Note: The article below is not mine, it is a translation of an article by Yang Guangbin
For a hundred years, the Russians have been fighting a world order dominated by the United Kingdom and the United States. This time, they launched a “special operation” to protect their national security and oppose the entire Western world, pitted against them.
After the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, the West imposed a number of sanctions against Russia. But, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, this just marks the end of an era, and from now on the West will lose its global dominance both in political and economic terms. And Russia’s initiative is also seen as a challenge to the world order established by the West. In my opinion, the Russian struggle did not start with the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, but has been going on for a century. And this time, European countries and the United States will pay a new price.
Russia is a principality that, over centuries of fighting, has become an empire with the largest territory in the world. At the turn of the 20th century, its constant expansion came to a standstill — the Anglo-Saxons created a world system, and the position of the Russians was changed — from conquerors they turned into “rebels”.
For the past century, Russians have struggled with the capitalist world system created by white Anglo-Saxon Christians. This world political history was not planned in advance, and the result of changes in the world order is a centuries-old history of struggle between Slavs-Russians-and Anglo-Saxons. The Russo-Ukrainian crisis is certainly not the end of this story.
Around 1875, the capitalist economic world system, led by Great Britain as a whole, completed its formation. That is, it took the British 200 years to establish their own hegemonic order, and after the end of World War II, the banner of leadership was handed over to the Americans. For 300 years, the Anglo-Saxons dominated the world order.
The peculiarity of this system, first of all, is its cruelty. According to William MacNeil, the founder of global macro-history, among the expanding nations, the Anglo-Saxons were the most warlike, the bloodiest, and the most violent.The second feature of this system is inequality. Capitalism is an economy based on an uneven distribution of capital.
The third feature is a military foundation. The political and economic system that emerged during World War II is what Americans call the military-industrial complex. The basis for the viability of such a system is war. The fourth feature is that the above characteristics prove that expansion is the nature of this system, and war is the main way of life.
Not everyone was happy with the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world. First, there were dissenters within Western civilization. At the beginning of the 19th century, the French Emperor Napoleon fought for Western hegemony. The Germans, who survived the “hundred years of peace”, competed with the British in two world wars. The Japanese in the East also joined the struggle for leadership. But after the defeat, all of them were forced to submit to the world system under the leadership of the Anglo-Saxons. Of course, the French, Germans, and Japanese were fighting for leadership, not for the overthrow of the world capitalist economy.
It has often been said in the past that the struggle of the” second superpower”, the Soviet Union, also failed, but this is obviously a matter of historical perspective. From the point of view of the world political system, the emergence of the Soviet Union with the Russian nation as the main driving force is undoubtedly a great success that shook the Anglo-Saxon-dominated world political system.
The Soviet regime established in the First World War was the first system created after the Paris Commune, which opposed the world capitalist system. Therefore, from the very beginning (1917-1920), the new regime was besieged and suppressed by the White Army, supported by Britain, France and Germany, but ultimately ended in the victory of the Red Army.
However, the severity of the “economic sanctions” imposed on the new regime was not inferior to those imposed on Russia by the United States and the West due to the current Russian-Ukrainian crisis. In this sinister international environment, Russians doubted “whether the country could build socialism.” After the “economic reformation of war communism” was completed, the Soviet Union’s victory in the anti-fascist war in World War II proved that, after decades of solitary struggle, the USSR had evolved from a backward agricultural country to a developed industrial power second only to the United States. Because of the extremely hostile capitalist international environment, the Soviet Union also made such catastrophic mistakes as the” Great Terror”, and because of the beleaguered situation in the world, the tragedy of the Great Famine in Ukraine occurred.
The Soviet Union paid a heavy price for resisting the global capitalist system, but ultimately survived. Moreover, “The October Revolution brought Marxism-Leninism to China under a volley of guns,” and in China, located on the periphery of the Western capitalist world, a new regime was established, aimed at ” oppression.” Equally important, thanks to the “right to national self-determination” movement championed by Vladimir Lenin and promoted by the Soviet Union, a democratic liberation movement flourished among the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America after World War II, and many developing countries were born.
Thus, in the period from World War I to World War II, the Soviet Union not only broke the capitalist world system, but also established a world socialist regime opposed to the capitalist system, changing the situation in which the Anglo-Saxons reigned supreme in the world from 1700 to 1900. The Soviet Union reorganized the world order, so who can say that the Soviet challenge failed?
