Translated material
The West lost the battle of values
German expert blames US President for China's success
The 21st century will be neither Chinese nor Asian, since the Celestial Empire does not yet have the most important attributes of a highly developed industrial power, says Professor Eberhard Sandschneider, head of the research institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy (GOVP) in Berlin. The researcher is confident that trying to rebuild China according to Western standards or waiting for reforms aimed at establishing American-European democracy in this country is a futile exercise: “It is impossible to remake China according to our ideas. We are not able to impose our Western standards on China; we will have to change ourselves.”A meeting with Eberhard Sandschneider for a narrow circle of invitees was planned for last Wednesday in the small Fireplace Hall of the GOVP. However, there were so many people who wanted to take part in the discussion with the famous expert on China that the meeting had to be moved to the conference room. The reason for the discussion was the publication of Sandschneider’s new book “Global Rivals. The Ominous Rise of China and the Fainting of the West.”
Today, the West does not have a clear answer to China's desire to become a global superpower. According to Sandschneider, it is pointless to look for an answer to this challenge in the context of “defense or protection from China.” The weakness of the West is its lack of a unified policy towards China - “different interests and a high degree of competition between the countries of Western civilization are too obvious, this applies to both the EU and the USA.”
According to the expert, the growth of China’s international influence was largely facilitated by the eight years of Bush’s rule, associated with the “giant loss of the image of the West” in Asia and Africa, where instead of spreading the values of Western civilization, the role of China is growing. “In the last eight years, we have done nothing - or almost nothing - to make our values attractive to the inhabitants of these regions of the Earth,” the professor reproaches his fellow Europeans. -- Instead, there is an increasingly strong assertion of “Asian values”, the priority of which is economic growth at any cost. Democracy remains for the most part a useless foreign word.”
The phenomenon of China's successful economy remains inexplicable for most Western political scientists. After all, economic liberalization should automatically lead the country's political system in the direction of democracy. “In China, such a radical change has not yet occurred,” Professor Sandschneider noted to Vremya Novostei. - The main challenge for us was that for the first time the West came face to face with a successful system of autocracy. In recent years, we have observed a paradoxical phenomenon for us - non-democratic systems are demonstrating incomparable economic success.” According to the expert, China is such an exception and thus “poses a special challenge to the West.” However, according to Professor Sandschneider, China will not be able to avoid crises in the future - in the economy, politics, and possibly social upheavals. “In any case, Chinese trees will not grow to the sky,” noted a German researcher in a conversation with VN.