RECENTLY, a common talking point for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is “Common Destiny” or “Community of Common Destiny”.
Basically, it asserts that humanity has a common destiny…under the auspices of China no doubt.
From where I’m standing though, it seems like a Chinese knockoff of other universalizing concepts like human rights or the multilateral law0based order, with the universalizing notions of “human rights” or “liberal democracy” replaced by whatever the Chinese think are most expedient for their interests.
Another common Chinese talking point is Multipolarity or multipolar world, a concept that they most likely borrowed from the Russians.
I’ve written about this topic before and basically it asserts that the Western-dominated unipolar world will fragment into a world where different regions are ruled by regional powers. China likes to use this idea of multipolarity to assert that America’s unipolar world system is on its way out, and assert its dominance in Asia.
The problem is that both concepts are at odds with each other. Implicit in the idea of multipolarity is that different regions have different pasts and different destinies. That excludes the very notion of anything related to a common “humanity” whether it is defined by the PRC or Western nongovernment organizations.
But this contradiction seems to have eluded the PRC’s newsletter staff, or perhaps they merely define it differently (and both concepts make sense in their heads).
From where I’m standing, though, the idea of “humanity” or “human destiny” flourished under the totalizing aegis of Western power. Take away that power and divide the world into different power centers (i.e. multiple poles), and you get many “humanities”, each with its own respective unique “destinies”.
China can insist that it stands for some nebulous human destiny, like a new mandate of heaven, but all that means nothing without power, and China does not have that power. The best it can do is to worry about Chinese destiny, in a more unpredictable and more fragmented world./PN
