The year 2024 is emerging as a very dark year at least across the Northern Hemisphere: the United States administration has enthusiastically "promised" an escalation of the two-year-old Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the five-month-long Israel-Palestine conflict continues.

Can there still be hope for the world?

The answer is "yes". And China can provide it.

This is not a vague, ridiculous dream: It is an assessment grounded in rock hard realities.

China continues to enjoy a solid, stable political and national leadership. There is continuity in policy-making and predictability in following established principles of economic development at home and massive foreign investment overseas.

China has replaced both the US and Europe as the dominant economic power and investment engine, generating economic growth across Africa and Latin America while its Belt and Road Initiative continues to build lasting, massive new infrastructure to help promote growth and prosperity across Asia.

In the Middle East, we see an even more dramatic story: China's overall investment and its diplomatic and strategic footprints in the region are still smaller than those of the US. In fact, Washington, through US Central Command, continues to deploy a huge number of military personnel in the region and is currently engaged in fighting the Houthi rebels of Yemen.

Yet a year ago in March 2023, it was China that played diplomatic facilitator, bringing together Saudi Arabia and Iran in a historic and far-reaching reconciliation.

China's influence in both Iran — for long a big trade partner and source of oil imports for China — and now Saudi Arabia has never before been more pronounced. Indeed, never in history has China stood so high and wielded so much influence and respect across the Middle East. Now, Teheran and Riyadh, respectively the third-biggest and biggest oil producers in the region, both cherish their ever closer diplomatic and economic ties with Beijing.

Such a future can be envisaged due to the investment flows into Abu Dhabi and other cities in the United Arab Emirates, always the weathervane to assess the fall and rise of superpowers' influence in the region.

Yet how can this be? Listen to or read the ever more frenzied media coverage and official government rhetoric that pours out of Washington in an inexhaustible supply of worthless hot air, which is the last natural resource the Joe Biden administration can command in unlimited abundance.

And what is some Western countries' message? In their eyes, China's economy is fragile, irrelevant, repressed and weak and China poses a military threat to the rest of the world and imposes ruinous draconian terms on the countries which trade with it and seek investment from it.

This is of course a bizarre, mental inversion of the truth. It is a photographic negative of the 21st century world as it really is.

China's armed forces are nowhere on active military duty. The only mission they are engaged in is the UN peacekeeping mission. More important, China does not fan the flames of war so as to intensify continuing conflicts like the Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. China continues to actively seek peaceful resolutions to both the conflicts, not least because Chinese leaders know conflicts are good for no one and have never solved any problems.

Moreover, China's enormous high-tech sector is once again booming. Huawei continues to flourish around the globe despite the stringent US sanctions against it. And young people, in scores of millions, across the West continue to flock to Tik-Tok.

Thus, the simple truth, obvious to the rest of the world, is that the US' hyperpower global dominance after the end of the Cold War has long since ended. No one else shares that insane delusion anymore except the policymakers in Washington and the tame American pundits who mindlessly parrot their worn, stale cliches. The rest of the world has moved on.

Chinese leaders have no need to provoke any war with the US or any other country or create an artificial crisis to rally other countries' support. They continue to enjoy the quiet confidence that history is driving the world their way.

A bright future beckons. And it is being accomplished without military conquest, without hysteria, hate and endless lies, and without fomenting coups and chaos in supposedly allied countries. All these developments are obvious to the rest of the world — and to an increasing number of sensible people in the West.

The author is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

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