Xi Xingping recently had his “Clark Kent” moment. Kent was Superman. He would rip off his workaday shirt to reveal his true identity. China’s despot leader figuratively did that when he unilaterally “brought peace” to the Middle East, and will now proceed to solve the Russia/Ukraine war. At least that’s how it is being reported in China.
How the deal he brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia will actually work out remains to be seen. America and Israel are certainly nervous, and many are worried that this “deal” will produce the exact opposite of peace.
Similarly, will Ukraine’s Zelenskyy be persuaded by Xi’s eloquence to turn swords into ploughshares, or is it more likely that the savage war will stagger on to some distant and muddy conclusion?
We don’t know.
But what is going on here? Why did Xi suddenly involve China in the Middle Eastern hornet nest, and what does he possibly hope to achieve by inserting himself between Zelenskyy and Xi’s ally, Putin?
Most likely, Xi is signalling that the American Superman is as old and tired as Joe Biden, and a new and more vigorous Chinese Superman has come to take his place.
Will it work?
It probably has already worked with the non-Western nations that Xi is trying to impress. African, Middle Eastern, South American, and Asian countries that are already well into the Chinese orbit and quite hostile to America probably see China as the peacemaker, standing up to the American warmonger. While it is exceedingly unlikely that Xi’s overtures to Zelenskyy will produce anything of value (he will probably just repeat Putin’s demands), he has probably already achieved his public relations goals. He is slowly and surely raising China’s standing in the world, while diminishing America’s.
What went wrong here?
When Nixon and Kissinger visited Mao in 1972 things were so hopeful. The West would open up trade with China, China would prosper, the Chinese people would want the same liberties and freedoms we in the West enjoy, and China would eventually become a liberal democracy. A happy ending.
Except it didn’t work out that way. The plan was fundamentally flawed. Maybe the Chinese people wanted to be like us. But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) didn’t want to be like us at all.
And why would they? A liberal democracy would put them out of business. So, under cunning leaders, like Deng Xiaoping, they laid low and bided their time. China took what it needed from the hapless West, and prospered. The safe shipping lines patrolled by a compliant America allowed it to grow at a fantastic rate.
And now, Xi Jinping doesn’t feel the need to be humble any longer. His Wolf Warrior diplomacy is becoming more and more aggressive, as large parts of the developing world are falling under China’s control.
So with his new role as peacemaker in the Middle East and Ukraine, Xi is announcing to the world that the tired old American Superman should get out of the way, and let the new and vigorous Chinese superhero take over.
Canada is small potatoes (pun intended) in this epic struggle. We are just one minor nation that communist China is playing with. We have very little to say about how it will end.
But it is now completely clear that we must take immediate steps to regain our independence. The recent revelations about how deeply the Chinese communist regime has infiltrated all of our institutions—and particularly the federal Liberal Party—by means of bribery and corruption (elite capture) are truly alarming.
Canada must excise this foreign intervention from our midst, and develop strategies to prevent such a thing from every happening again.
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
