May 25—“Happiness” and the “beautiful” were the subjects of China’s President Xi Jinping in a critical address to the Eurasian Economic Union’s opening of their plenary session in Moscow. Xi was explaining why he thought the synergy between his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) nations can and should be deepened. This is the tenth anniversary of Xi’s presidency and of his launching of the Belt and Road Initiative. Its mission is to discover and realize the common development for countries, and so, to open up a “path of happiness” that benefits the entire world.
Common development amongst different countries with different cultural strengths and weaknesses is not as easy as it sounds. But, as with the US Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty and happiness,” happiness is the characteristic of a created world, where the Creator made mankind’s liberty, its freedom of thought to create new scientific breakthroughs, necessary for the possibility for life, for solving the recurring existential problem of running out of resources for the present state of technology. In such a created world, it is not possible that different cultures exist in fundamental opposition to each other. If there is a seeming conflict between cultures, there is a resolution on a higher level.
Xi situated the basis for an actual synergy between the BRI and the EAEU. He reasoned that Eurasia, of which China is a part, has the largest population, the largest number of countries, and the most diverse civilizations in the world. Hence, it had the most possibilities for a future world of lasting peace, universal security, and common prosperity—a “beautiful” world.
More than 300 years ago, the great European genius, Gottfried Leibniz, the author of the concept of “happiness” that Benjamin Franklin brought to the US Declaration of Independence, posed that, if China and Europe had elements of a very high culture, it could not be the case that they were doomed to keep to themselves. Clearly, expansive Russia had the mission of transmitting both such cultures to each other, taking the world to the next higher level to which it had to go. It’s time—and President Xi qualifies.
Also yesterday, Xi met with Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Beijing. Mishustin had just signed some huge trade deals with China on energy and agriculture. He posed to XI that the partnership between Russia and China was “of particular importance for us in the wake of increasing turbulence in the international arena. Our countries stand shoulder-to-shoulder fending off the collective West’s attempts to preserve global…. I am convinced that Russia and China will offer a resolute response to those dangerous aspirations and will create favorable conditions for steady progress — toward our common strategic goals.”
European culture has seen better times. Leibniz’s quality of statesman, as with Abraham Lincoln and the modern-day Leibnizian, Lyndon LaRouche, has made appearances in the United States. Yet the overriding strategic reality is that the better angel of China and that of the US need to find each other. Russia still has a key role to play. Sending arms to Ukraine for neo-Nazi grouplets to invade Russia, to help drain Russia, is probably not the place to start.
Xi certainly showed yesterday that a lot can get done in a day. The West needs to re-learn how to think big, because thinking small has gotten us into quite a big problem.
