China's False Positive

Beijing represents the antithesis of global leadership

(Protesters in London, England in 2021)

In recent months, some have erroneously concluded that US dysfunction under Trump is giving China an opening to exercise global leadership.

This thinking is wrong-headed for many reasons.

It’s a mirage, a hallucination and a false positive. The latter occurs, in a binary classification, when a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition. To see Beijing as a global leader is to identify a false positive.

Here are five grounds for this conclusion:

First, China is a top-down, totalitarian dictatorship that conducts comprehensive surveillance of its population at home and diaspora abroad. No autocratic state of this type has ever exercised global leadership, which requires a level of engagement, openness and capacity to inspire emulation that today’s China self-evidently lacks. With Chairman Xi’s aggressive efforts to take full control of public and private sectors, the influence of multinational bodies where China has significant weight — such as the G20 — has actually declined in recent years.

Second, China is engaged in concerted, long-term efforts to destroy distinctive ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political and religious communities. Beijing’s decades of genocide against Tibetans and Uighurs are well documented. China has also rolled back the partial independence of nascent institutions needed to uphold the rule of law. It has dismantled democracy, basic political rights and media freedom in Hong Kong. It has hunted dissidents and human rights defenders, while engaging in stunning levels of transnational repression in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Oppression on such a scale is incompatible with global leadership of any kind.