Politics & Power Quote by Li Peng

“Multipolarisation” is doing heavy diplomatic lifting here: it’s not a neutral description of the world so much as a bid to narrate where legitimacy now lives. Li Peng frames a dispersed balance of power as “inevitable,” a word that turns a contested geopolitical project into weather. If the trend can’t be stopped, the only rational move is to align with it - and by implication, to stop clinging to the old order.

The second move is rhetorical crowd-work. “Widely welcomed by the international community” sounds like consensus, but it functions as a pressure tactic: disagreement becomes not just policy variance but a refusal to join the supposed global majority. The phrase “common interests and aspiration of the overwhelming majority of countries” does similar work, casting multipolarity as democracy-by-headcount, where the number of states substitutes for the messier question of who has power, whose security is protected, and whose rules prevail.

The subtext sits in what’s not named: the unipolar moment dominated by the United States after the Cold War, and the unease many governments felt about interventionism, sanctions, and conditionality packaged as “liberal internationalism.” In that context, Li Peng’s language offers multipolarity as a moral upgrade: plural centers of power as a proxy for sovereignty and non-interference.

It’s a public servant’s kind of persuasion - bureaucratic, majoritarian, and quietly strategic. By redefining the “international community” to mean the Global South plus rising powers, the quote stakes a claim that China’s preferred order isn’t revisionism; it’s representation.