The Polemics of China’s Counter Cosmopolitanism

America’s prestige as the bearer of a liberal democratic world order has taken a dent due to both geopolitical power shifts and the debilitating polarization of American democratic culture. Relatedly, symbolic power has been shifting away from liberal ideals and standards of legitimacy globally.1 It has become ever harder to deny that a variety of non-Western civilizational states, China chief among them, will not conform, nor even try to conform, to the West’s liberal democratic standards. Though these states imported all kinds of Western-style institutions in their earlier phases of modernization, they now seem ever more determined to break free from the West’s gravitational pull.