Russia v.s. the West: Who’s Really Isolated in Today’s World?
Why multipolarity is so important? I think, because its opposite, unipolarity, is immoral, unjust, and outdated. Under unipolarity, virtually everything, from dollars to trade, to computer chips, to other technologies, to climate change, can be weaponized. Sanctions, missiles, and color revolutions are the norms and are used routinely at will, causing wars, death, havoc, and untold human sufferings for millions upon millions of people. And this order has to be changed and will be changed.
With the rise of China, Russia, the expanding BRICS, and other members of the Global South and the Global East, a multipolar world order is emerging fastly.
In the case of China, with seven decades of socialist construction, China has become, for the first time in human history, the world’s largest modern economy by Purchasing Power Parity since 2014. It has now been almost one decade. China has become the largest industrial power, manufacturing power, a trading nation with the world’s largest consumer market. At the speed of accomplishing almost one industrial revolution every decade since the early 1980s, China now is at the fore frontier of the 4th industrial revolution with Big Data, AI and quantum technologies, et cetera. Now, China is the only country capable of providing goods, services, and experience from all the four industrial revolutions to the whole world. All this has changed China forever and changed the global landscape forever.
In this context, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative 11 years ago. Now, with over 150 countries participating in thousands of projects, based on the Chinese idea of “discussing together, building together, and benefiting together.” This is a very advanced idea for human society and for the new multipolar world order. And BRI has now become the largest common good and platform for international cooperation in human history. Indeed, it is laying a very good foundation for the emerging new world order.
As a full-fledged, independent pole, China is also a civilizational state with full sovereignty, powerful defense capability, immense economic, technological, and cultural, intellectual power. We believe in the model of “Unite and prosper”, rather than the Western model of “Divide and rule”. We reject that categorically. We embrace a shared future for mankind in contrast to America’s: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”
Likewise, despite some controversies over the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s determined objective and resolve to change the unipolar world order is widely appreciated and supported by the world majority. As a result, Russia is isolated by the West, but the West is isolated by the rest. This fact alone shows that Russia is also a full-fledged independent pole with full sovereignty, powerful military might, economic weight, culture, and intellectual strengths of a civilizational state.
Many new poles have emerged as well, not only China and Russia, but also India, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, and others, plus the expanding members of the BRICS and the Global South and East. And they may have internal differences among themselves. All these poles, all these countries share one common objective of establishing a multipolar world order, based on peace, equality, justice, development, and common prosperity, many of them also consider themselves as civilizational states or civilizational communities. If the United States’ unipolarity is underpinned by its deep state, which has done so much harm to the world at large, civilizational states are known for their “deep cultures” and “deep peoples”. They all cherish their own moral standards and civilizational roots and reject categorically the Western moral lecturing or imposition of its will on them. EU foreign policy chief Mr. Borrell admitted not long ago that almost everyone in the non-Western world thinks now that there are credible alternatives to the West, not only economically, but also technologically, militarily, and ideologically, and with immense material weight, or hard power, and enormous intellectual power, or soft power, on the part of the world majority. This shift towards a multipolar world order has become an irresistible trend in history. Let’s celebrate this and promote for a better and more human world to come.
Finally, let me express my sincere thanks on behalf of all the Chinese participants and other participants as well for our host, Russian host, and for holding this grand forum, for your gracious hospitality, we wish the forum a great success.
