China’s initiative, announced at the SCO Summit 2025 under the title Global Governance Initiative, represents a continuation of the line presented by Xi Jinping in 2017 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. At that time, Beijing signaled its readiness to take the lead in shaping a new world order, against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s retreat from global institutions and projects.
The Chinese model of technocratic governance is increasingly viewed as a prototype of a new post-capitalist world order. At its core lies the idea that the Western liberal-looking elite (often referred to today as neo-globalists) had for decades prepared China to serve as the locomotive of a new global socio-economic system—so-called “red capitalism.” Its essence rests on corporatocratic technocratic totalitarianism.
It is not by chance that the Davos elite repeatedly emphasized the advantages of the Chinese system, while Western advocates of strict lockdown measures during the pandemic pointed to the Chinese example. To understand this logic, it is necessary to examine the origins of China’s economic miracle. History shows that the notion of a “Cold War” with China, widely promoted in the media, was used primarily for tactical political purposes.
The utopian “New International Economic Order,” once discussed at the Trilateral Commission and other globalist platforms, in practice implied a dictatorship of technocracy. China became the first modern experiment in this direction. David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger played a significant role in this transformation.
As early as 1932, the U.S. movement Technocracy, Inc. proposed establishing a technocratic dictatorship, but such a model was easier to implement in an authoritarian environment. Chinese students returning from the U.S. in the 1920s, influenced by technocratic ideals, promoted “expert governance.” Researchers emphasize the particular role of Yale University: without its support, Mao Zedong might never have risen to power. After Kissinger’s agreements with Mao, all U.S. ambassadors to Beijing (with the exception of the Carter administration) were linked to Yale. The “Yale in China” organization functioned as a network of influence aimed at weakening Sun Yat-sen’s republican movement.
David Rockefeller, who described himself as an “internationalist,” wrote that the social experiment in China under Mao was among the most significant in human history. The policy of normalizing relations with the PRC effectively became a program for transforming China into a superpower through technological and technocratic means. It was formulated by three members of the Trilateral Commission—Jimmy Carter, Cyrus Vance, and Zbigniew Brzezinski—and continued the course initiated under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping launched reforms during which the so-called “Eight Immortals,” senior Communist Party leaders who had survived the Cultural Revolution, consolidated their influence. Their descendants continue to play a role in various sectors of China’s economy.
The historian Antony Sutton argued that the conflicts of the Cold War era were not aimed solely at containing communism but also generated multibillion-dollar military contracts. Moreover, Wall Street participated in financing different models of socialism and authoritarianism, including Bolshevism as well as corporatist versions of fascism and Nazism.
Over the two decades following Deng’s reforms, China’s leadership shifted toward technocrats and engineers. Their core belief was that social and economic problems could be approached as engineering challenges. Massive investments in China became part of a coordinated program involving the world’s largest corporations, investment funds, and influential Western policymakers.
It is noteworthy that in the late 1990s Henry Kissinger highlighted China’s potential as an ideal leader of the new world order. In his view, China did not impose its culture on others and would not rely on military force to support global governance.
Thus, the “Cold War” between American capitalists and Chinese communists in reality accompanied the construction of a global governance system that blended elements of capitalism and socialism. This hybrid model combined Chinese political authoritarianism with corporatocratic economics. In today’s paradigm, it is referred to as “inclusive capitalism,” the roadmap for which was unveiled in June 2020 at the World Economic Forum in Davos under the banner of the “Great Reset.”
In this context, the Global Governance Initiative continues along the same trajectory. Its rhetoric of creating a “more just world” is comparable to the slogans of “equal access to vaccines” during the pandemic. At the same time, the West is gradually introducing elements of digital control systems, while China serves as the primary testing ground. It can be argued that the Chinese model, with adjustments for national specificity, is likely to become the template for much of the world over the next two decades—within the overarching paradigm of technocratic governance.
