Standing behind the peace talks, controlling the humanitarian crisis and avoiding a greater impact on the global economy, a number of developing countries have echoed China’s stance on these topics of common concern as they discussed the Ukraine crisis in diplomatic circles.

As led by President Xi Jinping, China, alongside a number of nations from Asia, Africa and South America, want to make sure that “give peace a chance” does not end up as an empty slogan, officials and experts said.

Since the outbreak of the crisis, Xi has talked to the leaders of a number of countries separately by telephone or video link and discussed the Ukraine situation.

“The comments and all the diplomacy efforts made by Xi fully display the broad vision and strong sense of duty that a major country should have, and this is exactly what a major country is expected to be doing,” said Su Xiaohui, deputy director of the China Institute of International Studies’ Department of American Studies.

Su highlighted a telephone conversation Xi had with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday.

During their talk, both leaders voiced support for Russia and Ukraine keeping up the momentum of their peace talks, and they agreed that sovereign countries are entitled to independently decide on their own positions.

“In contrast to the bloc confrontation and unilateral sanctions sought by US-led Western countries in the Ukraine crisis, China and many other developing countries hold their own views and positions, comprising a vast ‘middle zone’,” Su said.

As many “middle zone” countries call for the success of a cease-fire via peace talks and offer humanitarian aid instead of weapons, they stand in sharp contrast to some Western countries’ forcing of other nations to take sides, and “the global community is crystal clear about which pattern will be helpful to eventually resolving the crisis”, Su said.

On March 2, 35 countries－including Algeria, China, South Africa and Mongolia－abstained from voting on a UN General Assembly resolution on Ukraine.

Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra told State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a meeting on Sunday that their two countries’ abstention sent a clear signal that they hope to maintain independence and are willing to give peace a chance.

Algeria believes that China’s proposition, based on international fairness and justice and aimed at promoting peace, stability and security, represents a correct and broad path, he said.

Wang told reporters after the meeting that the majority of countries in the world, including China and other developing countries, “share reasonable concerns and hold similar positions”.

No country should be forced to choose sides, and when dealing with complex issues and divergent views, one should not opt for the simplistic approach of “friend or foe” and “black or white”, Wang said.

Xu Yicong, a researcher at the China Foundation for International Studies and a former Chinese ambassador to Cuba, said, “As many countries have discussed the situation and made constructive proposals, their ideas deserve equal opportunity to be known by more people.”

Independent roles

Indonesia holds the chairmanship of this year’s G20 Leaders’ Summit. In an interview with Japan’s Nikkei newspaper this month, Indonesian President Joko Widodo called for a cease-fire in Ukraine and said continued dialogue rather than economic sanctions on Russia is the way to resolve the crisis.

“US-led Western countries should realize that many major emerging economies－such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa－are highly self-reliant in shaping their own strategy,” said Zhu Jiejin, a professor of global governance studies at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs.

“These countries do not easily take sides between the US and Russia in the crisis. They take the world’s bigger picture into consideration and act on their own interests. They know even the so-called unprecedented sanctions will not lead to peace,” Zhu added.

A number of Middle East countries have refused to take sides on the Ukraine situation as well, leading to complaints or concerns from some US officials and policy researchers.

The Washington Institute think tank said in a policy analysis this month that “many nations in the Middle East are keen on balancing their relationships with the United States and Russia”.

Xue Qingguo, a professor of Arab studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, noted that many Gulf nations view the crisis differently from the US and its allies.

“The majority of Middle East countries’ governments and public subscribe to neutrality and not taking sides, and China’s stance on the situation is winning more support there,” Xue said.

Xue noted that in addition to the Middle East, most African, Southeast Asian and South American countries have not followed up on the sanctions pushed by US-led Western countries.

“The voice of the vast number of developing countries should be given a higher profile, which is also giving peace a chance. And the overwhelming global support to sanctioning Russia, as portrayed by the media outlets of the US and some of its allies, is actually something false and overblown,” Xue said.

Former Trump campaign and White House advisor Steve Bannon this week told the talk show: “United We Stand” that China had committed a “biological Chernobyl” against the United States. Proceeding to advocate the conspiracy theory that the virus leaked out of the laboratory, he then accused China of “premeditated murder” and said that Beijing owes the US “trillions” as a result. The rhetoric echoes those within the Trump administration and congress saying the same thing, in line with the approaching US election.

Steve Bannon is one of the chief architects of Trumpism as we know it, in both doctrine and word. A nationalist media mogul who run the far-right news outlet Breitbart, Bannon in 2015 and 2016 helped Trump craft his vision of “America First” by advocating a philosophy that the United States ought to consider its own interests exclusively against that of the rest of the world, oppose globalization and pursue confrontation with China as the primary “threat to America”.

In doing so, Bannon’s strategy and modus operandi is floated on advocating deliberate misinformation with the goal of spurring up nationalist anger and exaggerated perceptions of threat in its target audience, thus creating momentum for aggressive populist policies. It is designed to create deliberate insecurity in American conservative identity.

Thus, it is important to note that the objective of such rhetoric is not whether it is factually true or not, but for the given sentiment which it creates and how the such identity based anger drives and uproots established political conventions.

For a long time his focus included a prominent focus on Islam and other groups: Breitbart would advocate hatred towards ethnic minorities migrating to the United States, whip up fears of crime and terrorism amongst such groups and argue they were eroding America’s identity and way of life.

This involved the weaponization of conspiracy against the Obama administration to sow discord and thus the broader discourage that they were in effect dismantling America through adherence to liberal ideas, globalism and internationalism.

On this plateau, his work with the Trump administration therefore concerned weaponizing an all-embracing sentiment that America was in decline and it would be the nationalist dogma of the president who would salvage normality against the politicians who had betrayed and sold out the country to parties like China and liberal ideologies.

