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US-China relations
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Inside Out | Troubled US could learn from its differences with China, rather than simply challenge them

  • Difference is intrinsically good, a vital force behind creativity and innovation, and an essential ingredient for international competition
  • It becomes a negative force only when people or governments try to impose those differences on others, and this is not something China has done

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President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on February 7, in Washington. Photo: AP
David Dodwell
I have a chronic, deep-seated discomfort with US President Joe Biden’s call for the world’s democracies to wage war on autocrats and autocracies, particularly when used as a pretext to isolate and decouple from China.
This discomfort comes not simply from the difficulty of defining a democracy – Wikipedia defines dozens of types of democracy, many of which stray far from the template Biden is starting from – but because a precondition for human survival in this increasingly crowded world is a tolerance of difference.

I was just 18 when I flew into Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, to begin a year teaching in a school full of the sons of Pathan tribesmen, plucked from a small Christian community in the British Midlands into an Islamic city in which women only appeared in burkas, most men carried rifles or always had them near to hand, and opium poppies blossomed across the hillsides.

But I quickly discovered that their very different habits, customs and belief system served a very similar purpose to those that my very-Christian parents adhered to in Britain: they enabled people to live together in very crowded circumstances without constant civic conflict.

They forged a widely held agreement on proper behaviour, and how to manage the transitions and stress points in life – births, graduation into adulthood, marriages and deaths.

I realised that, rather than being morally outraged at those alien customs and beliefs, I should measure them by their effectiveness in managing the conflicts that arise in crowded communities, and in encouraging civic-mindedness and community cooperation.

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