by Pepe Escobar : Posted with permission
Western economists and intellectuals obsessed with demonization of China are never shy of shortcuts glaringly exposing their ignorance.
The latest outburst posits that “we” – as in Western intellectuals – “are the modern version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” who electro-shocked a dead body (China) into a resurrected “murderous monster.”
So, welcome to the Sino-Frankenstein school of international relations. What next? A black and white remake with Xi Jinping playing the monster? Anyway, “we” – as in mankind’s best hope – should “avoid carrying on in the role of Frankenstein.”
The author is an economics professor emeritus at Harvard. He cannot even identify who’s to blame for Frankenstein – the West or the Chinese. That says much about Harvard’s academic standards.
Now, compare this with what was being discussed at a trade war symposium at Renmin University in Beijing this past Saturday.
Chinese intellectuals were trying to frame the current geopolitical dislocation provoked by the Trump administration’s trade war – without naming it for what it is: a Frankenstein gambit.
Li Xiangyang, director of the National Institute of International Strategy, a think tank linked to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, stressed that an “economic decoupling” of the US from China is “completely possible,” considering that “the ultimate [US] target is to contain China’s rise … This is a life-or-death game” for the United States.
Decoupling
Assuming the decoupling would take place, that could be easily perceived as “strategic blackmail” imposed by the Trump administration. Yet what the Trump administration wants is not exactly what the US establishment wants – as shown by an open letter to Trump signed by scores of academics, foreign policy experts and business leaders who are worried that “decoupling” China from the global economy – as if Washington could actually pull off such an impossibility – would generate massive blowback.
What may actually happen in terms of a US-China “decoupling” is what Beijing is already, actively working on: extending trade partnerships with the EU and across the Global South.
And that will lead, according to Li, to the Chinese leadership offering deeper and wider market access to its partners. This will soon be the case with the EU, as discussed in Brussels in the spring.
Sun Jie, a researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that deepening partnerships with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) will be essential in case a decoupling is in the cards.
For his part Liu Qing, an economics professor at Renmin University, stressed the need for top international relations management, dealing with everyone from Europe to the Global South, to prevent their companies from replacing Chinese companies in selected global supply chains.
And Wang Xiaosong, an economics professor at Renmin University, emphasized that a concerted Chinese strategic approach in dealing with Washington is absolutely paramount.
All about Belt and Road
A few optimists among Western intellectuals would rather characterize what is going on as a vibrant debate between proponents of “restraint” and “offshore balancing” and proponents of “liberal hegemony”. In fact, it’s actually a firefight.
Among the Western intellectuals singled out by the puzzled Frankenstein guy, it is virtually impossible to find another voice of reason to match Martin Jacques, now a senior fellow at Cambridge University. When China Rules the World, his hefty tome published 10 years ago, still leaps out of an editorial wasteland of almost uniformly dull publications by so-called Western “experts” on China.
Jacques has understood that now it’s all about the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative: “BRI has the potential to offer another kind of world, another set of values, another set of imperatives, another way of organizing, another set of institutions, another set of relationships.”
Belt and Road, adds Jacques, “offers an alternative to the existing international order. The present international order was designed by and still essentially privileges the rich world, which represents only 15% of the world’s population. BRI, on the other hand, is addressing at least two-thirds of the world’s population. This is extraordinarily important for this moment in history.”
In fact, we are already entering a Belt and Road 2.0 scenario – defined by Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi as a “high-quality” shift from “big freehand” to “fine brushwork.”
At the Belt and Road Forum this past spring in Beijing, 131 nations were represented, engaged in linked projects. Belt and Road is partnering with 29 international organizations from the World Bank to APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation.
Apart from the fact that Belt and Road is now configured as a vast, unique, Eurasia-wide infrastructure and trade development project extending all the way to Africa and Latin America, Beijing is now emphasizing that it’s also a portmanteau brand encompassing bilateral trade relations, South-South cooperation and UN-endorsed sustainable development goals.
China’s trade with Belt and Road-linked nations reached $617.5 billion in the first half of 2019 – up 9.7% year-on-year and outpacing the growth rate of China’s total trade.
Chinese scholar Wang Jisi was right from the start when he singled out Belt and Road as a “strategic necessity” to counter Barack Obama’s now-defunct “pivot to Asia”.
So now it’s time for Western intellectuals to engage on a freak-out: as it stands, Belt and Road is the new Frankenstein.
