CHINA AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

 

 

CHINA AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

The year 2020 had started off on a cautious note, with various cities across the world going into lockdowns due to a respiratory virus i.e. the novel corona virus. . Be it London, New York , Sydney, all of them were coming to terms to with the new paradigm in life, where facial masks would be the accepted normal, big gathering a faint memory and free movement, well, restricted.  World events like the French open and the Tokyo Olympics were forced to be postponed; sporting leagues around the world were under the shadows of an invisible enemy. As the situation started getting lethal by the day, with no assessment of the degree to which the world was hit and the potential of it in the coming days, weeks, months or even years, the global community had started to be more assertive on the seeming origin of it all, the meat markets of Wuhan in china.

The global power play spiralled pretty quickly as the American president termed the corona virus as Chinese virus and was vociferously joined by the Brazilian president, in turn attracting a quick response from Beijing, nose diving from sharp to abusive. And here in lay the catch, the Chinese this time around were very aggressive and were bulldozing arguments left, right and center. But this response wasn’t confined to matters around the pandemic only but what soon appeared, was a larger diplomatic offensive undertaken by the Xi administration. As Winston Churchill had once remarked while preparing for the United Nations during the World War 2, “never let a good crisis go to waste”, this was the window china had been preparing for, for the last few decades. This was the opportunity for another pole to rise since the cold war, and china started upping the ante.

Chinese handling of the situation in Hong Kong was a beginning, its vehemence with the Australian foreign office, assertiveness in the  south china sea, closeness with Iran, the very obvious hand in the boundary dispute between Nepal and India,  and the mother of it all, the Ladkah standoff.

If one could think from the Chinese point of view, there are possible threefold objectives to the moves that the “wolf warrior” diplomacy had set out to achieve. One, it could plaster over the stresses that were appearing among the Chinese common populace with regards to the disaffection towards the kind of systems in place within the national governance. Two, china wanted the world to know that USA couldn’t be relied upon, especially with the then trump administration and  that China was to be the next global player, dismantling the hegemony that USA had cultivated for long. Three, china was ready to force its will on the other states, sovereign states. All in all, the time had finally come, to realise, the one China dream, not later than 2050 and the wheel had been set in motion.

But what Beijing had not anticipated or perhaps miscalculated, was the resistance it would face while trying to blaze for itself a path of dominance in the world order and also, to an extent, overestimated its own capacities of trying to fit in too many pieces at the same time, successfully.

 The Chinese misadventure at the Pangong Tso was met with a robust response from India. China, on its part, not only encroached on India’s stated position at fingers of the Pangong lake area, but it also breached agreements signed in 1993, 1996 and 2013, for maintaining peace and tranquility at the LAC, resulting into reported deaths of Indian soldiers. India too retaliated and there were mass casualties on the Chinese side too. The reinvigoration of the quad that includes India, USA, Japan and Australia too, did quite well to spook the Chinese, as was evident from the statements of their foreign ministry. China issued a statement saying, “we hope the relevant countries can think more of the regional countries’ common interest and contribute to regional peace, stability and development rather than doing the opposite.” The Chinese mouthpiece, the Global Times, in a sense of warning India wrote, ”India has to face China by itself. China and India could reduce friction through negotiations. China will not hesitate to resort to military means if need be. There is no place for the QUAD group in the China India border issue.” Harsh pant, a professor of international relations at the London’s king’s college said, “if it rattles China’s cage, why not rattle it well? This is what India is trying to do”. The Malabar naval exercise which was now joined by Australia too, rattled china. And one must not forget the turbulence the dragon faced in South China Sea. Add to that, the support that Hong Kong protesters got from the democracies around the world and the changing positions with regards to the Taiwan issue too, did not go down well with Beijing.

To sum up, one must understand the wide impact that the pandemic has had, not only in terms of health and finances but also, in terms of the global political dynamics and its continual shifts. And it would be naive of us to assume finality to the ever changing scenarios. If 2020 was a roller coaster in the world of power balances then 2021 could be a smoother slide leading to sand pit, with transformations and changes being the expected outcome.