G7, NATO have no business meddling in China's affairs

The G7 and NATO summits both issued very provocative communiqués that conveyed their intent to meddle in China's affairs. The first criticized what they described as China's "nonmarket policies and practices", as well as the alleged human rights situations in the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) and the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region. The economic bloc also said that it was "seriously concerned" about the situation in the East and South China Seas.

NATO was much more aggressive with its rhetoric, as could be expected from a military bloc. China was condemned for its alleged "systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to the Alliance's security." NATO basically built upon the G7's rhetorical attacks against China by even more grossly mischaracterizing its activities in order to present them as alleged threats to global security. Both communiqués are unacceptable.

The G7 is an economic bloc by virtue of its founding vision, but it's supposed to concentrate on improving trade and investment with its members as opposed to pressuring other countries to change their relevant policies.

Contrary to their false claims, China continues to embrace market-friendly policies and practices as evidenced by its unveiling last year of the new dual circulation development paradigm.

As for the organization's criticism of China's human rights situation, this obviously isn't an economic issue within their purview, nor is it even a real problem. Rather, it's just a media myth created by the US and weaponized by its intelligence agencies.

While the G7's communiqué can be dismissed as pure rhetoric, NATO's should be taken much more seriously since it's a military organization with a documented track record of aggressive behavior across the world.

Its members are wrong to claim that China is a threat to global peace when it's they themselves who've threatened this in the most dramatic ways possible after the end of the Cold War.

The 2011 War on Libya and the earlier 1999 War on Yugoslavia are perfect cases in point. They literally violated the same "rules-based international order" that they're now accusing China of undermining despite Beijing not waging any wars.

Taken together, the G7 and NATO communiqués signal the US' intent to rally its Western economic and military allies against China in order to intensify what many observers have recently started describing as the new cold war between these two countries.

Actually, there doesn't even have to be another cold war in the first place since this is nothing more than a self-interested and highly risky gamble by the US to delay its fading unipolar hegemony.

Historical processes are such that they're inevitable and irreversible, and the present one represents the world's gradual transition to an emerging multipolar world order where the US no longer reigns supreme.

The US' implied multilateral threats of economic and military aggression against China, including it and its allies' attempts to meddle in its affairs, are doomed to fail but might nevertheless "succeed" in destabilizing the world before that happens.
Cynically speaking, it's this speculative chaos that the US might secretly be seeking to provoke in the delusional hope of exploiting it for the previously mentioned unipolar purpose.

As the US ramps up its hybrid war on China via the G7 and NATO, it can be certain that this will also entail unexpected costs to its allies, some of whom might ultimately balk at this and realize that there's no reason for them to participate.

The West should consolidate itself around improving the living standards of its own people instead of obsessing over its misrepresentation of China as the ominous "other" against whom they must all aggressively unite.

Now's the time for the world to put aside perceived geopolitical and ideological differences in order to come together to fight COVID-19 and rebuild the global economy. The new cold war that the US is trying its utmost to provoke against China is just a distraction from the inevitable and irreversible transition to a multipolar world order. America's allies must realize this before it's too late and they get caught up in disastrous hybrid war quagmires.

Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.

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