West does not always know what's best

When certain Latin American and Middle Eastern ambassadors ask: "What about America's arming of Israel in Gaza", they are not, it seems, motivated by profound concern or deep anger. They are simply stirred by resentment directed at the United States, which "China stands ready to exploit". This is one of the several curious claims made in the final column written by the departing Beijing bureau chief of The Economist.

David Rennie is leaving China after over six years. He has, he explains, written over 220 "Chaguan" columns "from all but one mainland province or region". His final contribution as Chaguan, which his journal featured prominently, is written as a farewell.

He claims China's attitude divided the world, while completely ignoring the two-trunk elephant in the room. The US has, with its baked-in martial disposition, multi-trillion dollar wars and 700-plus span of global military bases, been incandescently swaggering and dividing for over seven decades.

Chaguan agrees that the US has contributed to the "collapse "of Sino-American relations, adding that "logic guides each side".His observations contrast with those of another leading (US) commentator, Fareed Zakaria. In March last year, Zakaria openly called for the US to step firmly away from a foreign policy "forged out of paranoia, hysteria and above all, fears of being branded as soft".

The piece is permeated by a fundamental message that, though China has major achievements to its credit, it is apparently not living up to Western good governance standards. Moreover, it is a country "increasingly unwilling to accept foreign scrutiny".

Foreign scrutiny, here, essentially means scrutiny by the US-led Global West. Not mentioned, naturally, is how the US and its allies have progressively shredded their scrutiny legitimacy through, for example, involvement in those ruinous, trillion-dollar wars, willful provocations dating back 30 years which have led to the war in Ukraine, and the compounding failure of leadership in the US and beyond. Whatever remained of this claimed standing to scrutinize has, more recently, been incinerated by the appalling US and allied complicity in creating today's Gaza hellscape.

It is still interesting, though, to consider what this article tells us about the worldview which underpins it.

During the colonial era, a divinely-ordained civilizing role was regularly argued to support the expansion of various European empires around the globe. Drawing on established methods of written language interpretation, we can see how this approach elevated European governance and organizational norms into a dominant global role while isolating alternative, non-European normative systems outside of this pivotal, ideological power circle. In its most audacious form, this divided the world into a troika of civilized, semicivilized and uncivilized segments.

Today, of course, leadership elites, the media and NGOs in the Global West have largely moved beyond any references to divine ordination as a basis for projecting a preferred worldview.

Now, we are accustomed to massive official, NGO and media marketing of universal Western values stressing the mandatory importance of Western-style democracy and legalized individual rights. These exhortations could be well-intentioned. But they are also frequently motivated by a mission to sustain and amplify Western geopolitical ascendancy. Meanwhile, the central importance of intimately linked, profitable Western investment opportunities is less stridently voiced.

Governance systems and norms that do not comply with this secularized, geopolitical blueprint are, once more, grouped outside of a refreshed, Western, pivotal circle of power, by the gatekeepers of that very circle. Noncomplying alternative systems are regularly categorized as "authoritarian" (in days past, the term "pagan "was used to note — and denigrate — non-Christian religions). Inexcusably, horrific Western Gaza genocide complicity has scarcely interrupted these political morality lectures.

As one reads the final Chaguan article attentively, one can see how this embedded political power framework has shaped it. To his credit, Rennie implicitly makes this clear. For example, he quotes a recent Pew Research Centre global survey of views on China, noting how there is "just one rich country[Singapore] where most adults approve of China — but views of China are much warmer in low and middle-income countries". Next, he quotes a senior Chinese government official telling him that: "Western countries talking about universal values are like colonial-era missionaries telling other countries which god to pray to."

This departing dispatch is articulate, as one would expect. And it is clear the last six years have left a deep impression. They might have prompted thoughtful reflection on what the West could learn from China. But in this case, they have not. This final column confirms that, despite an extended stay, Chaguan's needle of understanding has barely moved from the West-knows-best end of the dial.

The author is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University.