CHINA COLD WAR OR HOT PEACE?

HENRY KISSINGER HAS SUGGESTED that the west and China are in the “foothills of a new Cold War”. The Chinese scholar Wang Jisi has called the confrontation more of a “hot peace”, a useful term for a strange relationship where both sides are economically interdependent but diverging ever more sharply on questions of global security and human rights.

For the past four years, the relationship has been defined by two individuals: Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Xi (right) has used the period to define a “new era” in which China has become a power with global influence. He has done so with self-confidence, taking terms that the West thought that it owned and redefining them to suit China’s interests. At Davos in 2017, Xi portrayed China as the true upholder of the values of the post-1945 order, a clear dig at the then new US president.

He had already taken a disparate range of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects across the global south and rebranded them as the Belt and Road Initiative, a blueprint compared to the Marshall Plan. And he took a term with huge resonance in the post-9/11 west, counterterrorism, and used it to justify a repression of Hong Kong’s democracy activists, as well as immense numbers of Chinese Uighurs confined in “re-education”