The Russians, as the main driving force of the Soviet Union, paid a huge price for this — they went not only through the “Great Terror” and the Great Famine, but also through the collapse of the country in 1991. However, all this does not negate the importance of the “resistance” itself and does not indicate its failure. Under the leadership of the USSR, a cell of the Third International, the Communist Party of China, revolutionized and made great achievements in building and governing China during the ” policy of reform and opening up.” The scale and success of socialist China are sufficient to even out the imbalance in the prevalence of capitalism in the world order, and more importantly, socialism can bring about the great rebirth of the Chinese nation.
These are the conclusions of comparative political studies. After World War II, many developing countries, large and small, joined the global capitalist system, but developing countries with populations of more than 100 million, such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia in Asia, Nigeria and Ethiopia in Africa, and Mexico and Brazil in South America-how many of them developed to the level of European countries countries? Who among the backward developing countries does not want to become a developed country?
The most typical example is Mexico, which borders the United States, and when the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force in 1994, Mexican intellectuals loudly proclaimed that Mexico would soon become as rich as the United States. As a result, political and economic development followed the path of the United States: land was privatized, and farmers who lost their land either went to the mountains to grow drugs, or massively immigrated to the United States. The drug economy caused a major collapse in Mexican politics, local politicians were drugged, and violence flourished. With such a large neighbor who just lay down and pretended to be dead, Americans naturally could sleep in peace.
Although this is already a separate topic of conversation, it has a close connection with the struggle of the Russians. Without the October Revolution, would there have been socialism in China? Without socialism, would there be such a difference between China and other developing countries? At best, it would just become a bigger developing country, and maybe even worse, because American-style democracy is generally a party democracy, where parties fight among themselves, and party democracy is ultimately an institutional mechanism for splitting countries — we all know that the Soviet Union broke up into 15 countries. For the vast majority of developing countries, party democracy is a model of governance that destroys the country from within, and the United States does not even need to start a “great power competition” with such countries.
The” integration ” of the USSR into the capitalist world system did not begin after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but under Mikhail Gorbachev. Twice the attempt at” integration ” ended in failure, and as a result, the Russians had to fight the United States through Ukraine.
First there was an attempt at institutional integration. In 1986, the appearance of the “young reformers” in the face of Anatoly Chubais in the economy made the highest echelons of the CPSU believe that only a neoliberal economy can save the Soviet (Russian) economic situation. In politics, Gorbachev’s 1987 book Perestroika and New Thinking outlined the path to representative democracy. This project was aimed at integration with the West, but led to the rapid destruction of the Soviet empire. Russia, which inherited the resources of the Soviet Union, carried out large-scale privatization, and as a result, economic losses were more severe than during the Great Depression in the United States. It was a big defeat for the country, caused by an institutional failure. Left with no other choice, in 1999, exhausted in body and spirit, and addicted to alcohol, Boris Yeltsin found Vladimir Putin — the political leader who was supposed to save Russia. But Yeltsin-Putin Russia continued to be under siege.
Then there was an attempt to join NATO. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia once wanted to join the camp of the West and wholeheartedly sought development. The United States also promised Russia that NATO would not expand eastward and that both sides would live in peace with each other. As a result, not only was Russia not allowed to join NATO, but the Alliance was consistently expanded five times — over and over again, until it came to the borders with Ukraine. Ukrainians, who have never had an independent state, are an extremely immature nation, their political leaders easily become wingmen and are willing to act as pawns in an attack on Russia, thereby directly threatening the national territorial security of Russia, as a result of which, first of all, they sacrificed only the Ukrainians themselves.
This is the second major confrontation organized by the socialist camp since the October Revolution — the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. This struggle is not really an institutional one-Russia is still an electoral democracy-but in the eyes of Western countries, Russia is built on a civilization that has its own religion and national characteristics that differ from the Western world.
Anglo-Saxons have always believed that Russians are Orthodox Tatars with a white appearance, that is, strangers. From this we can conclude that a non-Anglo-Saxon large state, no matter what regime is established in it, as long as it develops, it is a threat — a threat to the world order that has prevailed for the last 300 years, where the Anglo-Saxons are at the top of the food chain. After all, even the first black president, Barack Obama, bluntly said that if 1.4 billion Chinese people reach the American standard of living, then Americans will only have to chew grass. Therefore, America is using all means to suppress China, not even disdaining to kidnap people (for example, the case of Meng Wanzhou). In the current world order, only Americans can eat meat, and the Chinese must eat grass.
