Africa -China Review Africa -China Cooperation and Transformation
Published: May 02,2022
By Staff writer
Author: Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
The above title is of a book written by Kevin Rudd who is a former Prime Minister of Australia, who understands well China’s development. Kevin not only studied in China but also lived and worked there for more than forty years. His analysis of the US-China relationship is captivating to the readers and at the same time throws scaring uncertainty of the future relationship between the two super powers.
“A war between China and the US would be catastrophic, deadly, and destructive. Unfortunately, it is no longer unthinkable. The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. It rests on a seismic fault of cultural misunderstanding, historical grievance, and ideological incompatibility. No other nations are so quick to offend and be offended. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily,” Kevin Rudd writes.
Kevin observes that the mindsets of the leadership and judgment will determine if a war will be fought at some point between US and China. However, it is possible that both sides can find a way to co-exist without betraying their core interests in what the author calls “managed strategic competition.” Kevin warns that should the two countries fail to manage their differences, the possibility of a resultant war could rewrite the future of both countries, and the world.
Kevin Rudd further says that the defining issue of international relations in the 21st century is the rivalry between a rising China and a ruling United States. The impact of this rivalry is redefining the international order, of which the United States has been the principal architect and guardian.
China also continues to bridle against the assumption in most Western capitals that liberal democracy is held to be a universal norm that the West seeks to impose on China and other developing countries, notwithstanding the ugly history of the collective West in its colonial occupation of much of Asia and Africa over the previous 500 years.
China also sees the attack on its own state industry policies as profoundly hypocritical given the role, for example, of the U.S. military-industrial complex in support of American industry during the postwar period, and the particular role of the U.S. military in incubating U.S. computer and information technology industries in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, “Western hypocrisy” are words now heard with increasing frequency across much of China’s official commentary, describing the West’s efforts to impose norms on China’s behavior, which the West has never bothered to impose on itself in the past. For these reasons, the underlying perceptions gap between the United States and China is growing larger and larger. Kevin says.
“A war between China and the US would be catastrophic, deadly, and destructive. Unfortunately, it is no longer unthinkable.”
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