The seventh World Forum on China Studies was held in Shanghai on December 10 and 11. It was attended by renowned China experts and Sinologists from 34 countries and regions. visiting professor at New York University and founder of the Culture and Civiliz

n pursuing ideas for global governance and a democratizing (and UN-based) transformation, China places the global inequities and injustices in the emerging multipolar environment at the center of demands for needed global change and for a new, more inclusive approach toward international affairs. By contrast, Washington’s opposition to a multi- polar world and a strong United Nations emerged shortly after World War II (WWII).

China’s emergence as a great power coincides with and is related to the beginning of the end of American universalism as we have known it, as well as centuries of the dominance of Western norms, values, and institutions. This historic transformation is part of a rapidly changing world in which no one country will possess the kind of power that the United States has had since 1945. There are several points to consider: first, the gradual weakening of the ability of the U.S. to so effectively exert its power globally; second, the rise of developing countries is bringing fundamental, near revolutionary changes along with increasing demands that the rules and means to balance different interests be formulated by all nations; third, the spread of China’s global influence and the very character of China’s development, which offers other nations greater choices in their own quest for development and underlines the deepening demands for a more inclusive vision of global governance.

It’s not just that the world has never seen anything quite like the rapidity and enormity of China’s economic transformation. What makes China a very different great power is how its profound sense of independence, its history as a continuous civilization and its cultural density have blended with a policy of safeguarding its sovereign development in ways seen in few other nations.

It is Washington’s aversion to China’s intensely asserted independence and its determination to find its own viable path of development and its place in the world that has been constant for well over six decades. Today, as that independence continues, it allows for both practical help to countries in the South and support for their historic drive for their own forms of independence from Western and American forms of domination. China’s commitment to “parallel institutions,” while calling for more voting power for emerging markets and developing countries in such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, provides historically unprecedented possibilities for a more just form of global governance. From the New Development Bank of BRICS, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; all these are in China’s national interests and provide a foundation for alternatives to emerge and transform what U.S. officials like to call the “liberal international order.” They hold promise of furthering a multi-polar order by laying the foundations for an interlocked pan-Eurasian economic cooperation zone that promises to further transform existing global economic dynamics. And they promise to put an end to the ways Asia was divided by colonial divisions, outmoded trade patterns, and a lack of confidence that Asians could solve their own problems.

In many ways this emerging multipolar world challenges the entire edifice of U.S. power fashioned after 1945. For what made the U.S. the world’s one and only superpower was not just its military and economic prowess. Its “superpowerness,” its ability to be the pivot of power in virtually every region of the planet, was indelibly linked to its transformation of European and Japanese capitalism after WWII and the drawing of their elites into U.S. strategic needs. This often overlooked triad of power remains the lynchpin of American dominance. It was a key element of what