Afrasianet - Ibrahim Alloush - China, which is leading the economic and technological race with the United States, is also leading a major project to reshape the international system, with the aim of achieving a number of goals. What are they? 

China's "coldness" in the face of American encroachment often provokes multipolar proponents and advocates of freedom from American hegemony around the world.

China, the world's second-largest economy in nominal terms (i.e., in US dollars) and the first largest in terms of purchasing power parity (i.e., in the purchasing power of the yuan in China), is no longer justified in avoiding clashes, directly or through proxies, with the United States, according to who wants it to lead the more vibrant and visible response to America's global hegemony.  

China is also the largest exporter of products, which has accumulated a trade surplus of about a trillion dollars in 2024.  It is the largest factory for 35% of everything produced globally.  It is the West's collective rival in innovation, among which  China's recent launch of DeepSeek, an open-source AI-powered robotic chatting platform that has entered the line of strong competition for the American app  ChatGPT.

Although only 7.8% of Chinese have a higher education degree, China is the country whose universities produce 65% of the world's STEM graduates, year-on-year.  This type of graduate is a common measure of the quality of higher education (STEM) outputs, as the lack of graduates of these solid sciences negatively affects the quality of the workforce, especially in the fields of advanced manufacturing and advanced technology, and thus national security.   

China, according to the global WIPO  organization, which documents patents, filed more than 70,000 patent applications in 2024, while the United States of America filed about 54,000 applications, coming second, followed by Japan with more than 48,000 applications, South Korea with about 24,000 applications, and Germany, which filed less than 17,000 applications.

In 2024, according to WIPO, China submitted more than 4,800 applications for new industrial design, followed by Germany with more than 4,200 applications, followed by the United States with just over 3,000 applications, and third.  "Industrial design" means creating a new way to commercially manufacture a product, whether it is old or new.

China, which is leading the race economically and technologically with the United States, is also leading a major project to reshape the international system towards two goals:

(a) The replacement of multipolarity with American hegemony globally, which upsets the balance of power, internationally and regionally.  

(b) The replacement of the plurality of systems, politically and culturally, with the model that the American pole tried to impose, after the collapse of the socialist system in 1990-1991, a model based on absolute market freedom, non-interference by the state in the economy, and letting globalization take its course, as well as on liberal democracy as a political system that does not accept an equal and does not recognize the right of others to exist, and on the dedication of the individual as a supreme cultural and spiritual reference, that is, the worship of individual interest, and the criminalization of national sense, whether in its emancipatory form eager for equality in the Global South, or In its white racist image in the collective West.

The definition of "multipolarity" is often lost in the midst of conflicts associated with attempts by this or that international or regional party to change the balance of power, and the US administration's efforts to undermine those attempts.

Therefore, the term multipolarity is often consumed at the present moment in the media, in the tension and instability resulting from the exacerbation of the raging conflict between the ascendant and the base, without paying attention to a deeper dimension of multipolarity, which is the possibility of diverse patterns in the world, economically, politically and culturally, beyond the dictatorship of the neoclassical school as a reference for economics, the unilateralism of the so-called "liberal democracy" as a reference for contemporary political thought, and the arbitrariness of "multiculturalism" imposed by globalization as a recipe for atomizing societies and dismantling countries into Towns. 

China's impressive rise on the international stage represents a major challenge in itself to the ideological foundations of the proponents of globalization, because China is a country where the economy is led by the state and the Chinese Communist Party is led by the state, despite the presence of a large and vibrant private sector that operates in harmony with the public sector and in harmony with the needs of Chinese society to a large extent.  We are not talking about a communist experience here.

China's success represents a challenge to Western values politically because its system is not subject to the standards of "liberal democracy", and because it has engaged in the globalized international economic space based on a strong central state keen on the cohesion of its society, homeland, identity and historical memory.  

Finally, the Chinese experience represents a victory for the independent state of the Global South, a state whose borders correspond to the boundaries of the nation it legally expresses, the unified central state, when it mobilizes its forces and adopts a real project of national revival.  

Once again, that "ideological" dimension is often lost in the struggle to reshape the international system, although it is no less dangerous than the change in the balance of power, internationally and regionally, due to the rise of new powers and the resulting frictions.  

But China, which terrified the collective West and various regional powers in its East Asian periphery, such as Japan and South Korea, with its meteoric rise, translated that rise internationally, through major initiatives that American strategists consider a direct threat to American national security, such as:

a) "The Belt and Road", which is detailed in the article "Serious Obstacles in the Paths of China's Belt and Road Initiative".  

In the context of the Sino-U.S. conflict, we can add that since its inception in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative has focused non-exclusively on connecting the parts of the ancient world, Asia, Africa and Europe, with infrastructure and trade lines, land and sea, with Chinese impetus and funding.  

This is important if China is denied export to the U.S. market, the world's largest import market, and in order to dilute U.S. influence in the Old World, which remains the center of gravity of the Belt and Road Initiative, despite deep Chinese breakthroughs in Latin America and the remote Pacific islands. 

