And I agree with those aspects of the article highlighting the importance for China and for any other large country to listen to others, discuss differences point by point, and “not get angry”. But I disagree with your opening sentence and the premises that I think lie behind it:

“China’s economic growth over the past several years has excited many members of the international community, who see it as an alternative to the US’s and west’s leadership of the world order for the past two centuries”

I don’t know who the “international community” is whom you are referring to, nor to what extent and in what manner they have become “excited” by such a prospect. Typically “international community” is the term used to refer to those countries that the U.S. can manage to convince to follow it, or adopt its positions. (example: “the coalition of the willing”) I don’t think any other real and actual “international community” exists. The “international community” -if any exists- is (or should be) the United Nations General Assembly. (and certainly NOT the security council)

I am an individual and not a country or a government. And I represent no-one except myself. I do not want China to become “a new alternative to the United States” Nor doI want the United States to continue to “lead the world”, particularly in the manner in which it has been doing it recently. I think countries and peoples would be much better off and better served if they had no “leaders” other than themselves.

And if I had to choose any political or economic model to try to impose on anyone else (it is impossible anyway and each country will develop in keeping with its own historical conditions and legacies) I would prefer the Scandinavian social democratic model to either the U.S. so called “free market economics” and “democracy” (I have read Stiglitz too, and not only Stiglitz) or the Chinese “socialist market economy” model, both of which are not really what they claim to be.

I also do not believe in a unipolar world or even in the evolution into a multi-polar world. I don’t think there need to be “poles” at all. And I don’t even like the United Nations very much because I think it is a “disunited nations” held hostage by the petty interests and the parochialism of its member states. Whereas it should be a “united peoples of the world”. (”nations” for a long time have been a very poor surrogate for “peoples”)

I think the more power ends up in the hands of civil society and its very many organizations trying to do assorted good and worthwhile things, and out of the hands of governments and the private sector, the better this will be for common people. People are quite capable of organizing themselves into groups that work for the things they believe in and are increasingly learning to do so in the Internet age.

They do not need to “fall in line” behind either the United States, China or any other big country or government. If the current Chinese government understood that and worked to try to genuinely improve international institutions so as to achieve something along the lines of what I have just said above, it will make a lot of friends.

But if instead it hopes to simply “replace the United States” at center stage, I think it will neither succeed nor make any friends at all. And if it did manage to somehow succeed, the world would be no better than what it is today.

We have urgent extremely serious problems. The rapid degradation of the natural and physical environement is the main one. Overpopulation is the second and is related to the first.

Let’s seriously get to work on those instead of wasting our time thinking about who is number one today and who might become number one tomorrow. Most people couldn’t care less.

regards to whomever wrote this article, or may be behind it,

Max Jones