🇸🇬KISHORE MAHBUBANI:
"Where is China heading? Is it going to disrupt the world order, or will it become, in a sense, a supporter of the current world order?
My answer is that it will depend on how we treat China as it is rising.
Napoleon famously said, 'Don't wake up the sleeping dragon, China, because if you do, it's going to shake the world.'
Now, you and I know there are two ways of waking up a person.
Either you wake them gently, whisper soft words into their ear, and nudge them gently, and they will wake up relatively happy.
Or you could take a bucket of water, splash it on them, and say, 'Wake up!' You can imagine how angry that person's going to be.
Paradoxically, while the United States, to be fair, engaged China very well during the Cold War, particularly from Kissinger's visit in 1971 to roughly the end of the Obama era in 2016, for roughly 45 years, the United States did engage China quite well.
In the process, it created a China that had stakes in the current world order and became a responsible stakeholder in many ways.
Since then, however, the United States has decided to do the opposite and use all kinds of measures to stop the rise of China.
Even though the U.S. is bitterly divided as a society, and Trump and Biden don't agree on anything, they do agree on one thing: it's time to stop China.
I think, by the way, that this is an unwise policy because it isn't going to work.
You can't stop China's rise.
China's rise or demise will be determined by internal forces within China. Outsiders cannot influence it.
So, if the United States continues to take measures against China—tariffs, chip restrictions, sanctions—China is clearly going to emerge as a very angry dragon.
I wonder whether the West has considered this and asked, 'Is this what we want to see happen in the world?'
Now, for us in Asia, the biggest mistake we are making is that we can see the West creating an angry dragon. We know that this angry dragon will be a problem for us, but we keep absolutely quiet while the West is making the dragon angry.
That's so unwise of us Asians.
The trouble about Asians, as you know, is that we are too polite.
And when the angry dragon is woken up, the United States may one day sail home and say, 'Okay, I'm going to go home. I don't care what happens.'
Who's left to deal with the angry dragon? We are.
So why aren't we speaking out?
Why aren't we saying the most logical and most obvious thing that, 'Hey, what are you doing? What are you trying to achieve?'
We should be the ones acting to temper the forces that are trying to create unnecessary conflict, because our own interests will be endangered by doing so.
But we haven't.
So far, there's been no leader who's been willing to do so."
ALT Professor Kishore Mahbubani, former Singaporean diplomat and geopolitical consultant, discussing with Gita Wirjawan for Endgame, August 21, 2024.