Sinology, the Belt and Road, and the Changing World Order
Sinology, the Belt and Road, and the Changing World Order
Remarks to the 2nd Conference of American Sinologists, Qingdao, Shandong, China
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
By Video
13 November 2026
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is an honor to have been asked to contribute to this important conversation among students of China about the Belt and Road Initiative. I regret that I could not join you in person in Qingdao. I have much to say. I shall try to say it briefly.
In a world undergoing kaleidoscopic geopolitical change, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is an important contributor to stability. The BRI is part of a suite of interlocking initiatives that buttress and advance both regional and global peace and development. These initiatives include the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the BRICS grouping and related funds. The programs of international cooperation these associations and institutions support are gaining China and other resurgent and emerging powers positions of leadership in the global majority – the eighty-eight percent of the world population beyond the West.
There are those in the United States who argue that it was a mistake to facilitate – rather than oppose – China’s rise to wealth and power as this would inevitably offset and weaken Western control of world events. But the past five centuries of lopsided Western power and non-Western weakness have been the geopolitical exception in human history, not the norm. China is now returning to the civilizational preeminence that it enjoyed for millennia before Europe emerged from its Dark Ages and acquired the power to rule the wider world.
As the rise of the West illustrates, global geopolitics are subject to tectonic shifts. It is arrogant as well as foolish to imagine that China or other civilizational states would not eventually recover their lost wealth, power, and prestige. It was futile to assume that Euro-Atlantic dominance of world affairs could ever be perpetuated by opposition to the return of what is sometimes called “the Global South” to wealth and power.
In any event, China rose within the American-sponsored post-World War II order, not in opposition to it. Far from contesting what is left of that international system, China is helping to create institutions that complement and buttress it. This is a vital offset to the ongoing breakdown of international law and comity. It is ironic that America should seek to destroy the system its own statecraft brought into being, while China, once excluded from the American-led order, should seek to preserve, revive, and revitalize its rules and practices. But that is what is happening.
The United States has been a global leader for the past century and a half. American policies and practices have not always reflected America ideals, but they have been better than the available alternatives and central to global peace and prosperity. It is painful, as an American, to have to acknowledge that the world now sees American influence on human events as more malign than praiseworthy. The political establishment in the United States now espouses the prejudices and policies of the wealthy oligarchs who direct American politics. These “malefactors of great wealth” and techno-ideologues have fostered the creation of a dysfunctional political economy dominated by corporate oligopolies and monopolies that exploit the venality of career politicians. Some Americans remain in denial about this, but a growing majority rejects the incumbent financial and political elite for its betrayal of American constitutionalism, the rule of law, and the civic virtues that for long made the American republic a beacon of liberty.
I do not believe that Americans have lost our capacity for the resilient reinvigoration of our ideals. For the moment, the better angels of our nature are in eclipse, but they have not died. They can and will be reasserted. It is a mistake to underestimate the moral credentials and authority of the American people.
But at present, the policies and practices of the United States at home and abroad do not represent the values of the American people so much as those of a selfish, ideologically misguided plutocratic minority. They are encountering mounting populist opposition from both the Left and the Right. But they have catalyzed the end of the Pax Americana and the gestation of a new world order that has yet to be born.
That world order is not being shaped by the current, belligerent foreign policies of the United States but in reaction to them. Washington now equates shamelessness with toughness and privileges xenophobia and greed over tolerance and generosity. It is devoid of any vision or strategy for peaceful coexistence with other nations. The American political elite treats international relations as a zero-sum game. Its policies are counterproductively coercive, erratic, and destabilizing. They are isolating the United States internationally.
The United States shaped the world of the 20th century. By behaving as a rogue state, it is defaulting on any effort to mold that of the 21st.
This means that the structure of the new order will be decided mainly by others, including China. Much, in fact, depends on what China does, including through the BRI, the New Development Bank, the SCO, and other initiatives to which China is central. In this regard, it may be important that Beijing will assume the chairmanship of the BRICS grouping in January. It will be guided by the Declaration of New Delhi, issued by the BRICS’ 18th summit. The declaration is the most extensive package of projects and initiatives in BRICS history, but it leaves open the creation of institutions and funding to actualize these initiatives.
At New Delhi, the BRICS proposed cross-border payments and local currency trade settlement mechanisms that would reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar without eliminating it. They embraced cooperation to stabilize and secure food supplies. They endorsed enhanced cooperation on issues affecting public health. They advocated long-overdue reforms of the UN Security Council and the World Trade Organization (WTO), both now rendered ineffectual by American policies, and they identified many other opportunities for their members to cooperate in re-establishing a just and predictable world order.
If the BRICS’ agendas are realized, they will create programs and agencies that supplement or provide substitutes for those once available to all mankind through the United Nations and its specialized agencies. These agendas continue and extend the trend toward sub-global voluntarism represented by the formation of the SCO, the BRICS, the communities incorporated in the BRI, the Comprehensive Regional Economic Partnership (RCEP), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and other initiatives organized by major nonwestern powers.
For better or ill, reliance on organizations with universal membership like the UN is visibly diminishing. Sub-global coalitions and regulatory arrangements, regional trade and investment regimes, and ad hoc and voluntary gatherings are de facto replacing the UN as venues where member nations concert policies that advance common interests. Deglobalization, fractalization, regionalization, and the devolution of functions to sub-global bodies foreshadow a quite different world order than that established after World War II, during the Cold War, or in the so-called “unipolar moment” that followed the Soviet collapse. We are already in a new era.
