Xi's new New World Order 'blueprint,' plus China's EV 'Zeitenwende' jump-starts an EU subsidy probe -- China Boss News 9.15.23

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What happened.

In The Atlantic last week, Michael Schuman argued Xi Jinping's snub of the G20 - he will break with tradition by sending Premier Li Qiang in his place - is the most recent signal that China's supremo is "done with the established world order."

"By skipping the G20, Xi is attempting to discredit it. The forum is filled with U.S. partners and therefore resistant to Chinese manipulation or control, moreover, it has mounted an effort to make the stewardship of global affairs more inclusive —it welcomed the African Union as a new member — and Xi likely sees it as competition for his own plans to win adherents in the Global South,” he said.

Instead, Xi has been actively promoting other multilateral institutions “he thinks he can dominate or pack with friendly clients,” like the BRICS forum, Schuman says, where, only last month Beijing pushed past Indian objections to add six new members.

And that may lead one to wonder what Xi may have up his sleeve that might help China achieve even greater alignment with the Global South. To answer, Beijing is relentlessly promoting a strategic string of acronyms - the GCI, GDI, and GSI - each with their own solutions to the world’s problems that, coincidentally, have also been newly repackaged into a set of UN proposals for changing how current global governance works and is run.

Why it matters

The ‘blueprint’

China is pushing a new “blueprint” to reform global governance - the nuances of which are rarely reported in the news media. 

China’s Global Security Initiative Concept Paper, MOFA, Feb. 2023:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has proposed the Global Security Initiative (GSI), calling on countries to adapt to the profoundly changing international landscape in the spirit of solidarity, and address the complex and intertwined security challenges with a win-win mindset.

In Part III of the China’s GSI Concept Paper (above), which lays out Beijing’s "Priorities of cooperation,” there are twenty action steps - some might call them “unilateral demands” - that "all parties" can take to "carry out single or multiple cooperation" with China.

The first of these - which is to “[a]ctively participate in formulating a New Agenda for Peace and other proposals put forth in Our Common Agenda by the UN Secretary-General” - is hardly objectionable.

Until you get to China’s most recent UN filing - Proposal of the People’s Republic of China on the Reform and Development of Global Governance (“the Proposal”) - posted on Wednesday, which sets forth, in Part I, Beijing’s ideas for what the New Agenda for Peace should include.

President Xi Jinping has put forward the Global Security Initiative (GSI).

It advocates a commitment to the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security; a commitment to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries; a commitment to abiding by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter; a commitment to taking the legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously; a commitment to peacefully resolving differences and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation; and a commitment to maintaining security in both traditional and non-traditional domains, with a view to jointly promoting a global community of security for all.”

But if you start to think “enough with the 'GSI’ and ‘security’ already,” entertain the prospect of a “twin” for global development. You guessed it - China’s Global Development Initiative (GDI), introduced in 2021, and offered in Part II of China’s “blueprint” to change the world.

With the implementation of the GDI as a main focus, China will push for international efforts to consolidate and expand consensus on development and keep development front and center on the global agenda.

China will pursue greater synergy of development strategies at the global, regional, subregional and national levels, including synergy between the GDI and the U.N. development agenda, to achieve complementarity and interconnected development.

In translation, China would require other states to “prioritize the right to economic development over all other rights,” as it has stated publicly many times in the past.

But Beijing recently introduced yet a third acronym - the “Global Civilization Initiative (GCI),” also found in Part III of the Proposal, again, something it has often repeated over the years.

In proposing the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), President Xi Jinping aims to promote the exchange and mutual learning between civilizations, enhance mutual understanding and friendship between people of all countries, build international consensus for cooperation and advance the progress of human civilizations.

. . . There is no one-size-fits-all model for promoting and protecting human rights. All countries’ independent choice of their own path of human rights development should be respected.

In other words, with regard to the UN’s current insistence on the universality of human rights, China feels discriminated against and wishes to see values associated with single-party control, which so frequently lead to mass arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, and cultural and religious persecution in its totalitarian system - placed on equal footing with the likes of rule of law and individual liberties. Audacious, yes, but that’s the Proposal.

China’s new tributary system

In The Conversation last week, Geoffrey Roberts, Graduate Researcher at La Trobe University, called out China's Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), in particular, for “represent[ing] a kind of modern-day tribute system in which an all-powerful China sits atop a hierarchy of like-minded states from the Global South.”

“In exchange for kowtowing to Beijing, the Chinese government offers developing countries lucrative trade and investment opportunities and the ability to emulate its authoritarian political model,” he said.

We can already see this happening with six African countries, Axios China reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian last month said.

In the East African country of Tanzania, the Chinese Communist Party has set up "its first overseas training school" to teach "its authoritarian alternative to democracy" to local leaders.

According to Allen-Ebrahimian, Chinese and African officials “have presented the school as a way to promote Africa's economic and social development,” while branding “the CCP's approach” in Tanzania “as a way to alleviate poverty and spur economic development through training effective leaders.”

The curriculum is varied and includes “party governance, party discipline, anti-corruption methods, Xi Jinping Thought, and poverty alleviation.” Courses are taught by “Chinese teachers affiliated with party schools in China,” to “rising young members of the ruling [local] parties,” but they are not open to the opposition.

“If you are upholding one political party and not offering [support] to the whole political system, you're offering to strengthen one party within a country, you're nurturing authoritarianism. That is political interference,” New Zealand China expert Anne-Marie Brady said.

The GSI, GDI, and GCI, are replete with “lofty ideals” and “intentionally vague concepts,” for which Beijing has yet to work out details. It may not ever.

The aim is not to commit China’s party elites to a new set of standards that would reduce their ability to maneuver, as the current rules-based model of global governance does, but, rather, to support like-minded authoritarians in juntas, other party-states and weaker democracies around the world, like in Tanzania and the Global South, with validation and diplomatic messaging that can be repurposed.

“Together, the three global initiatives stem from the ideological edge of Xi’s efforts to roll back American global primacy,” Atlantic Council’s Michael Schuman, Jonathan Fulton, and Tuvia Gering explain.  

But they go much further by conceptualizing and promoting a new “future” where “China will be in the lead, and the international system will be friendlier to autocratic governments; sovereignty will come at the expense of individual liberties, while universal values such as democracy and human rights, which have been at the core of world affairs for decades, will be stripped from global governance.”

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