Presently, the informed and leadership of the BRI nations understand its impact. When the common people of the nations begin to be employed to build roads, tunnels, bridges, ports, rail lines, airports, highways and pipelines, the consciousness of the masses of the 4.5-6.0 billion people will awaken.
Then, the BRI will be like a dozen rising Chinas. Poverty, hunger, lack of medicine and medical facilities will be a thing of the past. Wealth will flow out of the projects and corridors of progress to the billions of people building the infrastructure of their countries. Connectivity will bring education, skills, digitalization of economies.
These will happen with no ideology driving them. Progress and development don’t need dogma and slogans. They come from the will to change the poor to middle class. BRI now is no longer one model fits all. China has changed the modeling to suit the partners along the New Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road.
As Pepe points out, growth of late along the BRI path is over 9%. This despite the global slowdown and frictions and obstacles thrown at China and the BRI. Next year, it will be higher. And as the momentum builds, we can expect 10-12-15% growth in coming years.
I m not overjoyed, pinching myself, shocked and stunned by this seeming tremendous development with the potential to make me at least forget about looming Brave New Worlds
I will simply watch, observe to see if it is real, if it takes off leaving the hegemon to stew and mumble in his soup
the question that pops in my mind relates to the Khazars. they control a sea of capital..how will that capital find expression in a changing world following the BRI. Can Khazar capital be deployed to derail the BRI?
They control a sea of dollars, their dollars far exceed their real wealth such as gold. When the world stops trading dollars, their sea of wealth will dry up. Global dedollarisation is in full force, it can not be stopped, no matter how many tariffs the artist formerly known as deal maker Donny puts on the world.
Dedollarisation is the terminal bypass the world needs.
US Sovereign debt (i.e, the debts of the Federal Government) is now greater than US GDP 105%. And that’s just public debt. Add in the private debt of finance, household, student as well as unfunded future liabilities, pensions, healthcare and such and total debt to GDP stands at about 5 times 105%.
Yet it seems that the economic experts only look at one side of the ledger when assessing a nations’ wealth.
And that side is the ability of the gvt to tax the citizens up to the point of violent revolt, and perhaps slightly beyond.
cautious is the term I was looking for..I am being exceedingly cautious in expectation of the BRI. if all goes well the world has a chance..that’s clear. but will it all go well?
what can the Hegemon do to derail?
Look at the South Asia zone, the Pakistan Corridor project. Terrorists working to disrupt it.
In the Central Asia republics, terrorists are massing to disrupt the projects.
All over the map, the US is moving ISIS, AQ and local radicals into positions to be a problem.
Then there is the world of Sanctions that the US commands. They disrupt trade and development by interjecting sanctions on companies and countries and individuals they want to harass.
And then the massive attack that is under way against the Chinese economy is designed to cost China income and to redirect her wealth away from the AIIB and other institutions China uses for investment, loans and operations BRI projects.
The US is actively trying to blunt China and the BRI in Latin America, Africa, ME, NA, Central Asia, SE Asia, and South Asia, as well as southern Europe, Eastern Europe and the Arctic. Efforts vary, some are military, some psyops and propaganda, some the use of terrorists, some economic.
Larch,
Not to forget the “spontaneous” revolutions,and outbreaks of Epidemic diseases at critical BRI nodes in Africa….
Excellent as usual from you,Larchmonter.
I see a number of ‘talks’ on Youtube where ‘experts’ are predicting global pandemics caused by pathogens made more virulent using CRISPR and similar genetic engineering technologies. Why, it would only take ‘one madman’ to do this, with little investment required. Obviously there is therefore a good deal of redundancy and corruption involved in the Pentagons tens of billions expended on ‘bio-warfare research’ every year (and God knows how much in private laboratories)-purely for ‘defensive’ purposes, of course.
It’s a no brainer that the bulk of future new wealth will be produced by the BRI countries, by BRI technologies and multiplied by BRI trade. It will dwarf the size and trade of the US.
Under Trump, the US looks inward to make America great again. Lashing its trade partners in order to get back low-paying jobs will not make America great again even if successful.
It will likely just drag America back to Great Depression past again.
Two-thirds of the largest exporters in China are foreign-owned and thousands of US Corporations in China sell $600 billion annually into its domestic market–$100 billion more than China exports to the US–and generate net profits there of $50+ billion annually.
