Xi Jinping’s Dream World – China’s Desire for Absolute Power Over the World.

The issue of human rights is the least of Xi Jinping's concerns.

More “son of the sky” than ever, as the emperors of China were said to be, Xi Jinping wants to impose his vision of world affairs. This ambition is at the heart of the priorities of the Chinese president, who has just been elected for a third five-year term at the head of the second-largest economy on the planet.

But what should the world look like according to Xi Jinping?

The question would be academic if it were not for a head of state, surrounded by a team of mandarins all at his devotion, who concentrates more power than any of his foreign counterparts.

The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, a knowledgeable sinologist, describes in the British Financial Times “a Marxist-Leninist worldview” - where politics takes precedence over economics and where “struggle,” “combat,” the terms that pepper Xi Jinping's speeches, must be the driving force behind Chinese policy.

But against whom should China fight according to Xi Jinping? The enemy is designated: Western ideas.

Western ideas destabilize relations between states and undermine the international system, as much as they can harm China's internal stability for Xi Jinping. The objective of strengthening the country's “national security” implies - among other necessities - changing an international order shaped by the United States and which slows down Beijing's rise to the top of the world power.

In this politico-ideological battle, Russia, all the more aggressive because it is on the decline, is on China's side. Their shared target is the “liberal order,” that set of norms to which the international system born in 1945 refers. It is not so much the institutions that are being challenged - Beijing is happy with them - as the “values” to which they refer.

Avoiding the issue of human rights

The “liberal international order” was often neither liberal nor truly international. But its founding texts, the Charter of the United Nations and then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are the product of a very largely Western culture, and of an era, the post-war period. Americans and Europeans, who had in mind massacres and mass killings, wanted to put back at the center of international life the rights of the individual as they understood them - freedom of expression and conscience, in particular.

Beijing does not recognize the universality of these “values” and argues that they are evoked by Westerners who have too often been unfaithful to them.

China “rejects any idea of an international order guided by shared universal values,” notes the British weekly The Economist in its October 15, 2022 edition, entitled “The World China Wants.” China denounces a Western invention used to counter its inevitable emergence in the first place.

Hence the need says Xi Jinping, to “lead the reform of the global governance system.” This reform consists of evacuating human rights from relations between states. These are the only actors in international life, not individuals or people.

Absolute cultural relativism: the norms set out in the texts of the United Nations Organization (UN) are, depending on the culture, subject to interpretation. The principle of state sovereignty, also at the heart of the UN system, cannot be subverted in the name of human rights.

Consequently, Xi Jinping's diplomacy does not pass judgment on the nature of governments. It respects the state authorities in place. It deals with all regimes, even if it does not hide a preference for the authoritarian type - it advises Africans to draw inspiration from the Chinese experience. This one hates “color revolutions and other Arab springs,” internal troubles that disrupt external stability.

The world, according to Xi Jinping, should move as little as possible.

The Chinese president, who likes to refer to Mao, is not a revolutionary. He wants to act from within the existing institutions. China has benefited from the order established by the Americans in 1945, at least since 1976, and the beginning of its economic revival. It has no problem with the functioning of the UN Security Council. Along with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, it is a permanent member and has the right to veto. Should it be expanded to include other major powers? India, Japan? No hurry.

Beijing plays a leading role in the UN's specialized agencies and is one of the major financial contributors. China likes free trade and free capital flows, even if it fights the supremacy of the American dollar. Full sovereignty of States and inviolability of their borders: reaffirmed loud and clear, these great principles are adjusted when necessary, as all the great powers have done.

Beijing indulges in some dubious rhetorical contortions to avoid publicly condemning the war of the dictator Putin and his Russia in Ukraine. China helps the countries of the South to face the global challenges of the time, whether it is pandemics or global warming.

In exchange for its assistance and credits, it expects a political counterpart. At the UN, it has forged a group of friends who, willingly sharing their distrust of the West, vote in favor of Beijing. Thus China intends to “sinicize” the UN system. It has become relentless. China is now present on all continents.

The world according to Xi Jinping seems to obey only one tropism, alas, too well recorded in history: the will to absolute power.

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