Imagine the Chinese leadership out of the public eye for nearly two weeks – virtually holed up, immersed in a secret debate. That is exactly what just happened at Beidaihe, the beach resort in eastern Hebei province.
While there might be James Bond-ish conspiracy theories out there for this annual ritual, there are no doubts about the key theme of discussions: The US-China trade war.
The second-largest world economy under President Xi Jinping is deep into the long march towards superpower status. The previous geopolitical and geoeconomic status quo is dead.
Xi has made it abundantly clear that for China to just become a “responsible stakeholder” in the post-Cold War US-controlled liberal international order is not enough.
It did not escape the notice of the senior leadership at Beidaihe of the change of direction by the US. President Donald Trump’s administration is taking a belligerent approach while the US National Security Strategy in December 2017 unmistakably labeled China a “revisionist power,” a strategic rival and for all practical purposes, from the Pentagon’s point of view, a top threat.
Instead, what the Beijing leadership identifies is what we could define, in Chinese culture terminology, as the “three threats.”
A threat to their foreign policy concept for the coming decades, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and a threat to China’s own integration drive centered on the three strategic zones of the Greater Bay Area, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei corridor and the Yangtze river delta. And, of course, a threat to the Chinese stock market.
State media is still grappling on how to deal with it. The People’s Daily has, politely, defined the Trump administration’s strategy as “engagement plus containment.”
China Global Television Network (CGTN) has played the soft power card by addressing a sarcastic letter to Trump. The network thanked him for uniting the rest of the world while forcing China to make its economic environment more seductive to foreign investment. The CGTN video subsequently “disappeared” from YouTube and Twitter.
So, even as the leadership consensus may be this is all about containing China’s irresistible rise, and even considering the fog surrounding major Beijing decisions, it’s still possible to detect some fascinating nuances.
No mercy
For Trump, on the record, “trade wars are good and easy to win.” That reflects his fascination with the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) ethos. Trump, in this case, is The Undertaker bent on taking Xi to the woodshed. Xi is no more Mr. Nice Guy, Trump’s former “good friend.”
So, Xi cannot possibly believe that galvanizing the crowd like superhero The Rock will save the day. The WWE is not about “win-win” – that is for losers. Now, it is no holds barred. Trump accuses China of US election interference: “Fools that are so focused on looking only at Russia should start also looking in another direction, China.”
China’s military “adventurism” allows the Pentagon to come up with a Space Force. China is also barred from investing in US industries related to national security.
The US response to the reach of the Belt and Roaf Initiative is to invest in the fuzzy “Indo-Pacific” – by committing a paltry $113 million in energy, infrastructure, and digital commerce. “Made in China 2025” is qualified as an absolute threat to “America First.”
And China is increasingly depicted as “malign” – the buzzword of choice that makes Trump, in this case, fully aligned with the industrial-military-security-think tank complex.
So, how to fight a cage match with no referee? Enter Sun Tzu, China’s legendary military strategist who wrote The Art of War. The first rule is simple: “All warfare is based on deception.” As in Beijing gearing up to negotiate both as a partner and a threat.
‘Outside barbarians’
It will be long, it will be nasty, it will be protracted, going way beyond the talks this week in the US, which importantly do not feature Vice-President Wang “Firefighter” Qishan, a key player and Xi’s trusted consigliere. He is more useful coordinating long-term strategy in Beijing.
Here, a quick flashback to the British Empire is in order. In 1793, during the first diplomatic mission to Beijing, led by Lord Macartney and received by Emperor Qianlong, the Brits quickly identified how the teeming markets of China posed a “threat” to Europe and the contemporary world trade system.
China was self-sufficient at the time and exported to Europe goods such as silk, tea, textiles, porcelain. In fact, all the trimmings of the luxury market in a web of silk routes or an earlier version of the Belt and Road.
But what did they import? Not much, apart from Siberian furs, some exotic food and ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine. Here is Emperor Qianlong comments: “The Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is, therefore, no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.”
We all know how that ended – gunboat diplomacy, the Opium Wars, Beijing being sacked in 1860, “unequal treaties” and the Chinese “century of humiliation.”
All that still features deeply in the Chinese collective unconscious as much as the real roots of the current trade war. Deng Xiaoping’s brilliant strategy was to open China’s special economic zones or SEZs as unbeatable, low-cost production bases for Western and Asian multinationals.
Deng offered the prime platform for the expansion of global capitalism. The inevitable consequence was a stampede of foreign direct investment (FDI), off-shoring and outsourcing.