Boeing sells more airplanes to China and Walmart produces more goods from China than any other company in the world. Of the factories operated by Apple’s top suppliers, 357 are in China and 63 are in America – so Apple is shifting Mac Pro manufacturing from the US to China. Since the trade war began, Tesla, Boeing, BMW of America, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart have announced new investments and factories in China – because Chinese sales grow six percent annually.
American media silence about this is deafening. How many have mentioned that, while China is America’s biggest trading partner, America is only China’s #3?
The EU, its #1 partner, increased its China trade 11.2% this year and expects a further boost as the EU-China Bilateral Investment Agreement kicks in twelve months ahead of schedule. China’s 7% tariffs on EU products are another accelerant, as is the 17.2% rise in Belt and Road trade and the upcoming merger with the The Eurasian Economic Union. Meanwhile, hourly departures of Trans-Eurasian trains, fiber-optic cables and pipelines are rapidly uniting the continent.
ASEAN, China’s #2 partner saw China trade rise 10.5 percent in the first half and ASEAN’s induction into the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership later this year will boost it further.
The USA, China’s #3 partner, saw its China trade fall 9%, depressed by 21% tariffs.
Just how trade-dependent are the partners? Though trade accounts for 86% of Europe’s GDP, it’s only 37% of China’s and 26% of America’s. Imports account for 19% of China’s GDP and 15% of America’s but, while China’s global current-account surplus has fallen from 10% of GDP to 1.4%, America’s trade deficit has not budged. The US is less trade-dependent, but China is now the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, FDI, and its lead is growing.
Total trade of Euro area: 3,452.143 million euros. 2018. trade.ec.europa.eu. (~3.45 Trillion)
The European Union’s GDP was estimated to be $18.8 trillion (nominal) in 2018. ec.europa.eu.
But World bank says 86%. Obviously something is wrong somewhere. Probably world bank is wrong. Why?
Most of every country’s (or block’s) economy is internal, not external, trade.
EU GDP cannot be 86% external trade. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS?locations=EU
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/refreshTableAction.do;jsessionid=9ea7d07e30dd3bf0a52b9a8a474c872db039e243c026.e34OaN8Pc3mMc40Lc3aMaNyTa3eQe0?tab=table&plugin=1&pcode=tec00001&language=en
http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_122530.pdf
So who was this Harvard Professor? I’m not inclined to pay money for the information. Oh, there you go. Janos Kornhauser, in fact, listed in Wikipedia under ‘Jewish economists’. Thus is explained the deranged, racist, hatred dripping from every sentence. The elite Jews who have captured the West will NEVER control China in similar fashion, so their millennial dreams of global suzerainty are threatened by a civilization older than their own cult. In fact, of course, the Chinese are not innate Judeophobes, but more to the point, they refuse to be groveling slaves, and dare to treat the Jews as just another human community, like all others. And you can bet that if deranged hate-mongers like Kornhauser had their way and the West ceased to co-operate with China, or, as he slyly and typically viciously suggests, begins purging scientists and technologists of Chinese heritage, that Israel would still enthusiastically co-operate with China.
It will be interesting to watch play out. Is the BRI to benefit China or also the countries linked to it. A poster noted the trade increases in many countries, but is this bilateral and benefiting both or Chinese exports up and only benefiting them? Much of the infrastructure as I understand it is as loans to receiving states and often the labor imported from China. Is this really any different to the insidious IMF?
We all know how the West is sliding into ugly totalitarian surveillance states. But what about China, surveillance is pervasive and then there is the social credit score placing restrictions on those that don’t comply with the states exact dictates, is this really a more attractive alternative?
I would like to think China means well, but how often are countries ever altruistic? Likewise rose tinted glasses are best avoided.
“But what about China, surveillance is pervasive and then there is the social credit score placing restrictions on those that don’t comply with the states exact dictates, is this really a more attractive alternative?”
I hear conflicting stories about how the social credit score works—I haven’t researched this and so am quite ignorant.
But as for “attractive alternative,” I don’t think the world’s people aer being offered an a la carte menu. Basically, very few get to choose what system they are born into ahd must live under. Doubtless t his fact of life accounts for much of the philosophical musings that humans have produced over the centuries.
Meanwhile millions of Chinese have been lifted and also have lifted themselves out of misery. They have survived where their parents and grandparents had to live through the desperate political and social upheavals of the 20th century. So it may be that linving under the Chinese version of a surveillance state is a cost that they pay wililngly. Or, if not willingly, then consciously. They have a long philosophical tradition of Confucianism to turn to for contemplation as to how to balance the requirements of the self, society, and eternity.
