China and the Next Liberal World Order

Part of English School Special Section This short essay sets out to argue, from an explicit English School perspective, that China’s rise has demonstrated the resilience and abiding nature of pluralist international society. It considers critically whether and how two contending pluralist visions of the next world order, one American (a world safe for democracy) and one Chinese (a community of shared future for humanity) can be accommodated in a collective quest for an ethically sensible, morally defensible, and politically and economically viable world order in an anarchical society of states that is no longer solely dominated by the West both materially and ideationally. It articulates an alternative vision of the next world order, an equally pluralistic one of liberal persuasion, which aims at constructing a world safe for diversity and prosperity. This is, however, not a call to re-centre international relations on great powers or to reinstate realpolitik in world politics in the construction of a new world order. This reassertion of the virtues of pluralism serves rather as a plea for a critical move towards a new raison de système guided by the humanity’s pursuit of ecological solidarity and planetary solidarism.