中文
By Warwick Powell
Lead: Chinese President Xi Jinping's New Year address reflects China's clear-eyed recognition that American unipolarity has ended and the Western-led "rules-based order" has exhausted its momentum.
Chinese President Xi Jinping's 2026 New Year message was, in form and emphasis, overwhelmingly domestic. This was neither surprising nor incidental. China's leadership understands that the credibility of any international role rests ultimately on domestic stability, economic resilience and social coherence. Yet contained within Xi's brief remarks on global affairs — references to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin and to China's suite of global initiatives — was a compact but revealing statement of how Beijing now sees the world, and China's place within it.
Those short remarks deserve close attention, not because they announced a dramatic shift, but because they reflect a quiet consolidation. China is no longer orienting itself to an international system assumed to be stable. It is instead operating in the clear-eyed recognition that American unipolarity has ended, and that the political project often described as the "rules-based liberal order" has exhausted its historical momentum.
This matters because the Western conception of a "rules-based order" was never synonymous with international law as embodied in the United Nations Charter and its associated institutions. It was a political proposition — selective, asymmetric and increasingly instrumentalized — layered atop formal multilateralism. As that proposition loses credibility, the institutions it purported to defend have been exposed as hollowed out and ineffectual. The U.N. remains indispensable but is no longer sufficient.
We are living through what Antonio Gramsci, writing in 1930, called an interregnum: a period in which the old is dying, the new cannot yet be born, and "a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Gramsci was describing the rise of fascism and Nazism, but history rarely repeats itself cleanly. What we see today is a resurgence of insular nationalisms across Europe, North America and Japan — often infused with hard-right or authoritarian tendencies — driven by deep social and economic dislocations.
This is not an ideological accident. It is the political expression of what might be called displacement anxiety: the fear, among political and economic elites accustomed to structural privilege, that the world is moving on without them. Financialization and decades of elite-driven neoliberal policy have hollowed out productive capacity and social cohesion in the West. As the unipolar moment fades, these anxieties intensify.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Europe. The European Union, long presented as a model of post-national governance, is slowly imploding as a coherent international actor. Contradictions between Brussels and member states, conflicts among member states themselves, and centrifugal pressures within states are eroding the EU's capacity to act strategically. For many European citizens, "globalism" has come to signify elite detachment and economic insecurity rather than shared prosperity. This internal fracture has profound external consequences. The U.S., too, is stricken by domestic contradictions and economic tensions, which will overflow once midterm electioneering begins in earnest.
A drone photo taken on Jan. 1, 2026 shows a fireworks show in Xiangyang, central China's Hubei Province. China's economy kicked off 2026 with robust momentum, as evidenced by bustling economic activity in the year's first days. [Photo by Yang Dong/Xinhua]
It is against this backdrop that President Xi's references to China's Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, Global Civilization Initiative and Global Governance Initiative should be read. These are not tactical slogans, nor are they attempts to replace the U.N. with a parallel system. Rather, they represent an effort to articulate a different framework for thinking about order, legitimacy and cooperation in a world where old certainties no longer hold.
The Global Civilization Initiative is particularly revealing. It challenges the idea — implicit in much Western policy thinking — that values must be universalized through convergence or coercion. Instead, it emphasizes plurality, mutual respect and the coexistence of different civilizational paths. This is not cultural relativism in the crude sense; it is a rejection of moral hierarchy as the basis of international authority.
Similarly, the Global Governance Initiative signals an awareness that institutional legitimacy can no longer be assumed simply because an organization exists. Governance must be enabling rather than disciplining, developmental rather than extractive. It must create conditions under which states and societies can solve problems, not impose abstract norms divorced from material realities.
This is where China's emergence as a "great enabling power" becomes analytically useful. Unlike hegemonic powers, which seek compliance, or revisionist powers, which would seek replacement, an enabling power focuses on capacity creation: infrastructure, connectivity, financing and platforms for cooperation. The SCO, Belt and Road projects, development finance institutions, and technology partnerships are all expressions of this logic.
Crucially, this approach resonates across much of the Global South, where the promise of the old order was experienced less as liberal inclusion than as managed dependency. For many developing countries, China's offer is not ideological alignment but practical possibility — the ability to build, trade and govern with greater autonomy.
Yet the interregnum is a dangerous time. As displacement anxiety intensifies in the West, instability is likely to increase. We can expect sharper rhetorical confrontation, more frequent economic coercion, and greater volatility in security arrangements. The temptation to externalize domestic failures will grow. In this environment, China and others in the Global South must tread carefully.
Looking ahead through 2026, the question is not whether the unipolar world can be restored — it cannot — but whether the interregnum hardens into systemic chaos or gives way to a more plural, functional and development-oriented order. China does not claim to have a blueprint. What it is offering instead is a set of principles and practices that acknowledge difference, prioritize material development, and seek to rehabilitate multilateralism by grounding it in reality and practical collaboration, rather than moralizing and rhetoric.
President Xi's New Year address did not proclaim a new world. It assumed one already in transition. In that sense, its restraint was its message. The task now, for China and for others willing to engage beyond the ruins of the old order, is to ensure that what comes next is enabling rather than destructive, plural rather than hierarchical, and stable enough for history's monsters to lose their appeal. To this end, as President Xi stated during the address on the New Year's Eve, China always stands on the right side of history, and is ready to work with all countries to advance world peace and development and build a community with a shared future for humanity.
Warwick Powell is an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology.
