context: Analysts and officials have recently urged China to take a stronger international moral stand to boost its ‘discourse power’ (话语权 huayu quan). Author Zheng Yongnian 郑永年 is director of the National University of Singapore's East Asia Institute and concurrently chairman of South China Normal University's Institute of Public Policy (IPP) Academic Committee. He is a prominent columnist, and able to comment relatively more freely than many domestic analysts from his position in Singapore.
China needs more international space, argues Zheng Yongnian 郑永年, which the existing order is unwilling to provide. Hence, China advocates building a new regional order, often leading to tension with the US. Zheng recommends China
- continue reforming and playing a major role within the existing international order
- build its own international order discourse, clarifying
- why it should advocate a new regional order (as an alternative, not a replacement)
- the relationship between the new and the current one
- ‘open regionalism’: open, participatory, international
- establish closer relationships with some traditional US allies, hence defusing US resistance
Ex-colonies only gained territorial independence, contends Zheng; their thinking remained ‘colonised’. A rising power, China expects to challenge the current international order because it
- is rising within the existing order
- has sufficient capacity to reshape it
The notion of ‘international order’ originated with the US and, as such, the US possesses moral supremacy.
Zheng recalls Henry Kissinger’s views on international order
- there is never a single order, but multiple coexisting
- every civilisation has its own view of it
- different views will compete
- since modern times, it has been established, dominated, and spread from the West to the rest
Non-Western states, explains Zheng, have accepted the West’s international order due to
- its profitability
- easier to gain benefits
- powerlessness to change it or to create a new one
- lack of an alternative