Unlike, I would say, most USA-ians.
Katherine
The current corrupt system of the democratic hegemon has got to go. The BRI is not only essential, but the only viable alternative.
While you worry about too much Chinese influence, I think back to the development of the palm oil industry and the devastating effects on local environments and the people and animals within. Local officials, easily bribed, enabled this corrupt capitalism to run roughshod over Indonesia. I wonder, could the Chinese do any worse?
What we are witnessing is the next wave of globalism which will see development in emerging economies beyond simple resource extraction. The West simply doesn’t have the mental capacity nor the desire to do more than exploit. Let’s hope the Chinese can pull it off. They have shown flexibility when needed and seem these days to be responsive to world opinion, no doubt for selfish reasons as they woo the developed nations into joining the initiative but, who cares why so long as the result is a better outcome for all concerned.
Overall, I’m hopeful. The present model cannot continue.
China and its allies are the ONLY remaining hope for humanity. If China is destroyed and broken up, as is the undisguised ambition of the Zionazis and their allies and stooges in the USA and the Five Eyes, with the EU not far behind, humanity is doomed.
Chinese mass surveillance is in the defence of the citizenry. After all the USA and the West have spent tens of billions to provoke social unrest, terrorism and secessionist movements in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, ‘Manchuria’, Inner Mongolia and elsewhere. These efforts have continued since 1949, with black propaganda growing ever more deranged and vicious. The propaganda against China here in Austfalia is so utterly insane that comparisons of China with Nazi Germany are now commonplace, the ‘situation’ in Xinjiang is routinely decried as ‘genocide’ and China is described, universally, without exception, particularly viciously in the Government-owned ABC, as a threat to humanity. This is language clearly designed to foment a fury of hatred, ideological, cultural and, above all, racial, preparatory to war. And China intends defending itself, including keeping an eye on its population going about their daily business, safe from Uighur jihadist butchers, trained in Syria and Iraq, and, no doubt, Turkey and elsewhere, who gained a reputation in Syria for particular viciousness.
The situation here in Australia is actually worse than you describe, in that many who are vilifying China in Australia believe their own propaganda. So, when China gets cross at the slander, and turns a cold shoulder in Australia’s direction, these people believe that China is merely pretending to be upset, when really they know they are committing various atrocities, and their protestations of innocence are merely a smokescreen.
Australia has a long history of sinophobia, and the present outbreak has firm foundations to build on. But it is appalling to witness on a daily basis. At the end of the day, however, all we are doing is shooting ourselves in the foot and cutting our own collective throat.
Don’t forget the late, unlamented, ‘Bulletin’s’ masthead declaration-‘Australia for the White Man’, that lasted long into the 20th century. Until 1961 in fact. The basic Rightwing orientation (if you’ll forgive the expression) is hatred of the other, and what could offend their belief in their own Divine status more than a resurgent China, dominant economically, geo-politically, technologically and culturally. It is driving them barking mad.
I usually do have respect for the author of the article in the FT, Janos Kornai, but this piece reads like a delusional polemic directly penned by the Atlantic Council
The open letter to the US government said China is not an “economic enemy or an existential national security threat”. Yet events seem to be following the pattern of history, suggesting the Whitehouse is on course of war – the real monster.
It is important to be vigilant against monsters, including those planted by Empire in our own conscious and subconscious minds suggesting that Their Stagnant and Rotting “Order” of Hobbesian “Each Against All” Conflict …….must be an Eternal Law….and …….like earth’s gravitational field……...could never be escaped.
However, neither is true and that moral rotteness and intellectual imbecility is not the only thing the West has ever had to offer.
There is ALSO a Leibnizian Tradition in the West that rejects this pessimism and falsity and tragic error and it has found resonance and agreement in the East……..and likely will soon reach the South as well and can unite the entire planet in a More Human Paradigm……by putting it in an entirely different perspective……..viewed in the minds of millions of more mature inhabitants of all parts of this planet……….in their “mind’s eye”…..from nearby space:
“On nearly every front, the paradigm of a uni-polar world, centered on the concept of Empire, is disintegrating, while a new paradigm of sovereign nations, cooperating in the development of the productive powers of Mankind as a whole, is spreading out from Asia through the idea of the New Silk Road. Even the leaders of the dying financial Empire see the handwriting on the wall: French Finance Minster Bruno Le Maire, speaking today at a conference of leaders of the IMF, World Bank and the European Central Bank commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Bretton Woods System, said the following: “The Bretton Woods order as we know it has reached its limits…. Unless we are able to reinvent Bretton Woods, the New Silk Road might become the new world order.”
