EGMONT POLICY BRIEF 339 China, Sovereign Internationalism, and Silent Pragmatism

EGMONT POLICY BRIEF 339 – MARCH 2024 – China, Sovereign Internationalism, and Silent Pragmatism Bart Dessein Until the early 1990s, transnational institutions of the core of the CCP vis-à-vis the Communist Party of the which the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (SU) Soviet Union in the 1920s,2 Mao Zedong (1893–1976) were the respective epicenters were formed. [...] Near the end deviates from the peaceful, ‘soft power,’ approach that of the Chinese civil war between the troops of the CCP characterizes the liberal democratic view that builds and those of the KMT, more precisely on 15 March 1949, on the principles that then Democratic US President the CCP for the first time declared that it must “liberate Woodrow Wilson (presidency from 1913 to 1921) had Taiwan. [...] These points can be PRC regarded the US intervention in the Korean War as considered as the precursor of the ‘One country – two part of a deliberate strategy to preempt the unification systems’ (yi guo liang zhi31) policy, first formulated by of China,24 and that the ROC became aligned with the US, Deng Xiaoping on 26 June 1983.32 thus revealing the geopolitical importance of Taiwan to the US. [...] 12 The Chinese version of the ‘three worlds’ differed from the Western version in this sense that according to the Western version – in accordance with the actual Cold War situation – the first world consisted of the US and its allies, the second world of the SU with its allies, and the third world of other unaligned developing countries. [...] In the Chinese version, the first world consisted of the US and the SU, the second world of the US and SU allies, and the third world were the developing countries.