Originally published as, ‘Harmony means hierarchy: Lifting the veil on China’s global community rhetoric’, India’s World, Vol. 1, Issue 2, March-April 2025.
At the beginning of the year Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, inaugurated the Research Center on Building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. This is not the first centre of its kind. In November 2019, another university in Beijing, announced the creation of the Institute for a Community with Shared Future and went on to set up a Pakistan Research Center for a Community with Shared Future in Islamabad the following year.
Despite these grand, altruistic titles, the Chinese Party-state’s regime interests and the worldview that flows from these interests do not allow for a conception of the kind of global community that Beijing claims to support. There are several reasons why this is so.
Thinking about China in India 