Keep shifts in the West’s China consensus under watch

livemint.com:

In this age when geopolitics is in an overdrive, several assumptions of the past about the global order’s evolving nature have fallen by the wayside. The world is grappling with multiple challenges and yet there is no framework in place as of now that allows us to assess the rapid change in any meaningful manner. Nations, big and small, are struggling to cope with this flux with extant institutions, both domestic and international, exposing their limitations with each passing day.

New ideas and arguments are being tested in real time as new possibilities emerge for countries trying to retain their strategic space to manoeuvre. No issue is more challenging for the international system than the management of China’s role in the contemporary global order. The old optimism about China’s rise died a long time ago, but the pessimism evident today took some time to manifest itself.

For the Western world, the belief in Chinese benevolence was important to create the myth of a liberal global order. China’s economic rise was predicated on stable ties with the West and the ‘end of history’ was predicated on China’s peaceful integration into the global order. In the US, there was at least a domestic debate on China, but in Europe Chinese economic power was so bedazzling that difficult questions about the nature of the regime and lack of economic reciprocity had to be sacrificed at the altar of creating a mythical empire of ideas.