Visions of the future and civilizational crossroads

China, the West and the Pandemic

Abstract

Coronavirus pandemic has shaken the fragile economic, political and social balance of the world system, making visible that the global order requires urgent rebuilding, that the current development model is unsustainable and that social systems are increasingly regressive. However, what could have been an opportunity turned out to be a great deception: lack of political leadership and capacity for cooperation at the international level and poverty of intellectual resources to provide alternative visions of the future. In this context tensions increased between Western countries and China who, in spite of its many errors, persists in its will to lead world politics. I deal in this article with the intellectual foundations of this leadership through the recent production of Chinese intellectuals who, from different ideological perspectives, articulate pandemic issues with the core ideas of the chinese vision of the future. Among them: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, “the Chinese Dream as the Dream of Mankind”, ´Tianxia´ (All- under- Heaven) as Empire;  the Road and Belt Initiative and the Diplomacy of the People (in opposition to the Diplomacy of the “Wolf Warrior”  as tools for the achievement  of those ideas and finally, the possibility of a New Cold War, China as a threat and China as an opportunity.