Opinion | Resolving China’s ‘phantom conflict’ with the West demands a strong sense of perspective
- Beijing’s economic and geopolitical rise is causing a major shift in the global order, but anyone hoping for a one size fits all solution to the tit-for-tat disputes and repeated misunderstandings needs to think again, writes Kerry Brown
Commentators are talking of a new cold war, though in some ways that era of tensions between the Soviet Union and the US was far more straightforward. There were tangible boundaries between the two, and clear lines of attack and influence. With China, it is more like the mixture of a complex and interconnected set of issues that are far harder to analyse and disaggregate.
“Phantom conflict” is a more appropriate way to describe the situation, as no one knows quite what the terms of the struggle are, where the field of combat is, or for that matter, whether the battle – if there actually is one – has already started.
Complaints about Chinese influence are only intensified by this quality of being almost spectral and amorphous. In some mysterious way, Chinese state interference is being conducted, it is claimed, through Confucius Institutes, through cyberspace, through Chinese students working on campuses outside the country, and through a host of other measures. There is nothing explicit or easy to define about this action. Its power is in its mysteriousness.
The one certainty is that trust between Chinese and non-Chinese entities has never looked more vulnerable. Whoever is at fault in this, and it is likely to be a situation created by both sides, things have come to a sorry state.