Now, compare it with key data supplied by China’s General Administration and Customs. In the first six months of this year, no less than 41.58% of China’s exports to the rest of the world came from American, European and Asian multinationals.
There is no evidence corporate US – represented by multinational companies – is willing to sacrifice low production costs to “bring those jobs back.” Multinational companies also prize a devalued yuan because that keeps those low production costs down.
Additionally, any Trump attack on “Made in China 2025” does not alter the fact that the world’s second-largest economy is relentlessly climbing up the manufacturing ladder. Eventually, it will overtake the US in technological innovation.
As Zhigang Tao, director of the Institute for China and Global Development at Hong Kong University, pointed out, Beijing handed American capital the proverbial offer you can’t refuse – access to the Chinese market in exchange of technological transfer.
“[In fact,] this technology-for-market-access strategy has worked extremely well, as evidenced by China’s rise in key industries including high-speed rail, aviation, automobiles and wind turbines,” Tao said.
So, the next step should be an extension of the Tesla-in-Shanghai model.
Class struggle?
Seducing American capital to invest in China under more lenient rules may be only one aspect of a Sun Tzu maneuver for Beijing to defuse the trade war. Beidaihe certainly evaluated what might happen if this all goes wrong and becomes a hot trade war.
A Hurricane Tariff would have the potential to devastate China’s employment and financial landscape and provoke high inflation and even a recession. Xi cannot possibly risk losing his de facto power base, which is not the Chinese proletariat, but the rising middle class on a frenetic consumption and global tourism binge.
Add to that, the relentless working-class anger, already in full effect, according to the University of Utah’s Minqi Li. After all “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is hardly Marx.
Proverbial Western myopia has been riffing about a China collapse for years. Yes, there is a possible debt bomb. Yes, China’s dependency on foreign sources of oil and gas is a recurrent nightmare. And yes, US-China relations are now unmistakably in Cold War territory, even without considering the South China Sea and Taiwan.
But underestimating a rising power capable of planning a concerted global strategy in detail up to 2049 is foolish. Xi and Trump will have the chance to have a serious face-off on Nov. 30 at the G20 summit in Argentina.
Trump may even bill it as a “win”, as in his summits with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sun Tzu, though, is waiting in the wings.
this was predicted decades ago that china would rise to rule the world. as it was said the""YELLOW RACE WILL RULE THE WOLRD"" and china is 4 times the size of the us. both in geographically and population then us. the u.s.is in serious debt both govermental and personal. one small misstep and the economy which is a house of cards in the us. will collpase and the dollar will be wall paper.
I’ve listened to the interview linked to the article.
While I respect mr. Minqi Li’s opinion, it is important to clarify some stereotypes about Marx that come from Cold War propaganda.
Nowhere did Marx wrote a theory about socialism or communism. He died before he even finish his work about capitalism (Das Kapital), let alone a theory about socialism and communism.
What Marx stated was this: if you empirically analyse what we today call "History", you can see that this "History" is actually the history of class struggle. Class struggle is the synthesis between two opposing forces of any social system: the mode of production (how a society produce things) and the relations of production (who produce things).
But, Marx noted, even this "History" system is not sustainable (eternal): everytime a social system is suplanted by another, something new happens — there is a development of the productive forces, put it simply, the capacity a social form has to convert nature into humanly useful energy. So, it is not a situation of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". Therefore, Marx inferred, there will come a time when class-based societies will have to go extinct, one way or another (and, indeed, he’s probably right, since it unifies human sciences with natural sciences, see the second law of thermodynamics).
But why is capitalism the last class-based society? Marx hypothetized that humans, as material beings (animals like any other) can only try to solve problems they are actually facing, that are in front of them. Human imagination is limited by the real world. Since he was there, alive, thinking about the class problem, then it should be obvious that capitalism is, at least, the first society which gave humans the material base for envisioning a classless society.
From there, he postulated an ideal classless society, which he arbitrarily called "communism". He didn’t describe what communism would be, it is just a theoretical abstraction. But, he also recognized that such society wouldn’t be born out of the blue, from the guts of capitalism: there would’ve to be a revolutionary period of transition, where workers seized power, which he called "socialism" (a word he didn’t invent, it already existed in his time). Again, nowhere did Marx detailed about what this "socialism" would be — it is just a theoretical abstraction of a transiton period.
