【英文】中国研究集团报告：英国和中国：下一步如何接触（23页）

英文研究报告 2021年10月18日 06:13 管理员

Over the past 18 months, the democratic world has become markedly more critical of Xi’s China. Diplomatic fallouts with Sweden and Canada, trade disputes with Australia and human rights concerns have all pushed sentiment in a more sceptical direction. Public confidence in Xi Jinping to “do the right thing” regarding world affairs has dropped to historic lows. 1 In the UK, the tone towards China has broadly mirrored this global trend, culminating in the decision to sanction Chinese officials for the first time over human rights abuses. In a marked escalation, China imposed counter sanctions on five MPs, an academic and a barristers’ chambers. While China’s leadership blames a more hostile West for the deterioration in relations, Beijing has adopted an increasingly aggressive approach to its domestic and foreign affairs. This became particularly clear with the rise of wolf warrior diplomacy, where we have seen Chinese diplomats openly threaten Western countries.

Events over the past 18 months have given Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders a newfound confidence that its authoritarian, highly centralised political system is superior to those of liberal democracies. Struggling responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe and North America and China’s rapid economic recovery have reinforced this belief, while the storming of Congress and Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the US election result were seized on by the CCP as a perfect illustration of the chaos and weakness of democracy. CCP rhetoric has shifted away from an acknowledgement that the West and China had simply embraced different paths to prosperity and that neither system could be regarded as superior. As the only G20 nation to post positive economic growth in 2020, China’s Politburo declared “we have achieved an extremely extraordinary glory in this extremely unusual year.” In October 2020, Xi Jinping told cadres at the Fifth Plenum that “time and momentum are on our side.”