Attention should also be drawn here to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a Southern Pacific Free Trade Agreement that came into force in 2022.  The partnership includes China, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand, Singapore, Myanmar and Brunei.  The agreement is the largest trading bloc in history in terms of the size of the participating economies, including the largest Asian economies.  

Of course, the United States, as a Pacific riparian, was not invited to participate, while India was invited but refrained from participating.  In both cases, China remains the largest fish in that bowl, which is meaningful by geopolitical standards. 

On this occasion, it is noteworthy that China's exports to South and East Asia as a whole far exceed its exports to the US market, knowing that South Korea has a trade surplus with China of more than $ 35 billion in 2024, Japan has a surplus of more than 4 billion, Australia about 70 billion, and Malaysia more than 9 billion.  We do not see China shedding tears as a result.  

Perhaps some of these surpluses are losses calculated by China to link the interests of those countries to them.  Taiwan, which is not a member of the Pacific Regional Partnership, has a trade surplus with China of about $143 billion in 2024 alone.  Perhaps some of that deficit could be discharged in the context of "unitary efforts" with the island.       

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, established in 2015 as an international financing initiative in which 92 countries were mobilized, some of them Western countries or circles in the collective orbit of the West, except the United States of America, Japan and Taiwan.  The role and danger of such a bank can be summarized in the context of another international finance initiative that terrified the collective West, in the article "The New Development Bank: Challenges and Prospects."

These initiatives, with their Chinese horizontal expansion in geopolitics and the world of international finance, have so aroused successive US administrations, since before the Obama administration, and not only since the first Trump administration.

Bernie Sanders (very "progressive") was in the US House of Representatives when he launched on 9/2/2005 his call to strip China of the privilege to do business normally in the United States, sounding the alarm about the US trade deficit with China, which amounted to $ 160 billion at the time.

What is important is that, at least at this historical stage, China is pursuing a dual approach in the face of American incursion:

(a) Increasing involvement in existing international institutions, including increasing their financial contribution and role in the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, and trying to oblige the United States to abide by the provisions of those institutions, in light of the rise of other powers, internationally and regionally, in them.

(b) Establishing parallel frameworks for existing international institutions, such as BRICS and the above-mentioned initiatives, and spreading the yuan as an alternative currency in the international financial system, so as to establish the option of multipolarity through projects that attract other countries, without requiring them to sever their ties with the American pole.

On both tracks, China is trying to avoid a clash with the United States, because it does not see that it is yet ready to win that clash, technologically or militarily.  President Xi Jinping has set 2035 for the full modernization of China's armed forces.  

At the same time, China is slowly diluting America's global hegemony by strengthening power centers, both internationally and regionally, to create a more balanced international order.  In East Asia, it challenges the security architecture established by the United States.  In what colonialism called the "Middle East", it proceeded pragmatically and impartially towards central joints such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Zionist entity and Egypt at the same time.

In Europe, it is engaged in trade and investment, with a complete marginalization of the political dimension, in an attempt to break the bonds of the transatlantic alliance.  But in Africa, it is working directly to replace the United States.

 For more details of these Chinese strategies by geographical space, you can see the report "Dismantling China's Greater Strategy" published on the website of the Canadian Institute of Peace and Diplomacy on 26/2/2025.

In seeking to forge wide-ranging relationships around every corner of the globe, especially in countries that find themselves at odds with U.S. policies, China has sought to adhere to pragmatism and neutrality, ideologically and politically, in its relations with the world.  

This particular point is a central hinge to highlight China's keenness not to destabilize any country, regardless of its orientation and the nature of its regime, especially in light of the campaign of successive US administrations to change regimes and bomb countries.

Trump's new vision of what colonialism called the "Middle East", which is based on achieving American interests instead of trying to impose American values and change regimes, cannot be understood without following up on the progress made by China in the relationship with the countries of the world on the basis of never interfering in their internal affairs and non-interference in conflicts between them.

The problem is that this Chinese approach is not reciprocated by the American side. Under the pretext of "democracy, human rights and minorities", the collective West interferes in the affairs of states and countries, including China, and overthrows regimes with which it forges strong relations without hesitation, and contemporary examples are numerous.  See, for example, the article "Bangladesh: An American coup with a civilian façade."  See also the Congo section of "Will Trump's Customs Succeed in Undermining China's Rise?" last week.

The lesson is that China sees only countries, preferring strong ones, of course.  With the exception of its immediate geographic surroundings, it does not contemplate direct military intervention, nor does it adopt relationships with powers within countries that could suggest that they are engaging in "regime-change" projects, even when the United States does the exact opposite.

Hence, the exclusion of liberation movements in the Global South from their immediate attention.  It does not want to waste its resources supporting such movements.
To what extent can China avoid engaging in local and regional conflicts when some of those conflicts are directed against it? When the United States launches a direct, or proxy, war against it? Or when you discover that the systems it invests in, from the Belt and Road to the Southern African Development Community, which includes 16 sub-Saharan African countries, are vulnerable to the collapse of U.S. and other interventions?