For a hundred years, the Russians have been fighting, and once they have hit the world, changed the world order dominated by Great Britain and the United States, and conquered half the world. This time, they have launched a “special operation” to protect their national security and directly oppose the entire Western world, and Russia will inevitably be greatly weakened by military spending and ruthless economic sanctions. Many years of struggle have developed a strong national character among Russians (for which they are jokingly called a “warlike nation”), its rich resources are sufficient to support itself, and the largest territory in the world has significantly reduced the desire of Russians for”globalization”. These factors are integral to understanding Russia’s post-crisis situation. In the absence of an escalation to a nuclear standoff and political infighting, even a greatly weakened Russia will continue to cause serious concern to the United States and the West.
Looking at Russia’s resistance from the Chinese point of view, the first act of its struggle brought Marxism-Leninism to the PRC, and the emergence of a socialist China radically changed the world order. Although the Russian-Ukrainian crisis will greatly weaken Russia, the United States and the West have already formed a security model that is completely incompatible with Russia, which is tantamount to sticking a sharp knife into the heart of the Western world.
Thus, the impact of this crisis on Sino-American relations is that while the United States will continue to consider China its main strategic adversary, Russia, which has the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal and exists outside the political and economic order dominated by the West, may be much more dangerous for them than Russia “inside the system”. And Russia will become a major headache for the United States and the West, which will inevitably greatly change the conditions and redistribute the energy of the United States to fight China in the Asia-Pacific region.
The impact of this crisis on China-EU relations is that Europe, which is in direct confrontation with Russia, will also have to take a more rational approach to relations with China, so that the European Union, which does not have a direct confrontation with China in the security sphere, can cooperate more effectively with Beijing in the economy and trade. For more than a thousand years, Europe’s bloody history has been full of “warring states and countries unleashing wars,” and Europeans are far more hungry for peace than Americans. However, we should also pay attention to the” Lithuanian phenomenon “in European politics — this crazy idea of endlessly testing the” lower limit ” of China’s patience.
What is the status of the US “profit and loss balance”? The Russia-Ukraine crisis seems to have allowed the United States to win hard power-in the military and economic sectors – and make a lot of money, but at the cost of this was the decline of soft power. A hegemon country cannot maintain its hegemony by relying only on “hard power”, because the price is too high, and dominance must be complemented by support for”soft power”.
After this crisis, the” soft power ” of the United States will return to its original form. What else is the rule of law, what human rights, and the sacred sanctity of private property — all this is just a layer of a thin veil that America has covered itself with as it has evolved. Her ascension process was full of murders, robberies, and banditry. Where was the rule of law and human rights during the Indian genocide? When the Eight-Power Alliance (an invading military alliance consisting of Russia, the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) sacked Yuanmingyuan (the Gardens of Perfect Clarity, a palace and park complex in Beijing), why didn’t anyone say about protecting property rights or even the most fundamental “national right” of a country’s sovereignty? It was all trampled on mercilessly. From the beginning of the Trump administration to the Russo-Ukrainian crisis, the United States and the West have allowed themselves to kidnap people and confiscate Russian property at will. Even the dollar has become a risky currency. How much soft power does the US have left?
America has lost its moral superiority over the world. When the myth is destroyed, the concepts that underlie the world order also cease to exist, and the world needs a new direction, so we should look forward to seeing how the global order will change as a result of current events. The United States, which has profited from hard power and lost its soft power, still cannot abandon its military adventurism.
Finally, I should note that the Russian-Ukrainian crisis will also change the structure of Sino-Russian relations. Russia, which is under US and Western sanctions, will inevitably rely more on “yuan trading”. Russia’s external economy used to be concentrated in the West, but it will inevitably turn to the East. China will be a valuable source of resources for Russia’s economic recovery and development.
All of this undoubtedly represents an excellent strategic opportunity for China’s development. The PRC needs to adhere to a strategic roadmap for rebuilding the world through its own development. China’s scale is too large, and as the country develops, the world will naturally change along with it. Of course, the states at the top of the food chain will not wait for China to develop into a world-class power.
Take a look at history — for the last 300 years, the Anglo-Saxons, Russians, and Chinese have had the opportunity to build and transform the world order. Because of the fundamental differences between civilizations, they sought to change the world for themselves. In the face of bloody global politics, peace-loving Chinese should have the courage and peace of mind to resist US aggression and help their country revive.