In 2011, two decades after he first proclaimed the “End of History”, Francis Fukuyama went to China to debate the enduring value of his thesis – the idea that the American model, having won the war of ideologies, was the de facto aspiration for countries everywhere. Locking horns with him in Shanghai was Zhang Weiwei. A professor at Fudan University and former interpreter at the foreign ministry, Zhang is the author of a best-selling trilogy on what he describes as China’s “civilizational state” – a model of governance, rooted in indigenous ethical systems developed over centuries, that he presents as a coherent alternative to liberal democracy.

Zhang’s arguments have found a particularly receptive audience in Beijing: he is close to the Chinese Communist Party, and an amplifier of the ideas and views circulating among the Chinese elite. Pankaj Mishra spoke to Zhang about how the Chinese political and intellectual elite sees the collapse of American authority and the crumbling liberal international order.

Pankaj Mishra: We’re living through an extraordinary period where we see all the great pillars of the so-called liberal international order collapsing simultaneously. We’ve seen Donald Trump’s threats to Greenland, the US attack on Venezuela – and now through the spectacle of the Epstein files, we’re seeing how Western elites were profoundly corrupted by their proximity to power and wealth. The Canadian prime minister Mark Carney made plain, in Davos last month, that this order existed to serve the West, and the US in particular.

But there’s very little coverage in the Western press of how people in China view these developments. Can you tell us something about that?

Zhang Weiwei: Indeed, the Chinese are watching all this drama closely and with fascination. I think many people feel Carney was a bit more courageous than his European counterparts in calling this so-called rules-based international order a kind of disguise that allows the West to benefit –the US more, Canada maybe less. Now Donald Trump has said: we don’t need this disguise. We can approach everything based on the darkest aspects of realpolitik.

People [in China] see very clearly that these are naked acts of imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism. We have a holistic perception of all this: the crisis in in Greenland, the genocide in Gaza the low-intensity civil war in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US. All these are, in fact, interrelated, and it reflects deep structural problems in the Western political system.

In 2006, I wrote a small piece for The New York Times, saying that the Chinese model will be far more attractive than the American model in the Global South. Because in our model, we focus on people-centred development. The US, on the other hand, orients its political structure to favour the super-rich, and to sustain that today, they’re going back to the roots of capitalism: exploitation and territory grabs. In 2018, I gave a talk at Harvard in which I said that China’s leadership was looking to the 2050s while Trump was looking to the 1950s. Now he’s looking to the 1850s, which is clear in the US security strategy report issued at the end of last year. I remember Jeffrey Sachs saying that it is not so much anti-Russia or anti-China, it’s anti-everyone – except, perhaps, Israel.

I have some sympathy for European countries, because they’re suffering from the bullying of the US. They protest very meekly, though. I think the Europeans still place some hope that, post-Trump, the return of the Democrats will herald the return of the liberal order. But we must look at this [old geopolitical order] as one problem. We must solve it from the Global South. We must get united and really reform the order, change the order.

When I began visiting China in the early 2000s, I met many people who loved the American model – who wanted China to be more like America. What has happened to their sense of what America can offer to China and the Chinese?

As far as Chinese intellectuals are concerned, especially liberal arts scholars and academics, many of them have long looked up to the US. But now they have become a minority of the minority. Since about a decade ago, we started looking at the US as an equal – young people in particular. And now with the case of these Epstein files and other episodes, many people – again, the young in particular – have begun to look down on the US and its model.

Of course, behind all this is the rise of China in terms of industrial power, scientific power, technological power, and even in terms of living standards. Today, China is nominally the second-largest economy, but adjusted for purchasing power parity, China is already a larger economy than the US – it’s about 130% of the US economy. Chinese life expectancy is higher than that of Americans, by one to two years. These changes have been picked up by more and more people, especially in the age of the smartphone.

How did people in China respond to the genocide in Gaza?

That is another major event that has led to more disillusionment with the US, even among intellectuals. I remember you gave a talk where you used the term “live-streamed genocide”. Most Chinese share this view as well, that Israel has done something terribly wrong. You cannot commit this kind of crime in the 21st century. China, like India, like many developing countries – we’ve all gone through colonialism, and we experienced “a century of humiliations”. So we have sympathy for those in the Global South who suffer from exploitation, oppression and aggression at the hands of Western powers.

China seems like almost a default beneficiary of this collapse of American power and prestige. So what is China doing to propose itself as an alternative to American hegemony? I think there needs to be more that China does to persuade global public opinion that it stands for peace, stability and order in the world.

China is, in many ways, a unique country. It’s a civilisational state, combining the world’s longest continuous civilisation with a super-large modern state. As a result, it is behaving very differently from the US. For instance, China is more cautious with the use of military power because of the counsel of our ancestors. The very first sentence in The Art of War is: “In matters of war, we must be very cautious.” The Chinese philosophy, rather, is to subdue your enemy with your capability.

Behind China’s rise is the Chinese model. I’d already said that the American model will not work for the Global South, but it doesn’t even seem to be working for the West itself now. And the calibre of Western leadership is poor. In China, if you look at the top seven or so members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the minimum requirement is that they should have served two or even three terms leading a Chinese province, which means they’ve literally governed 100 million people before they get to their current position. If you look at Trump and the EU leaders – to be honest, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for these great nations, but do they have good leadership?

Last week, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave an extraordinary speech in Munich, celebrating Western imperialism; he attacked decolonisation as a communist conspiracy to weaken Western civilization; he then asked Europeans to join Americans like himself in restoring Western greatness. And he received a standing ovation. Looking from China, you see Europe’s leaders really ready to break free of this long dependence on the US?

China has always been advocating for a multipolar world order, and Europe or the EU should become a pole with its own interests that are very clearly different from America’s. But many European countries still see China as a kind of threat. It just feels bizarre. Why should China threaten a country like Norway, seven time zones away? If you look at European countries, for instance, they followed the Biden administration and banned Huawei products. But Huawei is the leader in 5G technologies. Without Huawei’s tech, you cannot produce what’s called the smart economy.

But we’ve seen some hopeful signs that Europeans are realising they need more independence. I was reading the other day that Denmark and Sweden are selling off their US bonds. France is setting up a consulate general office in Greenland. So a lot of things are moving. You know that famous joke that Donald Trump always chickens out (TACO) with respect to tariffs and more? Now the US is no longer talking about a military operation against Greenland because Europe is somewhat standing up for its own interests.

As a final question: I was wondering if, from the Chinese perspective, there exists this idea that China needs to step up to fill the void left by the crumbling of the American model? And concretely, what would filling that void look like – what sorts of measures could China take?

China is the largest trading partner for over 140 countries, and it is, in many ways, doing better than the US in science, technology and national defence. I just read a report by the Australian think-tank ASPI, which said that, in what they call the 64 most critical areas of advanced technologies, China beats the US in 57.

One more thing: China is now the global leader in renewable energy technologies, and it produces roughly 70% of all global renewable energy products, from EVs to solar panels and more. And then I think of the larger picture. If you look at the energy base of the British Empire, that was coal. If you look at the American empire, it’s based on petrol. I won’t use the term “Chinese empire” – that will never happen – but the new world order’s energy base will probably be renewables. And this is an area in which China can play a very important role, which will benefit the whole international community, even the Western countries. After all, fighting climate change is one major concern of most countries.

So the Chinese have a cautiously optimistic view of the world to come. But we have to go through a lot of turbulence and troubles before realizing this vision.