In the Cold War, the world’s nations defined their positions in the global pecking order by reference to their alignment – or lack of it – with one or the other of two superpowers. The term “bipolar” was an appropriate description of this world, in which maneuvers by overlords – one in the East, one in the West – dominated geopolitics. The post-Cold War era is often characterized as “multipolar,” meaning no longer “bipolar.” But the term “multipolar” does not begin to capture the far more complex interactions between independent nation states that have succeeded the quasi-feudal order of the Cold War. We have entered a polycentric world in which there is no longer an axis of geopolitics that runs between overlords in the East and West.
The emerging international order is not a jumble of bilateral axes, but a dynamic network connecting states in variable ways to each other, to their regions, and to existing and emerging great powers. Few, if any states still accept the overlordship of others. None defines itself by reference to the rivalries of greater powers. What is emerging is a multi-nodal world in which a diplomacy of maneuver by nations great and small is replacing geopolitical immobility.
A node, unlike the endpoint of a straight line or a pole, is four-dimensional. It is where and how a variety of relationships intersect. Nations in the emerging multi-nodal network can regulate political, economic, military, and cultural links with each other and determine both their character and their intensity. Any nation in such a network can – with appropriate prudence – adjust its connections to others to serve its interests as it sees them and as circumstances require. In other words, it can reposition itself in both geopolitical space and time. This is a world of diplomatic maneuver against hegemony consistent with the Westphalian principles of sovereignty, non-aggression, and mutual respect summarized in the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.[1]
This brings me to the many twists and turns that I have observed in Sino-American relations.
Before President Nixon’s bold opening to China, Sino-American interactions consisted of strategic antagonism, economic nonintercourse, military posturing, and cultural estrangement. In the decades that followed, strategic cooperation, economic rediscovery, military entente, and exuberant cultural interaction replaced antagonism. American reactions to domestic turmoil in China and the end of the Cold War then attenuated or severed Sino-American cooperation. Today, relations between China and the United States are marked by political suspicion, economic interdependence, military shadowboxing, and waning cultural engagement.
Relationships can change. So can their contexts. Current trends in Eurasia and adjacent areas illustrate this.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was launched in 1967, during the Indochina war. After that war ended, it expanded to include Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. It has recently added Timor-Leste as a member. ASEAN now exemplifies both Westphalian principles and the rise of sub-global regulatory arrangements. It sustains dialogue and other forms of interaction with multiple other nations, including Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the Russian Federation, Türkiye, and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States. It takes its own side rather than that of any other nation or nations. ASEAN rejects alignment with or against China while seeking to benefit from China’s growing prosperity.
In West Asia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye are attempting to organize an analogous cooperative security structure to replace American geopolitical dominance of their region, counter Israeli expansionism, and balance Iran. Israel is losing the support of the West but has yet to find an alternative that can assure its survival among the many enemies it has made.
In Central Asia, nations seek to maintain geopolitical independence by coordinating policies to balance shifting Chinese, Russian, and other great power influences.
Europeans are in the midst of an incoherent search for strategic autonomy.
Latin Americans seek to offset American dominance by developing their relations with China, Europe, and other extra-hemispheric powers.
Africans are in active search of post-neocolonial autonomy and empowering the African Union to take on some United Nations-like functions. The same is true of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP)[2] or Lusophone Commonwealth.
In an increasingly anarchic geopolitical order, the BRI promotes geoeconomic integration. This is a far better path to global and regional peace and prosperity than either economic disintegration or warfare. It is a voluntarist answer to the incapacitation of global trade and investment liberalization, dispute resolution mechanisms, and comity that the takedown of the WTO has entailed. But neither the BRI nor China is perfect. If sinology is to retain credibility, it must steer clear of propagandistic boosterism and embrace empiricism. Meticulous research and analysis of the BRI’s effects on its participants is essential to inform sound policies toward it and toward China itself.
If the post-Cold War order has been dominated by American militarism, the emerging order promises to re-empower diplomacy. There are no military solutions to the confrontation between India and Pakistan, the unsettled Chinese civil war, the genocidal conflicts in Palestine, the transatlantic and European divisions catalyzed by the war in Ukraine, the Israeli-American war on Iran, the U.S. threats to the independence of Canada and Latin American states, or the civil wars and insurgencies in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Sahel, and Congo. In each case, the use of force has conspicuously worsened rather than reduced human suffering while raising the risk of both vertical and horizontal escalation. The world needs to rediscover measures short of war embedded in long-established diplomatic doctrine if it is to enable the mitigation or resolution of enduring conflicts.
Diplomacy is skilled work that requires skilled practitioners. It is not a task for dilettantes, amateurs, or the inexperienced cronies of egocentric leaders. Like other professions, it has both a specialized vocabulary that enables precision of analysis and prescription and a collegial lore. The simplification of foreign affairs by the bipolarism of the Cold War seems to have caused us to forget this vocabulary and the lessons of history. But we are being reminded that alliances differ from ententes. Protected states are not the same as allies or client states. A ceasefire is a deferment of peace, not a peace. Rivalry need not lead to either antagonism or enmity. The purpose of war is not battle damage but the achievement of a better peace. Wars do not end until the defeated admit defeat. The past has many lessons to impart to those who study it.
History teaches us that the absence of dialogue leads to baseless conjecture and suspicion. This can easily evolve into adversarial antagonism or even enmity. In the 1950s and ‘60s, when Americans and Chinese were estranged, we were each sure that we knew everything we needed to know about each other. But when the ideological blinkers came off on both sides, we discovered that almost everything we knew about each other was wrong.
What is true at the official level is equally true at the academic level. The less intimate the relationship, the less accurate and the more polemical the research. Sinologists must assure that the mutual ignorance and estrangement that prevailed before the Nixon opening to China do not return. Conferences like this one are part of the answer to this challenge. Sound American sinology is key to the development of sound and mutually beneficial Sino-American relations.
I commend and thank both this conference’s convenors and its attendees. You are serving a worthy cause.
[1] These are: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.
[2] Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa