Forum: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

AT THE BEGINNING OF 2018, there were 68.5 million displaced people worldwide, including 25.4 million refugees — the highest number in the sixty-eight-year history of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In June 2018, the UN published the final draft of the Global Compact on Refugees — a follow-up on the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that was unanimously adopted by 193 states at the UN Leaders’ Summit for Refugees and Migrants in 2016. The UN General Assembly adopted the Global Compact on 17 December 2018, the US and Hungary being the only states having voted against it.

THE INCREASING number of Chinese citizens living, working, and travelling abroad has created an obligation for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to protect them. The Chinese leadership had previously accepted that, in most cases, other powers would evacuate Chinese citizens along with their own from situations of unrest abroad. But this has changed in the last decade, leading to new policies and capabilities which have in turn generated new expectations among the Chinese population. This phenomenon can be explained as the response of a rising power needing to protect its people and interests overseas as its influence expands. It could also be seen as a justification for the projection of power to underwrite China’s growing stake in world affairs. A recent and highly nationalistic genre of Chinese movies uses the former to explain the latter, in a clear move to establish such operations by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as ‘the new normal’ for both domestic and international audiences.