Pankaj Mishra
In their ideological struggle with the US and Europe, the Chinese and Russian autocrats can tap into a still-rich vein of anti-Westernism around the world.
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include “Age of Anger: A History of the Present,” “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” and “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”
After months of listening to US President Joe Biden declare democracy to be in mortal conflict with autocracy, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are launching an ideological counterattack. Last month, Xi explicitly denounced the US and its Western allies for pursuing “containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us.” Putin signed a 42-page document outlining a foreign policy aimed at curbing Western “dominance.”
Theirs hardly matches the ardor and eloquence of Mao Zedong’s speech inaugurating the People’s Republic of China in 1949: “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.” Nikita Khrushchev was punchier in insisting that communism was more resilient than capitalism: “We will bury you.”
But then, Putin and Xi have none of the ideological gravitas and appeal of their predecessors. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China claimed to offer a new model of organizing society, politics, economy, and the world order. Communism was especially seductive to new nations struggling to overcome decades of exploitation by capitalist Western powers.
Any alternative communist model of modernization disappeared in 1989 together with the Berlin Wall. Russia, the kleptocratic successor state of the Soviet Union, and post-Mao China embody little more than a nationalist will to power.
Still, Western nations should not underestimate the anti-Western passions Putin and Xi are exploiting today.
Westerners might find baffling and tiresome the “century of humiliation” phraseology relentlessly invoked by the Chinese. And it is easy to scoff at Putin’s supposed resolve to “create the conditions for any state to reject neo-colonialist and hegemonic aims.”
But such rhetoric echoes the historical experience of much of the world’s population. It resonates in countries that were exposed to the degradations of imperialism and colonialism, and, even when formally sovereign, suffered decades of proxy wars, coups organized by Western intelligence agencies, embargoes, and harsh economic programs imposed by Western-dominated financial institutions.
The manifold grievances of weaker nations against the West were largely muted between the collapse of communism and the financial crisis of 2008. Proxy wars and coups then seemed a thing of the past amid widespread hopes that the rising tide of globalization would lift all boats. Even Russia and China seemed to have embraced what Western leaders called a “rules-based international order.”
That consensus now lies shattered. China abruptly rose, faster than anticipated, due to its cannily selective use of the rules of globalization. And Russia, humiliated and diminished throughout the 1990s, was transformed under Putin into a commodities giant and revanchist military power.
To non-Westerners, Western nations appear to have responded by abandoning their promises of universal peace and prosperity. The US has retreated into economic protectionism while NATO, an institution designed for the Cold War, keeps expanding to Russia’s borders. With the formation of the AUKUS bloc, China finds itself confronting the same alliance of white-majority nations that in the mid-20th century tried, disastrously, to contain another rising Asian country: Japan.
Such actions, which Xi and Putin can easily portray as aimed at maintaining Western hegemony, appear to risk a third world war. Rising tensions can only dismay nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have broadly benefited from two decades of globalization and China’s rise in general, and are now resentfully anxious.
In their eyes, the “vaccine apartheid” practiced by rich Western nations during the Covid-19 pandemic confirmed yet again that the West will always protect its own interests, regardless of its rhetoric about human rights. They can see, too, the great contrast between the West’s generous hospitality to Ukrainian refugees and the walls and fences it builds to keep out darker-skinned victims of its own policies.
The signs of a resurgent anti-Westernism are everywhere: a viral video of Namibia’s president educating a visiting German politician in the facts of European racism, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva blaming the US and NATO for the war in Ukraine and seeing China as an impartial mediator, Putin’s popularity rising in Indonesia, and Indians in an opinion poll identifying the US as a bigger military threat than Pakistan (although still less of one than China).
As an ideology, anti-Westernism has little substantive or positive content. For geopolitical opportunists, however, it can be devastatingly useful: It should not be forgotten how much Japan once profited from its anti-Western stance, and how many influential collaborators it enjoyed even while brutally invading and exploiting Asian countries in World War Two.
Passions demonstrably play a larger role in geopolitics than rational interests and abstract ideas. Putin and Xi are playing shrewdly on the political unconscious of the non-Western world in this new Cold War. The West needs to respond with more than some tired phrases from the old one about democracy and autocracy.
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