International security

5 Reasons Why China Is Not the Soviet Union

The world is entangled with many problems including ethnic conflicts, cross-boundary disputes, economic turmoil, a growing climate crisis, and above all, insufficient and ineffective global governance. The clock is ticking. Yet there is no consensus among nations, especially the major powers, about what the world should be like and how they should collaborate to reach that goal. Between Brexit, “America First,” and the “Belt and Road,” different parties seem to be heading in different directions. Given the historical and social diversities among nations, China’s “Belt and Road” roadmap, of course, does not necessarily represent a holistic blueprint for the whole world and it indeed does not intend to do so, but it is at least a more open and more inclusive solution. Italy, a member of the G-7 group that has officially joined China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” has just proved this.

Nonetheless, it is at this moment that Washington, once again, has spotted China and Russia and paired them up as the prime rivals and threats to the United States. On March 27, in a testimony made before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the United States will “make sure that China and Russia cannot gain a strategic advantage in an age of renewed great power competition.” It is also worth noting that just a few days before the testimony, a “Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC)” was convened by a group of Washington policy advisers and former U.S. government officials, where the statement was made that “as with the Soviet Union in the past, communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States.”