Bruno Maçães > Quotes

“The Belt and Road is global in nature. Its ruling principle is interdependence, a close network of common interests by which every country’s development is affected by the development path in other countries. In his Jakarta speech, Xi called it a “community of shared destiny.” The expression featured in Chinese official pronouncements since at least 2007, when it was used to describe relations between Taiwan and the Mainland. Applied to relations outside China’s borders, it was a reformulation—a modern version—of the traditional concept of Tianxia (天下), which scholars such as Zhao Tingyang had been popularizing with extraordinary success. Zhao argued that the most important fact about the world today is that it has not become a zone of political unity, but remains a Hobbesian stage of chaos, conflict, noncooperation and anarchy.16 Looking for a way to frame new political concepts distinct from Western ideas of world order, the Chinese authorities quickly appropriated Tianxia—a notion that originated about three thousand years ago—and made it the cornerstone of their most ambitious geopolitical initiative. The idea of a community of shared destiny and the Belt and Road develop the two sides of every human action. Both have their own emphasis: the former belongs to the idea, the concept or type, the latter is aimed at practice. Together they form the “dialectical unity of theory and practice, goals and paths, value rationality and instrumental rationality.”17”
― Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

“When European countries abandoned their imperial dreams, they did so under the illusion that the rest of the world no longer needed guidance because it had voluntarily embraced European rules and ideas. It was an illusion, but an illusion that only now is being revealed as such.”
― Bruno Maçães, The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order

“fortune is a woman whose hair falls over her face so she is hard to recognize and bald at the back so she is hard to grab once she has passed.”
― Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

“The chief characteristic of the modern novel is a plurality of consciousness, each with equal rights and individual perspectives; the organized coexistence and interaction of spiritual diversity, not stages in the life of a unified spirit.28 The narrator should not pick sides, and that is why he is ultimately in control rather than the characters. A great novelist allows the different characters to develop multiple relationships between themselves and does not reserve for himself the ability to judge every event from his perspective. The work is an endless dialogue or conversation, in which he plays the role of an organizer. This is no longer a story where the narrator relays events from his own point of view, clumsily interpreting the world and everyone in it as a reflection of his personal wishes. Everyone is endowed with autonomy and power; his role is to bring all characters together and preserve their own individual spheres. Suddenly they must move together in a common world and none can be interpreted in isolation. The narrator has learned not to impose a single truth upon the whole, but neither should any of the characters be allowed to replace him.”
― Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America

“January 2018 Joe Kaeser, CEO of German industrial giant Siemens, had made the same point about a Chinese world order with a pithy sentence: “China’s Belt and Road will be the new World Trade Organization—whether we like it or not.”
― Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

“As the scholar Ming Hao dramatically writes, the world does not move from harmony to conflict but from conflict to harmony—from the West to the Belt and Road.20”
― Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order