Multipolarity demands a world leader, and it’s not China

Photo from Shanghaiist

By Chester B Cabalza and Mark Payumo

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of Academics 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza and Mark Payumo. All Rights Reserved).

The global race to combat the new coronavirus pandemic shows a litmus test at how China can become the world’s leader. The emerging great power transforms into a powerhouse that hypes philanthropic acts in many ill-stricken global cities, endowing soft power that backfires into soulless information warfare and untrustworthy COVID-19 testing kits, amidst the open-ended Armageddon. 

In December 2019, Chinese physicians breached China’s firewall, twitting messages in micro-blogging WeChat about the virus from Wuhan City. The whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang, raised the red flag of the possible outbreak but ignored by the Chinese politburo, even before the World Health Organization declared the epidemic as a ‘global health emergency’ before it was elevated in the shortest span of time as a pandemic.  

Neither the world faults nor discriminates the Chinese people of the blame-game and racism borne out of universal abhorrence or rancour to China on COVID-19. The absence of Xi Jinping’s transparency on the early spread of the unforgiving virus has led to the large scale mutation of the coronavirus, crippling global economy in lockdown, yet resulting to unstoppable transmissions infecting more than a million people and killed over 50,000 patients worldwide, accelerating on its third and fourth wave devastations. 

Orchestrated bandwagon

Despite Washington’s flexed global military power, the United States’ overconfidence and Donald Trump’s complacence to quell the virus fell out to indispensability by politicizing and weaponizing the Chinese virus. The massive spike of American confirmed cases, the planet’s highest caseload, roll out at the veins of its financial district becoming the new epicentre that succumbs to hundreds of death, recalling the identical soreness New York has experienced since 9/11.

Distressed G7 economies in Europe topped by Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, France and Germany temporarily surrendered its woes. It proclaimed the battle against the unseen evil as the worst catastrophe since the continent hit by two world wars. The great Chinese stage of spreading the virus orchestrated a bandwagon of the Old World to the rising phoenix, a contender to derive a multipolar world system.

Netizens in a borderless world have seen anarchy from their homes. It challenged western medical system’s advancement in curing the new strain of virus. In a contagion, not only social distancing has been required but a call for economic and political distancing from China. The Waltzian neorealist approach of ensuring affected nations’ survival from coronavirus pandemic re-enacts a security dilemma to derail China’s ascent in the theatrical stage.  

The bouncing effect of the novel coronavirus strikes concurrently that it contaminates again China, the world’s original epicentre, as nations follow various interventions and responses in surviving the pandemic. Ailing developed West frightens now recovering developing East as hubs of infection. While the U.S., Italy and Spain are hardly hit by the pandemic, grieving from unprecedented death tolls, the question of social mobility and economic inequality divides the world as it faces unprecedented economic recession.

The fatigue it brought to China’s balancing act limits cooperation created by fear and mistrust on relative gains and the possibility of dependence on China’s predicted primary role over the virus it has accidentally spread out to the world. The high cost of conflict and paranoia this pandemic may take undervalues the military prowess of any major powers, as this whole flux on non-traditional security on health, it still dispenses authority from major powers, as it may resist assistance from the lone superpower as it strives for its own survival.

China’s dismay of the global order

Long dissatisfied with the international order that the U.S. has set up since its ascension by becoming a superpower after the Second World War. China when it opened up as a sleeping economy in 1978 long appealed for multipolarity to achieve its own national strategic aims. While this might play well for other nations’ desire to have an equal voice in international fora, the diffusion of geopolitical leverage has an accompanying effect of eroding U.S. influence on the world stage, the major condition Beijing needs to advance its own interests.

But what these interests might mean for the world is gradually unravelling especially in the middle of the current pandemic. To be sure, Beijing intends to fill the vacuum that America failed to act as the world’s foremost superpower or at least to have an equal footing on its hard and soft powers.

The U.S. climbed as the world’s most ready of nations on the Global Health Security Index, but it failed its position during the COVID-19, becoming the new global epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. As a respected global leader over the past seven decades, the U.S. wilfully acted on its benevolent principle of preparing and coordinating conscientiously for a global response crisis by championing a coalition among its allies to counter any disease outbreaks. 

Nonetheless the current tide of interventions and responses on the pandemic will apparently present a realistic China-centric one-act show in a globalized world capping a forceful diplomatic campaign in combating the virus. The medical pandemonium has generally altered the global macroeconomic directions that set plurality of supervision of the world’s economy and trade in a presumptive post-COVID-19 scenario.   

Beijing’s success lies not on the spread of the microscopic lethal virus that it has spread around the world but as to what may happen to Washington and its western counterparts now bend on cooperation with China’s gradual recovery.

Multipolarity demands a new leader, but definitely it’s not China but a concert of great powers. This sobbing challenge is only an upgraded version of an interconnected world where the pandemic demonstrates resilience of our interdependence. It will somehow brighten the U.S. that it will need a new strategy to maintain its global position.