At the beginning of the year, Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, inaugurated the Research Center on Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. This is not the first centre of its kind. In November 2019, another university in Beijing announced the creation of the Institute for a Community with Shared Future and went on to set up a Pakistan Research Center for a Community with Shared Future in Islamabad the following year.
Despite these grand, altruistic titles, the Chinese Party-state’s regime interests and the worldview that flows from these interests do not allow for a conception of the kind of global community that Beijing claims to support. There are several reasons why this is so.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017, Communist Party of China (CPC) General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping described ‘problems with world economic growth, governance and development models [that] must be resolved’. But for the Chinese, this description of problems as being of a global nature hides their very specific concerns about the direction of global politics – the pressure on Chinese economic growth because of the U.S.-imposed trade war, the challenge of liberal democracies to its own authoritarian governance system, and competition from alternative development models that do not privilege state control or the control of a dominant political party over the economy and national resources. These are continuing challenges, and China’s call for a global ‘community of shared future’ is an attempt to cover up this internal insecurity.
Despite these grand, altruistic titles, the Chinese Party-state’s regime interests and the worldview that flows from these interests do not allow for a conception of the kind of global community that Beijing claims to support. There are several reasons why this is so.