Bannon advocates the belief that China is responsible for the hollowing out of America’s industrial base and job losses. He argues Beijing has long waged an economic war against the US, and America is locked in a clash of civilizations for its own identity.

Given this, it is not surprising that Bannon is now crawling out of the woodwork to support Trump’s 2020 campaign either directly, or indirectly by weaponizing the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory, as are many others on the right.

To accuse China of an intentional biological attack against the United States is a tactic straight from his standard playbook, being based on no evidence whatsoever and designed to whip up fear and hatred amongst core Trump supporting demographics, thus accumulating in his plans to wage further confrontation against Beijing to the administration’s gain.

With this, one should conclude swiftly that Bannon is a modern day demagogue. His political impetus is founded completely upon hatred, deception and nationalist dogma in the view of pushing a very sinister, malign and divisive agenda. It is as of present not clear how much he will feature in the upcoming Trump campaign, but his presence and influence will be hardly surprising.

Irrespective however, Bannon is nevertheless the man who has built many aspects of Trump’s political doctrine and strategy, the author of “America First” and “Make America Great Again” politics, and thus as the White House itself spreads the same bogus conspiracy theory, it is always worth looking back to the root of this nasty politics, the very individual who assisted in making populism, disinformation and identity driven nationalism a mainstream force in US politics. Bannon is reprehensible in both word and deed.

China and the United States are expected to sign a phase-one trade deal in a few days, which will ease trade tensions as well as take the bilateral trade negotiations forward.

That the deal, despite its positive overtones, has invited some criticisms both in the US and China, shows that it, although having a certain balance, cannot satisfy everyone. The two sides have reached a necessary compromise.

Concerns center mainly on the prospects of a “phase-two deal” and smooth progress of the trade talks. In fact, the decisive factor is not negotiating skills or having bargaining chips but how China and the US respond to the significant differences between their economic and political systems and ideologies, which are more complicated than those between the US and the Soviet Union.

Since the global financial crisis, Western analysts have used multiple labels to describe China’s political and economic systems. They have even said China’s “state capitalism” poses a challenge to the “Washington Consensus”.

After 2017, the West’s characterization of China’s political and economic systems turned even more negative. For example, Peter Navarro, trade adviser to the US president, accused China of intellectual property theft, often using the rhetoric that China is “basically trying to steal the future of Japan, the US and Europe”. But the fact is that since China joined the World Trade Organization, its annual IPR licensing fees have exceeded the global average.

In 2000, it paid $1.3 billion in IPR licensing fees, which increased to $35.6 billion by 2018－an average annual growth rate of 20 percent compared with the average global growth rate of 9.5 percent.

In addition, on the issue of industrial subsidies, the US has resorted to double standard. In the US, subsidies for industries such as advanced manufacturing and agriculture are huge. Amazon, for example, received at least $613 million in local government subsidies between 2005 and 2014. And from 2010 to 2016, the US administration invested more than $100 billion in basic research in biomedicine.

Ironically, while the US is asking the Chinese government to reduce its “intervention” in industry, it is learning from China how to use the government to promote innovation, and developing artificial intelligence (AI) by adopting a holistic government approach.

In May 2018, the US administration hosted the Artificial Intelligence for American Industry Summit, emphasizing government coordination in combining the strengths of industry and academia to maintain US leadership in AI. In February 2019, the US announced the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative, which is actually an executive order that requires the federal government to increase investment in the AI industry.

The White House has also formed a “Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence”, which comprises officials from government agencies including the Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And the Pentagon has established a “Joint Artificial Intelligence Center” to strengthen the partnership between the US military and Silicon Valley tech giants.

Of course, China has been taking measures to strike the right balance between the roles of the government and the market in the economy. Stephen Roach, a senior researcher at Yale University, said that although China’s difficult economic transition is continuing, its reforms have achieved a lot in the past few years. People should pay attention to “next” China, he said, as the US administration’s obsession with antiquated perceptions of China isn’t helping to solve the problem.

If the US expects the Sino-US trade talks to yield unrealistic results in its favor, it will only be disappointed. And if the US continues to be hostile to the Chinese systems, the pace of China’s reform and opening-up may slow, increasing the pressure on reform officials. In fact, the trade war triggered by the US has greatly hurt the interests of Chinese enterprises such as Huawei, which could prompt them to ask the government to set up trade barriers to protect national economic interests. This will not be good for any country.

Whether it likes it or not, Washington has to accept the fact that China will not follow the US economic development model. The US can no longer force China to accept its demands now that it is the world’s second-largest economy.

That China and the US have reached a phase-one deal shows they are trying to find a way to ensure their economic systems co-exist peacefully. Which is crucial for the continuation of the Sino-US trade talks.

Of course, competition between the two sides is inevitable, but it should be based on rules that are acceptable to both, and should not cause losses to other economies.

In short, it’s wrong to look at the Chinese and US systems as an irreconcilable barrier and unwise to judge China’s development model from a static perspective. There is a route beyond the binary of “deep integration” or “decoupling”. As China’s Ambassador to the United Nations Cui Tiankai said, the resilience of Sino-US relations lies in their ability to solve problems and overcome difficulties.

The author is research fellow at Charhar Institute. Source: Chinausfocus.com 

BEIJING – China on Wednesday slamed the practice of the United States shifting blame amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and said the US is trying to cover up its own problems by doing so.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang made the remarks at a press conference after Robert O’Brien, US President’s national security adviser, reportedly said that the United States has many ways to exert pressure and shift the blame to China, including filing lawsuits.

Geng said the virus is a common enemy to all mankind, and people across the world know clearly that some people tried to cover up their own problems by shifting the blame to others.

“I urge them to spend more time on doing their own job and do more practical work for their own people,” he said.