Is China Right About the West?

In February 2023, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a document entitled U.S. Hegemony and Its Perils.  

This was before the re-election of President Donald Trump, the imposition of the so-called “Liberation Day” trade tariff war, and U.S. military action of choice against Venezuela and Iran and, by proxy involvement in Gaza. 

The document explained that: “Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and wilfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.”

This is a powerful critique of the West that I invite global readers to consider in a book [to be] published in July: “Is China Right?”  (Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK).

It is important to recognize that the meaning of the word “hegemony” is contested. Indeed, Professor Luis Schenoni, University College London, has suggested that there are almost as many definitions as there are international relations scholars.  

Let us say that hegemony describes a geopolitical system comprising a leading nation – the hegemon – in a dominant but symbiotic relationship with subordinate states – subalterns – that offer allegiance in return for political and other benefits.   

The dominant power would be the United States while the subordinate states might vary by context. In economic terms, the hegemony could include all developed economies or, perhaps, a smaller subset such as the high-income countries belonging to the OECD. Some might count just the seven countries that constitute the G7.  

Militarily the Western hegemony has long been equated with the membership of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – founded after World War II. Recent threats by the second Trump administration to withdraw the U.S. from NATO might, if taken literally, suggest that this is no longer appropriate. However, it is likely that the recent rhetoric is no more than the hegemon bullying subaltern states to increase defence expenditure and buy more weapons from the U.S.  

Nevertheless, with the geostrategic dynamics in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions being increasingly intertwined militarily, one might also include the membership of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Australia, India and Japan with the U.S.). Other countries wooed by the U.S. might need to be counted: New Zealand, South Korea; and Vietnam.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs article cites five dimensions of Western hegemony. Simplifying the argument, political hegemony is imposed through a world order created to reflect Western values, while military hegemony is apparent in the “wanton use of force” over diplomacy.  

Economic hegemony is imposed by currency manipulation and control of intergovernmental financial organizations and technological hegemony through monopoly power and exclusion. Cultural hegemony is propagated by soft power and dissemination of misinformation.

According to international relations theory, a hegemon does not rule over subservient states that have no independent autonomy. A hegemon is not all powerful. Nor is it solely responsible for the consequences of hegemony. Rather it is dependent on the consent of subordinate states that typically lend their allegiance because, by doing so, they benefit relative to others that are not part of the hegemonic system or alliance.

It follows, therefore, that countries excluded from a successful hegemony fare worse than those included. The very existence of hegemony brings harm to the international community, if only in relative terms.

I pose a further question in the book: “Has Western hegemony harmed human welfare and increased global inequality?” but let readers draw their own conclusions from the evidence presented.

Take economics first. Reflect on the fact that no low and lower middle-income country is ever included among Western countries. The West is a rich country’s club. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the financial institutions which it has established and controls – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization – primarily respond to the demands of rich countries rather than to the needs of poorer ones.

This impacts on people’s lives. The West can claim rightly that per capita incomes in low-income countries have increased eight-fold since 1984 whereas those of rich countries have merely doubled. With less credibility Western commentators might parrot that this has resulted from developing nations being integrated into a fair trading system supported by a rule-based world order.  

However, the self-same statistics, when expressed in a more meaningful way, point to rapidly growing inequality. The incomes of the already rich have soared while citizens in low-income countries measure their increased wages in terms of cents. Daily per capita GDP in high income countries rose by US $54.91 between 1984 and 2023, that in the average low-income country by just US $4.31. The average increase in UN-designated “Least Developed Countries” was a miserly US $2.70 – the equivalent to an annual improvement of less than seven cents.

What, then, about cultural hegemony?  Surely, Western values and the institutions that promote human rights have enhanced human welfare! 

It is, of course, impossible to know what would have happened had there been no Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.  It is also worth recalling that, although the committee drafting the declaration was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt – wife of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Chinese diplomat Peng Chung Chang was a key intellectual force behind the project. 

It was P.C. Chang who insisted that, to attain universal validity and legitimacy, the Declaration must not be expressed in Christian or religious language. He successfully argued that the concept of “right to life” should not refer to mere existence, as implied by the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but embrace “a good life”, thus permitting the inclusion of socioeconomic rights within the Declaration. 

He led resistance against a proposed clause that would have differentiated the human rights enjoyed by citizens of colonial powers from those available to citizens in their overseas dependencies. 

In 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a staunch anti-communist, replaced Eleanor Roosevelt in her UN role. Ever since then the West has sought to limit the concept of human rights, prioritizing individual over collective rights. The international covenant giving legal status to economic, social and cultural rights was resisted until 1976.   

Amnesty International, when founded in the U.K. in 1961, explicitly interpreted human rights to be an alternative to socialism. The libertarian New York based Human Rights Watch has challenged abuse by left and right leaning governments. However, from its foundation in 1978, it has refused to engage with distributional ill-justice. 

Western civil society must, therefore, bear some responsibility for the rich world consistently refusing to give legal force to the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development. While Western governments claim to provide opportunities to their citizens, the U.S. explicitly, others implicitly, refuse to accept responsibility for outcomes for individuals.  Likewise, they refuse to accept any legal obligation to assist other countries develop their economies or peoples.

If passivity in pursuit of human rights is surprising, the human costs of proactivity are stark, measurable in terms of human lives. Due to military interventions with ostensibly humanitarian intent, some 13,500 civilians died in Kosovo, perhaps 7,000 in Libya, and 100,000 or more in Bosnia. 100,000 civilians, maybe 150,000, were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2006; 43,000 died in Afghanistan in the 20 years to 2021. 

It is not self-evident whether these deaths are a measure of the cost of ensuring human rights or of perpetuating Western hegemony with its individualistic interpretation of human rights.

Nothing yet has been said about Western military hegemony – that, for example, the U.S. has 66 overseas military bases in the Indo-Pacific while China, with a policy of non-alignment has none. China’s Djibouti base is only a logistic center, not for the military purpose. Nor have I had chance to consider the welfare costs and benefits of technological or political hegemony. The book – Is China Right? – says much about both.

Western hegemony, though, may be collapsing. Perhaps the new book is already a work of history.  Certainly, subaltern states – such as Canada – are resisting the idea that hegemons should seek, as under U.S. President Trump, to “continually monetize their relationships.”   

A test of the “collapse of hegemony” hypothesis is straightforward: empirical; geopolitical; and moral. Will rich countries join with China to construct a global community with a shared future based on openness and inclusiveness, equity and justice, harmonious coexistence, diversity and mutual learning, and unity and cooperation?