China dominated global politics in the first week of September 2025. First, we had the SCO meeting in Tianjin, and then the Victory Day parade was held in Beijing to celebrate the 80th anniversary of China's victory against imperial Japan in World War-II.

What stood out as the most significant takeaway from this Chinese dominance of world politics this week was the GGI (Global Governance Initiative) proposed by President Xi Jinping at the SCO meeting. This Chinese proposal seems to be based on the premise that the US is no longer a stabilising power in the world. Therefore, China proposed a vision of a new global, security and economic order that promotes the active participation of Global South. GGI stands up against hegemonism and power politics and promotes peace-time multilateralism.

Understanding President Xi's concept of the proposed GGI becomes easy if one has already read RD Kaplan's new book, Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis, in which the author argues that the current world is in a state of permanent crisis, similar to Weimar, Germany. Wasteland is a metaphor that the author uses to describe today's world as it existed during the inter-war period. Although during this period, Germany became a constitutional republic for the first time in history yet the German Reich, as it was officially named, was dominated by Hitler's politics and the Great War that followed it.

In the wasteland that we live today and which the GGI proposes to change, global power politics is being dominated and driven by three international institutions — IMF that represents........

© The Express Tribune