“Where Is China Running, And Why?” (Linkedin)

 My new article on Linkedin “Where Is China Running, and Why?”

Lately, it seems as though China is running at full speed in every direction simultaneously. In the past few weeks alone, it landed a probe on the moon, manufactured and is ready to ship millions of vaccines, beating Pfizer and Moderna, confronted Australia over control of the South China Sea, and reported that it is building a huge aircraft carrier, the kind that can be a game changer in the global arena. In addition, it is in constant conflict with the US over alleged attempts to intercept information, and Steven Myers and Keith Bradsher of The New York Times report that “China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is pursuing a strategy to make the country’s economy more self-sufficient, while making other places more dependent on it than ever.”

What’s the rush? Why is it suddenly so important for China to take over the world? Well, we could offer various political, social, and economic reasons why China is striving to shift from being a regional power and an economic superpower into being a military superpower with clout in regions far beyond its region. However, there is a simpler and truer reason: It’s China’s time.

Just as every newborn baby grows into a child, and then into an adult, so do countries. China has grown up, and like all grownups, it wants power and wealth. After millennia of isolation, China has emerged in the previous century like a sleeping giant that has just awakened. Now it is wide awake and wants its share, its respect, and its say in the world.

However, unlike other countries that have woken up, I don’t see China as posing an immediate danger. It doesn’t mean that it could not develop into one, but I don’t see an immediate threat coming from China.

Moreover, humanity is currently going through an unprecedented crisis of disintegration of human society and human civilization. It has been developing for years, but Covid-19 has exacerbated and accelerated the crisis to the point that countries cannot keep up with people’s disillusionment with authorities, capitalism, consumerism, the endless competition, soaring depression rates, and general dissatisfaction with life that has pervaded every family. The recent American presidential election is only a demonstration of things to come in many more countries around the world in the very near future.

Therefore, humanity’s most urgent problem is not China, but people’s disconnection from each other. China absorbed the achievements and ailments that humanity has accumulated over eons within just a few decades. If humanity will now restore human connections and rebuild the broken society that the West has become, China will absorb it, too, and will naturally change course from building aircraft carriers to something far less menacing and more embracing.

China has a very good relationship with Israel, and I see it as a great opportunity. Since setting an example of unity is Israel’s primary goal and primary role in the world, if we achieve internal unity, our good relations with the Chinese people will help them follow suit.

Just as currently, numerous countries come to Israel to buy new technologies and implement them in their countries, and recently including even Arab countries, if we develop unity, countries will be even happier to implement it in their countries. In the current trajectory of the world, unity will very soon become the most required commodity.

For this reason, I see China’s astonishing rise as yet another sign that we, Israel, must hurry and unite, so we can be a model of the most required commodity, and so that all the power that is now created in the People’s Republic of China will not go in the wrong direction.