If Beijing senses the rumblings of tectonic shifts in the global order, it is because it has been preparing for them for decades. At the turn of the millennium, former U.S. government official Michael Pillsbury argued that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1986 “has had an almost unchanging assessment of an ‘inevitable’ multipolar future,” and surveyed contemporary Chinese scholars who made parallels to the Warring States period (Pillsbury, 2000). At the United Nations in February, People’s Republic of China (PRC) Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) made the remarkable comment that “the past 80 years is a period of accelerated advancement in world multipolarity”—in other words, the entire postwar has been trending in this direction (FMPRC, February 19). Today, it seems, Beijing is more confident than ever in its analysis that it has correctly called the “changes unseen in a century” (百年变局) and that it is uniquely positioned to shape an emerging international order.
A growing number of voices in the West appear to be coming around to Beijing’s thinking. The new U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently concurred that the United States now faces a multipolar world (U.S. Department of State, January 30). Meanwhile, the theme of this year’s Munich Security Conference was “multipolarization,” with its accompanying report stating that “we already live in a world shaped by ‘multipolarization’” (Munich Security Conference, February 14). The PRC has followed these developments closely. Articles on the PRC internet purr that the Munich report “considers China to be an outstanding and strong supporter of the multipolar international order” (认为中国是多极化国际秩序的杰出、有力支持 者), and that the conference showed that Europeans “often put China in the position of a superpower on a par with the United States” (常把中国放在与美国比肩的超级大国位置上) while businesses and academics “generally recognize that China’s rise is unstoppable” (普遍承认中国崛起势不可挡) (Aisixiang, February 24, February 27).
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