True enough. But Le Maire’s view that such a new paradigm is a threat to the western world is nonsense. The concept envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which adopted Roosevelt’s “Hamiltonian” vision over that of the British Empire representative John Maynard Keynes, has been systematically subverted by the British “free trade” dogma, and the transformation of the regulated financial system by the unfettered speculation of the post-Glass Steagall era. The ongoing disintegration of Deutsche Bank is but one sign of the onrushing collapse of the “quadrillion dollar plus” bubble of derivatives and leveraged loans now hanging over the western financial empire.
The current ghost of the Bretton Woods System is finished. It can not be reformed, but rather it can only be put to rest, through a total reorganization of the world financial system, as designed by Lyndon LaRouche long ago, with the tremendous growth and development process generated by the Belt and Road as the center piece of cooperation between China, Russia, India the United States and others in an entirely new system. The current surge in cultural optimism generated by the 50th Anniversary of man’s heroic landing on the Moon this coming Saturday and the courageous declaration by President Trump and his NASA director Jim Bridenstine that a man and a woman will return to the Moon within five years, and that we will stay on the Moon, as a base for reaching Mars and beyond — this surge in optimism must be the channel through which the people of the world regain their sense of a common humanity.”
From today’s LPAC Lead: https://larouchepac.com/20190718/uni-polar-world-disintegrating-bring-world-together-through-mans-common-mission-space
The Bretton Woods arrangements were crafted by the USA during WW2, as their rulers realised that they would ‘rule the world’ (as Truman exclaimed when told of the A-bomb)after WW2. Europe, the Soviet, China and Japan were in ruins, India devastated by centuries of brutal English exploitation, and the USA controlled c. 60% of the global economy. The Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank, IMF and GATT, later the WTO, WIPO etc, were designed to preserve that dominance, forever. The hypertrophied US military-industrial complex was there to destroy any resistance, as the Koreans learned, where the destruction and genocide were merciless. Only the Soviet A-bomb, detonated in 1949, forestalled the use of nukes in Korea, and against China and the Soviet as well.
Behind the bully-boy tactics of the economic hit-men of the Washington Consensus, and CIA assassinations and coups, and Pentagon aggression, the USA and its Western stooges raped the rest of the world through neo-imperial and neo-colonial exploitation. Unfortunately the empire got its comeuppance in Indochina, and the Imperial overreach and defeat there set in train the Real Evil Empire’s lengthy collapse.
The Empire bought some extra time with their allies, the Sordid Barbarian Mafia family’s adoption of the petro-dollar ensuring the continuance of the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of US Dollar hegemony, without which the USA is finished. Countries that attempted to escape the petro-dollar trap, like Iraq and Libya, were destroyed and their people slaughtered for the impertinence.
The neoliberal reaction that commenced under Reagan and Carter was the coup de grace for the bloodsucking Empire. Since then the drive to move wealth from the many to the few, and increase the deficit to drive huge cuts to social welfare, have left the USA massively and unpayably indebted. Moreover poverty and inequality has burgeoned, as intended, and society devolved into a warring sewer of drug addiction, partisan hatred, ecological devastation, crumbling infrastructure, allied to foreign aggression and genocide in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria etc, and social revanchism in Latin America.
All in all the US Empire has reached its death-bed, dying of numerous incurable maladies, but its rulers are quite determined to take the rest of us down with them.
“the courageous declaration by President Trump and his NASA director Jim Bridenstine that a man and a woman will return to the Moon within five years, and that we will stay on the Moon, as a base for reaching Mars and beyond — this surge in optimism must be the channel through which the people of the world regain their sense of a common humanity.”
I find myself shaking my head over the surge of publicity over India’s efforts to effect a moon landing. True leadership would take greater pride in seeing that every citizen had hot and cold running water- or even clean water- or indoor plumbing before extracting billions from them to satisfy their vanity. The forced enthusiasm by Trump and Bridenstine seems more in keeping up with the 21st century Jones- a reaction to the amazing progress of the Chinese space program which could conceivably replicate the great American feat of the 60’s (and at a fraction of the cost adjusted for inflation.)
