via ZeroHedge
In the latest exchange of diplomatic barbs between the world’s two superpowers, on Friday China’s foreign vice-minister Le Yucheng called on Washington to accept that “American hegemony” is in decline, but insisted it will be difficult to overtake the United States even within a “relatively long period of time”.
The US is still the leading power in terms of strength but its adoption of a cold war mentality and creation of “small clubs” is a sign of ideological decline, Le told media outlet Guancha according to SCMP.
“The US decline is not a decline in strength but a decline of hegemony,” Le said. “No matter a country’s strength, hegemonic power is bound to wither, hegemony is not popular.” But he conceded that the US remains “a strong and large nation in the number one spot”, adding that “It will be hard to overtake it over a relatively long period of time.”
China’s foreign vice-minister Le Yucheng
Le said that US-led groupings like the defence-focused Quad, the intelligence-sharing Five Eyes, and the Group of Seven were all examples of Washington trying to define the “international community” when there are many more nations willing to support China’s position.
He also referred to a recent UN vote backed by 44 nations, including the US, which backed a call for the UN human rights chief to be given access to Xinjiang, where Beijing is accused of the mass detention of Muslim minorities and using forced labor. Afterwards, China said that it had won the backing of 90 nations, which had “said ‘no’ to anti-China ‘small clubs’,” according to Le. He said: “This is the international community’s voice of justice, this is real multilateralism.”
The remarks come at a time when Beijing is urging the US not to form a relationship rooted in rivalry but to continue engaging with China.
In an event marking the 50th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China which set in motion the normalization of US-Sino relations, Vice-President Wang Qishan said the biggest challenge facing the US came from within rather than from China.
Meanwhile the former US secretary of state has called for serious dialogue between China and the United States to avoid “catastrophe”.
Between 1979 and 2016, US-China relations were for the most part friendly, mostly because of Washington’s policy of engagement, which assumed that integrating China into the global economy – read mass producing cheap goods which would allow the US to enjoy low prices even as its monetary policy eased for decades and made a handful of people beyond rich – would ensure that political liberalization would follow. Le said that this policy had allowed the two countries to cooperate on issues of global importance, including the 2008 financial crisis and climate change.
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Le also accused Biden and his administration of revealing their hegemonic view of the world order and lingering cold war mentality when they spoke of approaching China “from a position of strength”. The phrase also irked China’s foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi during his March meeting with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in Alaska.
“The biggest challenge faced by a superpower like the United States will always come from within, and destroying China is by no means a prescription for solving American problems,” Le said. “We hope that the United States will return to reason and the right path of dialogue and cooperation, no need to turn resisting China into a policy, nor containing China into ‘political correctness’.”
Le is viewed as a moderate voice among Beijing’s far more hawkish diplomatic corps, being the first to send an olive branch to the US after last year’s election and penning long commentaries in state-run media calling for US-China dialogue at all levels of government and among think tanks and the media. This contrast with the more aggressive rhetoric of Le’s “Wolf Warrior” colleagues, such as the foreign ministry spokespersons Zhao Lijian and Hua Chungying.
However, during the interview on Friday Le made several criticisms of the US that were similar in tone and substance to the more aggressive rhetoric of the Wolf Warriors: Le said the genocide of Native Americans was one reason why Washington’s criticisms of China’s human rights record were not credible, he also described the hypothesis that the coronavirus could have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan as a “conspiracy theory manufactured by spies”, urging the US to clear up suspicions surrounding its own biolaboratories.