Editor's note: David Ferguson, a winner of the Chinese Government Friendship Award, is a senior translation editor at Foreign Languages Press. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

The current international situation is possibly more worrying than anything else since the darkest days of the Cold War, and China must exercise its diplomatic influence with as much skill as possible to prevent events from spiralling out of control. This will be no easy matter.

For two decades, the U.S. think tank Pew Research has been carrying out an annual survey on public attitudes to China in around 20 major developed countries throughout the world. The survey is very simple – it asks ordinary members of the public whether their attitude to China is generally positive or negative. The results show a steady trend of growing hostility to China that suddenly diverged into an enormous gap around 2017-2018. A relentless Western media campaign covering the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Taiwan region, the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, technology, COVID-19, and many other targets has succeeded in poisoning public attitudes to China in the developed world.

Of course, China has friends too, in the developing world and the Global South. But their voices do not carry far in the international arena, and they are not the ones entitled to decide where wars will be waged. They had no say, for example in the war in Ukraine that is now damaging their vital interests.

Some parties, most notably the entire Western mainstream media, take a "Creationist" view that history began on February 24, 2022. Others point to the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in 2014, which made nonsense of the popular Western shibboleth: "The great strength of democracy is that if you don't like the guys who are running the show, you can just vote for somebody else!"

But the true roots of the war in Ukraine go all the way back to the fall of the Soviet Union and creation of the "new Russia" in 1991.

The ordinary Russians who ended the Soviet Union and disbanded the Warsaw Pact were utterly betrayed. Their reward was to see their state assets looted by a combination of home-grown oligarchs and greed-maddened Wall Street financiers, and their GDP fall by a frightening two-thirds in a decade, causing unimaginable hardship. Even worse, proposals to ensure security in Europe through the 1990s Partners for Peace initiative, and commitments not to expand NATO eastwards, were cynically abandoned or brazenly flouted. Then, as the 21st century progressed, Russians found themselves and their country being systematically demonized in the West, endlessly accused of all sorts of egregious crimes.

Those who call the real shots in the U.S. and the wider Western world have no intention of allowing friendships between the West and Russia or China. They make their money from enmity, not friendship; from war, not peace. They need Russia and China as adversaries, not partners.

There was never any possibility of a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis from 2014 to 2022, because every Russian failure to respond to provocation with military action simply resulted in further provocation, until the West finally got what they wanted – war. NATO is bleeding Russia dry, while it gains priceless information about Russia's military technology and offensive and defensive capabilities, at almost zero cost to itself.

It is vital that China responds to Western provocation with a cool head. With mature, considered, sensible diplomacy. Outrage, indignation, and threats will achieve nothing, for two reasons. Firstly, they will not deter further U.S. provocation because they are precisely the response that the U.S. is trying to engineer. So they will simply result in more provocation. Secondly, they leave no room for manoeuvre. Once you have indulged in outrage, indignation and threats, you cannot backtrack or you will simply look weak. So you have no alternative but louder outrage and indignation, and more serious threats, until events lead to their inevitable conclusion.

The most important message that China should send is not to the U.S., or the other Western countries, but to the ordinary people in China's Taiwan region:

"If the U.S. had any interest in 'freedom and democracy' on the island where you live, then why did it spend 40 years arming and financing Chiang Kai-shek's military dictatorship under martial law? You literally cannot get further from freedom and democracy than a military dictatorship under martial law. The U.S. has no interest whatsoever in making the lives of people in the Taiwan region better. It only wants to make Chinese lives worse. If it can achieve that objective using the island of Taiwan as a tool, then Taiwan is utterly expendable. If the whole place was turned into a sea of molten glass and every person living there was vaporised, Uncle Sam would not lose a wink of sleep, as long as other parts of China had suffered some harm in the process."

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