Personally, I fail to see why many Marxist-Leninists support multipolarity. The primary goal of the Leninist movements has always been “workers of the world unite!” and not “non-US-aligned countries unite!”.
To be clear, in saying this, I am not endorsing US-led unipolarity. I am just saying that multipolarity is not inherently good as some MLs suggest. For example, the world in 1914 and 1939 were without a doubt multipolar, and those both resulted in brutal world wars which killed millions.
Could somebody explain why people support multipolarity so much?
I think that China would be interested in being a unipolar power if the world/situation truly called for it, but I think that the PRC is rightfully hesitant, and would prefer not to. Due to a combination of historical memory/trauma.
The PRC has also said many times, that the time to strike against the U.S./global capitalist order will come eventually. And given the events of the past few years, I get a feeling that “eventually” will be coming sooner than any of us think.
There’s also the attached costs that come with the position of global hegemon. The US has been basically eating itself for the past 50 years to maintain power projection through military might. I think this is something China is acutely aware of. Even though they are spending a lot of treasure and manpower on building up their military force, they are doing it only as a deterrent to an ever-increasingly belligerent US (and this is obvious if one looks at what capabilities they are putting on their new hardware, that are primarily designed at defending and operating in Chinese space). They’ve stated many times that they’d rather be building commercial ships than aircraft carriers.