It is particularly galling for the Indian regime and its caste-bound ruling class to contemplate how China has accelerated ever further away from India since both gained sovereignty over their territory in the late 40s. China has nearly eliminated poverty entirely, built the world’s greatest economy, with leading science and technology and infrastructure that leads the world, and India has mass poverty, ecological ruin, caste hatred, subservience to the USA and Israel and ‘democracy’. It’s all rather sad, really.
Thanatopia has been at war for almost all its 243 years. Usually against weak victims, but China is an existential threat to Thanatopian Messianism, their ‘Manifest Destiny’ to rule the world, with Full Spectrum Dominance, forever. Peace between Thanatopia and any equal, let alone a vastly superior society and economy like China, is impossible. The Exceptionals will NEVER countenance it.
The rise of Britain as an industrial power was founded on borrowed capital, imported raw materials, and cheap local labour brought into the cities from the countryside. That cycle ended through the 80s as the profits flowed out to China where a similar cycle is under way. I really don´t get Pepe´s breathless exaltation of the Chinese model. This after all is a country ruled over by a de facto emperor and a commitee of technocrats, where the people have zero political power.
John, you seem not to know much about that which you are pontificating about. The Chinese system is known as ‘democratic centralism’. It delivers democratic involvement at the local level, and the Party that runs the country is open to anyone to join, and rise according to their merits.
The situation in the ‘liberal democratic’ West, in contrast, is anything but ‘democratic’. The system might be described as plutocratic, rule by the rich, kleptocratic, rule by thieves, pathocratic, rule by psychopaths or kakistocratic, rule by the worst, but democratic, rule by the people-never!.
All Western political parties are owned by the rich ‘contributors’ and patrons. The mass media and other brainwashing systems are all controlled by the same rich, and are totally propagandistic and biased towards the parties of the rich, the so-called Right. Elections are sick farces, cavalcades of LIES, bribes, threats, fear and hate-mongering and character assassination. The two halves, more or less, of society, the life-hating, greed-driven psychopaths of the Right and the Life-affirming and empathic better angels of the Left, have been set more and more against each other, with deliberate and vicious brainwashing by the hate system.
Moreover, 50% of the electorate is, by definition, below median intelligence, many far below it, and there the Right has a ready near majority. The distribution of psychopathic tendencies is similar, another source of Rightist electoral strength, among the pathologically greedy and those hateful of others. Hence the steady march of the West to ever more omnicidal, vicious, socially savage and aggressive regimes, bent on furthering the ecological Holocaust, either openly as in the USA and Austfailia, or by inaction and empty posturing, as in the rest of the West. Meanwhile in China they get things done, and the Chinese population in all surveys of opinion, including by Westerners, is one of the most satisfied on Earth with their Government and social arrangements.
Mulga
Having travelled in China and also worked alongside the diaspora in East Asia, I was impressed by their business acumen and general smarts. I really cannot believe they would willingly choose such restrictive policies such as one child per family, strict censorship, a president for life. This is therefore NOT a democracy, but a serf society dictated to from above, as per UK in the 18C. That is why the western capitalists invested in China – it is a capitalist´s dream.
Well, the evidence to the contrary is copious. You seem to be adopting a typically Orientalist viewpoint, if you’ll forgive me saying so, where one only sees what one wants to see, which is non-Westerners copying Western social and cultural practises. However China is a different civilization, 5000 years old, with lengthy pre-civilizational customs laid down before that. In China the collective is valued more highly than the individual, but of course, the collective is simply a mass of individuals. In the West the greedy, egotistic, belligerent individual is king, and the ‘war of all against all’ prevails. Collective organisations like unions have been deliberately extirpated to aid the ‘wealth creation’ ie parasitism, of the individual winners, now a shrinking minority of > 1% of the populations. The Chinese have been happy, on the whole (the figures for life satisfaction in China are irrefutable)to sacrifice some things in the present for the greater good of the society as a whole, and for future generations.
Mulga
I sense that you have your ideas about Chinese culture exclusively from afar, and that you have no personal experience of what it takes to survive in this world. I would suggest you go there and ask a selection of people (say a grandmother betting on the stock exchange, a worker in a shoe or microprocess factory, a market trader) if they carry out their daily struggle for the betterment of Chinese society.
