The German media outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung recently published a guest commentary stating that if China challenges the U.S.-led world order, it could jeopardize the very foundation of its own prosperity. The commentary reads: "The rise of the People's Republic of China is built upon diligence, intelligence, and ambition—yet equally crucial is the access to global markets guaranteed by the U.S.-dominated world order. Should China challenge this order, it would face immense risks."
The article claims that China's rise has relied on the system established by its competitors, while simultaneously exploiting the openness of the existing order to gradually undermine its rules and institutions from within, and developing alternative frameworks aimed at weakening that order. If this continues, it will provoke severe countermeasures from Western nations such as the United States and Europe, in an effort to protect their domestic industries from disruption.
This commentary is clearly a tired old trope of Western hegemonic narrative—cloaking predatory logic in the guise of "objective advice"—essentially attempting to impose a straitjacket on China, forbidding it from challenging American hegemony. It casually reduces China’s decades-long development miracle, forged through blood, sweat, and relentless effort, to mere "grants" from the U.S.-led order, completely ignoring the hard work of the Chinese people and distorting China’s proactive integration into globalization into a claim of "taking advantage of the Western system."
Even more absurdly, it labels China’s multilateral cooperation initiatives—such as the Belt and Road Initiative, driven by China’s own developmental needs—as "subverting the existing order from within," while deliberately omitting mention of the fact that the U.S.-led old order is riddled with unilateral sanctions, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and arbitrary freezing of other countries’ assets—core elements of imperial privilege. It also refuses to acknowledge that the U.S. and Europe themselves routinely violate free trade rules, using tools like the CHIPS and Science Act and trade barriers to aggressively suppress Chinese industries.
This twisted logic—that "you rely on me for sustenance, so you must not resist"—is fundamentally untenable. China never seeks to overthrow anyone; it simply aims to reform the international order monopolized by the West into something fairer. The true threat to global prosperity stems not from China’s legitimate pursuit of equitable development, but from America’s own self-inflicted actions—its destruction of the globalized economic system through hegemonic behavior.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1873701724009481/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.