{The Global South, with 85% of the world’s population, has drifted out of the Western sphere of influence, as the United States and its allies discovered when countries with 70% of the world population rejected United Nations sanctions against Russia after February 2022.
The West found this out a second time October 27 when 120 countries voted for a UN General Assembly resolution opposed by the United States that failed to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.}
{American strategists should listen closely to Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University, who told the “Observer” news site on November 3 that “the world has long entered the post-American era. This does not mean that the United States is no longer important. The United States is still very important. It means the United States … going against the trend.”
Referring to US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s catchphrase “small yard, high fence” to describe US controls on technology exports, Zhang said, “We can think of this as the self-restraint of a frog in a well.”
The United States, Zhang said, “has isolated itself within this high fence around a small yard. Outside is the entire Global South, the entire non-Western world, which has the world’s largest market, largest resources, and most development opportunities.”}
{Zhang is entirely correct: No other country besides China has the resources and capacity to make a dent in the economic misery that drives refugees towards Europe. Asia Times editor Uwe Parpart made the same point in an October 18 essay for the Swiss newspaper Weltwoche.}
{The Chinese empire, unlike Christian Europe, never attempted to unify its peoples through religion. It demanded that they become “civilized,” as Sinologist Francisco Sisci observes, which meant learning the written characters, wearing Chinese dress, and paying taxes to the emperor.
Otherwise, they were free to speak any dialect and worship any gods they pleased. The empire in turn provided infrastructure – indispensable in the great flood plain of Central China – and order.}
{Of course, it is not quite that simple. There are exceptions, and China’s approach to dealing with jihadists within its own borders needs no mention here except to say that it has been quite effective in its own fashion. China has a long (but now distant) history of punitive expeditions against unassimilable barbarians.}