Ahh, john, I have ‘experience’ coming out of every orifice. I rather fear that you seem to project your predetermined ‘experience’ onto the Chinese. Of course the Chinese work to better their lot and that of their family, but they also, in the main, take pride in their country’s achievements, its history and civilization. All sampling of opinion in China shows very large majorities satisfied with their lot in life and the direction of their society, something that one cannot say of failed oligarchies like the USA and UK.
to John, 18th July:
You comment concerning Great Britain is not quite based on facts.
First the ‘industrial revolution’ started mostly from Great Britain as early as at the end of the 16th into the 17th century. Queen Elizabeth I. awarded to merchants/businessmen in London the monopoly for trading with India as well as other areas of Asia. The “East India Company” was founded. 1601 a convoy left London for Indonesia. These ships returned with heavy load full of pepper two years later to London. Commerce of condiments was done mostly with Indonesia whereas silk and cotton with India. Both were extremely lucrative for Great Britain.
At the end of WW I Great Britain lost a lot of influence and after WW II monetary and military influence (intervention etc.) were usually in the hands of USA.
Concerning China: While USA has 1 % of oligarchs China got out of poverty almost 1 million and is working in order to get out the rest of its inhabitants.
China should earn the biggest respect and honor for what it has done and still is doing for its people. Quite contrary to Western countries: more and more people fell and still fall into poverty.
monna
A fact check on Wikipedia confirms my assertions regarding the industrial revolution in UK, which according to to them took place from around 1760. The technical and financial advances that were made in that time were astounding, just as in China nowadays.
(I wonder if Wiki is allowed in China?)
Of course the finances of the general population increased, at great cost to their wellbeing, just as reportedly in Chinese factories nowadays.
to john 19th July:
Maybe the term I used “Industrial Revolution” (used by historians) wasn’t correct in this concern.
What I meant was that with the foundation of the East India Company (which had its own military/soldiers) it started/commenced real competition between Great Britain and India. Why: this because India was at those times the biggest exporter of cotton and silk fabric/cloth. Britain couldn’t get such cheap workers as India. This changed during the fourth quarter of 18th century as more and more British factories started to use the newly invented machines etc. and by the second quarter of the 19th century Britain advanced to the biggest exporter of fabrics made of cotton, linen and silk.
By the way: It is practically forbidden at universities in my country to refer to wikipedia. Wikipedia is ok concerning natural sciences as Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Mathematics, Molecular Biology etc. Any topic where politics and national interests are prevalent (as in history for example) it is not reliable and far too often manipulated.
monna
You just gave an example in support of my original post regarding the rise of UK as an industrial power in the 18C.
to john:
You referred to the “official acknowledged time” whereas my intention was to point out to the commencing that it could take place.
…” Queen Elizabeth I. awarded to merchants/businessmen in London the monopoly for trading with India as well as other areas of Asia. The “East India Company” was founded. 1601 a convoy left London for Indonesia. ..”
Unfortunately, I missed to write more precise in pointing out. Hope yet it is clear what I meant. This because without any pecondition things wouldn’t have taken such a course as it happened (competition mostly with India when it comes to cloth – for example cotton and silk).
In my opinion development usually occure when certain preconditions were available or have been laid. Without basics no development would ever happen.
America likes to call itself a grand “experiment in democracy.”
America is certainly an experiment alright–but not in democracy–but rather in deception and ultimately in a demonic ability to manipulate and pervert all that is “the Good.”
In short, America is a Frankenstein experiment.
No matter how many wars of aggression America wages around the planet.
No matter how many countries America economically exploits world through Dollar hegemony and the Washington Consensus.
No matter how many nations American politically subjugates through its serial “regime change” operations….
The American Empire tries to masquerade as a Force for Good in the world–while psychologically projecting its own malignant nature onto other countries.
The true “Frankenstein” is this American monster–one that is nothing more than a devil in disguise.
As Harold Pinter stated in his 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature speech:
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/25621-harold-pinter-nobel-lecture-2005/
World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945- )
http://global-politics.eu/world-conquest-united-states-global-military-crusade-1945/
Let us ask: who id an intellectual? Is it someone with the master degree, or the intellectual needs more qualities to earn that title? I vote for this other condition: one has to be widely educated (no need to have a master diploma) and to work, or care, or fight for a national goodness. And in his work he has to pay the attention: not to become “useful idiot” helping the dictatorship while believing it is for the people.