through the Five Principles.
- Mao’s Three Worlds Theory: Mao envisioned uniting developing nations to counter US and USSR hegemony, but China's focus later shifted to economic growth and multilateralism.
- Xi Jinping’s Reform Vision: China aims to reform the existing global order to ensure greater equity, state sovereignty, and inclusion of developing nations in global governance.
Though China’s conceptualization of global order has evolved over time, there are some common contours of its understanding of international order since the Qin dynasty, the Imperial Era. The imperial rulers of China favored diplomatic rituals that contributed to bolstering their worldview of global centrality. They mirrored Chinese civilization as the cultural, political, and moral center of the world; thereby, they dispatched envoys to different regions for diplomatic relations and ritualistic submission. Meanwhile, Chinese emperors not only prioritized domestic harmony and stable social order but also engaged with the external world with an approach that mixed cultural influence, diplomacy, trade, and military coercion. The primary Silk Route during the Han Dynasty is tantamount to China’s inherited trait of connecting with the external world for mutual economic and cultural exchanges.
Given its strong economic, diplomatic, and military muscles, Imperial China demonstrated its power, established trade relations, reinforced its tribute system, and shaped the regional order around its idea of China as a Middle Kingdom. To put it differently, China maintained its status till the last decades of the 17th century. Persuasion of isolationism, restricting foreign trade and interaction, during the Ming Dynasty, the crumbling of the tribute system, and the rise of Western imperialism during the Qing Dynasty contributed to the erosion of their Sinocentric world order. Despite the Century of Humiliation, the Chinese believed that China would again regain their glory; therefore, it is said that the 21st century is the Century of Jubilation for China.
In the post-WW2 era, China, being an initial member of the United Nations, sought to navigate its ship through the existing international order. However, after the state’s founding in 1949, China mirrored itself as a revolutionary power in world affairs, rejected the international order, and adopted proletarian internationalism, promoting solidarity and unity of global working classes and achieving worldwide socialism. Eventually, Zhou Enlai articulated The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which include mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs, equality, and peaceful coexistence. Interestingly, these principles have been central to China’s policy since its imperial era. These principles not only formed a foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s, but they have also become the core of China’s envisioned global order, which is opposing global power hegemony and facilitating a multipolar world order where developing nations have a greater say.
Subsequently, China’s conceptualization of international order evolved with Mao Zedong’s Three Worlds Theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Mao enunciated that the First World comprised the United States and the Soviet Union competing to dominate the world. Whereas the Second World consisted of the United States’ allies, Japan, the European Union, New Zealand, etc., and the Soviet Union’s Eastern European allies. While China, Pakistan, India, and other developing nations composed the Third World. Beijing, under Mao’s vision, sought to unite developing countries to collectively win over the Second World and counter the US and USSR’s hegemonic ambitions while leaving the two superpowers to fight against one another during the Cold War.
However, Mao’s vision crumbled in the late 1980s. In the initial years of the 1990s, the conceptualization of a new international political and economic order emerged in China to counter the Western world. China sought to cultivate its national interests, focusing on economic development and creating space for itself in the global field. Meanwhile, China integrated itself into global governance, built ties with other countries, and embraced multilateralism, entering into the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996, and signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998.
Since the late 1990s, the international environment has been favorable to China, whereby it prioritized domestic growth and internal stability by capitalizing on twenty years of strategic calm as announced by China in 2002. Undoubtedly, the present global order has allowed China to advance its national interests and expand its area of influence; therefore, China officially maintains that it benefited exponentially from opening itself to the outside world. China also maintains that globalization is irreversible and sees itself as a “socialist market economy.”
Therefore, China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, believes that the existing international order is moving in a favorable direction when it comes to power polarity and power structure, where the West is declining and the rest is rising. However, China thinks that the existing global structure needs to be reformed to make it equitable and just. Xi Jinping has also called for shared control of global governance whereby the aspirations of the developing countries are accommodated. China stresses reforms in the existing world order, believing its national interests are hampered because of inequitable and unjust Western dominance of the international institutions and intervention in domestic affairs of sovereign states.
Hence, China’s conceptualization of changing global order in the 21st century does not seek to establish an entirely new system; rather, Beijing aspires to reform the existing system where China has its due weight in global governance and a greater say in international institutions. China also envisions that the existing global governance should prioritize state sovereignty, strengthen and reform multilateral institutions where every state has equal representation, and downplay Western dominance. Besides this, Beijing expects that the changing global order should accommodate the aspirations of the developing world. Therefore, China sees the changing global order as moving in the right direction, but it has room for improvement to make it more just, inclusive, and equitable.
The author is the founder and editor of "The Spine Times."
