Pankaj Mishra interviews Zhang Weiwei in Equator:
Pankaj Mishra: […] there’s very little coverage in the Western press of how people in China view these developments. Can you tell us something about that?
Zhang Weiwei: Indeed, the Chinese are watching all this drama closely and with fascination. I think many people feel Carney was a bit more courageous than his European counterparts in calling this so-called rules-based international order a kind of disguise that allows the West to benefit – the US more, Canada maybe less. Now Donald Trump has said: we don’t need this disguise. We can approach everything based on the darkest aspects of realpolitik.
People [in China] see very clearly that these are naked acts of imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism. We have a holistic perception of all this: the crisis in in Greenland, the genocide in Gaza, the low-intensity civil war in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US. All these are, in fact, interrelated, and it reflects deep structural problems in the Western political system.
In 2006, I wrote a small piece for The New York Times, saying that the Chinese model will be far more attractive than the American model in the Global South. Because in our model, we focus on people-centred development. The US, on the other hand, orients its political structure to favour the super-rich, and to sustain that today, they’re going back to the roots of capitalism: exploitation and territory grabs. In 2018, I gave a talk at Harvard in which I said that China’s leadership was looking to the 2050s while Trump was looking to the 1950s. Now he’s looking to the 1850s, which is clear in the US security strategy report issued at the end of last year. I remember Jeffrey Sachs saying that it is not so much anti-Russia or anti-China, it’s anti-everyone – except, perhaps, Israel.
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