by Martin Albrow
As we are now commemorating a speech that Chinese President Xi Jinping gave at a university in Kazakhstan a decade ago, we are celebrating a moment when something that has changed the world began.
Now that may seem an over-grandiose statement. Yet we should take account of the way the world at large has changed in the last decade. I think then we can begin to appreciate that what the rest of the world knows as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been a main driver of change towards a new order in world politics.
Ten years ago, then U.S. President Barrack Obama had just begun his second term in office. Let us just position ourselves by looking at some of the events that led up to the decade that followed.
In his first term, Obama had authorized the military operation in Pakistan that killed the man who had done most to shake American confidence in the previous decade. That was Osama bin Laden, the man behind the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
Obama had also withdrawn troops from Iraq, which the United States and its allies had invaded in 2003. He had gone a long way to persuade Iran to sign up for what was later known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Nobody had any real doubts that as far as hard power was concerned, the United States had no rival. Yet now we speak of a multipolar world. The reason is that geopolitics is no longer defined in hard-power terms. So what has changed, and what is it that counts?
The BRI has been primarily instrumental in increasing Chinese influence in the world through the extension of means of communication of all kinds. The kind of project it supports is one of its earliest, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
The corridor was launched 10 years ago as the major pilot project of the BRI. Since then the Gwadar Port in Pakistan has been developed with the help of the China Overseas Ports Holding Company and two years ago became fully operational as the first deep-sea port in Pakistan.
By June this year, China had signed agreements under the auspices of the BRI with more than 150 countries. In other words, the BRI extends to nearly 75 percent of the countries in the world.
If we match this with nearly half the world's population inhabiting the 11 countries of the newly expanded BRICS bloc of nations, then we get an idea of the growing influence of China in world affairs. But this is not hard power, and I would not even call it soft power. It is something else.
Let us call it relational power, the ease with which you can communicate with another, initiate contact, find what is in your mutual interests, exchange goods and services, and discover what you have in common.
The great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, once distinguished between power over people and the power to do something. For me, this is a far more effective way of thinking about power than the hard/soft dichotomy.
While hard power and power over others come to the same thing in military hegemony, soft power and relational power do not. Soft power implies control of ideas through culture, the media in particular, and very much is just a variation of control over others.
Relational power on the other hand means the capacity to work with others. It is cooperation for greater ends than any can achieve individually.
It is the power to do things together that China has demonstrated in its own society in achieving the first centenary goal, building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Through the BRI and BRICS, we see the outcomes of China's relational philosophy not just for other countries but also for global governance generally.
And here, by speaking of the BRI and philosophy in the same breath, I am deliberately suggesting that China has an approach to world affairs that is deeply embedded in its own history. Not for nothing has Chinese thought over the centuries designated the unity of our world with the concept "Tianxia," "all under heaven."
What has happened over the last decade then is a profound shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one. In this China has been a major contributor, for its influence in the world through building new channels of communication has grown enormously.
Military power no longer determines the shape of international relations. Much else is involved. But we should be very cautious about assuming the world has thereby become a safer place. There may well be some who yearn for the simplicity of a single superpower.
Events in Ukraine and now in Israel may well suggest that conflicts at a local level may become violent more easily. But one result of the rise of relational power, for sure, is that the world must increasingly look to China as the honest broker between nations in conflicts.
Editor's note: Martin Albrow is a fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Xinhua News Agency.