Nowhere did Marx wrote that socialism would be a single party system. He didn’t wrote any "manual" about statemanship. This is pure Cold War propaganda. Marx was a scientist, not an ideologue. The single party system was born in the Russian Revolution and by accident: when the Bolsheviks took power, the original idea was to make a collective government with any willing party that existed participating. These parties refused to be part of the revolutionary government and chose civil war. The same happened in China.
If you take "socialism" as any kind of transition system between capitalism and communism, then China is socialist. The official description of the Chinese system — market socialism as the most primitive stage of socialism — is precise. There is no deceiving here. Professor Li uses the number of strikes as an idication of class struggle in China, but I don’t see the problem with strikes in a socialist system. On the contrary, the main critique of the Soviet Union nowadays was that it didn’t allow workers to strike, therefore giving up precious feedback from the workers and losing the train to the Third Industrial Revolution. As long as the CCP listens to the strikers and satisfy their demands, there’s no menace to socialism.
Now, the dangers of a capitalist couter-revolution in China is another topic (this "middle class insurgence" theory is a fetish in the West since 1989). It can happen, but let’s toss aside our crystal balls for a while and analyse the actual evidence.
Pepe on the dot, as usual. Thank you.
The Corporate Capitalist West does not realize that its rise was a fluke of history, a result of stupidity of Sunni Kaliphate/Jewish finance cartel that for 1,000 years sat smack in the middle of the Silk Road, milking world trade with oppressive Tariffs (Arabic word) until Christian expelled them both from Spain and found new routes to Asia (and new lands too).
The Sunni/Jewish cartel destroyed Europe and Asian industry, while riding themselves into oblivion by their own un-competitiveness as Tariff usually does. Finally Christian genius Balfour found a brilliant way to put both at each others throat by creating Israel. No war in Europe since then !!!
But the rise of CCW was on flimsy base, says factually its Prophet of Doom Samuel Huntington:
” .. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do ” —— The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51…
For most of the ancient history both China and India produced 1/3 each of world wealth, others (Europe, Middle East, Africa, Americas) the rest 1/3. As Xi Jinping reopens the Silk Road with BRI, expect things to return to the normal.
BRI that unites Europe, Asia, and Africa into one land based market, will make Americas, Australia (and possibly Japan and Brittain) distant islands unconnected to the globe. And USA with $21 Trillion in debt, and $150 Trillion in unfunded liabilities, and hated by one and all around the globe, can not dream of competing with a 4 times larger people loved by all and sitting on a pile of cash.
Poor Marx, living in a society transitioning from agrarian to trading, was way behind his times, 1200 years to be exact.
2,400 years ago in trading Athens while its Demos downed Socrates, 1000 years later Mohammed the small businessman in trading Mecca remains the only one in history to have trounced his Demos, a combined force of Big Business Umayyads, Bankers banu Abbas, trade monopolist infidels, and Tribe of Judah. He abolished classes under his new socio-economics.
Alas after his death the Meccan Demos made a counter revolution reversing all gains with the Kaliphate.
Mohammedan/Koranic economy is diametrically opposite of Corporate Capitalism. The profligate, wasteful, failing West offers:
1. No responsibility or limited responsibility godless culture
2. Large Corporate controlled Enterprise
3. Knowledge as a Private good
4. Top-down polity
5. Law and Order Democracy and Lawyerism
6. Positive interest regime
7. Income/spending/import taxation
8. Control of movement in goods, money, and people
Every one of these is anti-progress, anti-production, only for private profit for the few. Taxing incomes, spending, imports is no good for consumers or small and medium business alike. Not taxing assets encourages accumulation and hoarding, ties up resources needlessly. It leads to class struggle.
Mohammed offered more efficient Koranic prescription:
1. Personally Responsible Individualist Moral God-fearing culture
2. Free Enterprise
3. Knowledge as a public good
4. Bottom Up Polity
5. Justice minded Republic
6. Zero interest regime
7. Asset taxation
8. Borderless world
CCW fears that Koranic Islam today, using Mohammaden strategy and tactics will do an Encore. It will do mostly because frugal Islam is economically more efficient than wasteful profligate corporate Capitalism, and is above class struggle.
Mohammed had failed in Mecca, just as Marx in Paris. But he the succeeded in Medina, like Lenin and Mao, later. Like Paris, Mecca was all proletariat, but all others were a joint action by workers and peasants. Pity Marx who had tasted Judahism and Christianity did not learn from Islam. Even his thesis that economy determines all had been laid in full by Ibn Khaldoon 5 centuries earlier.
China’s socio-economic model is closer to Mohammedan above. Hence, class struggle is much weaker in China than it was in Marx’s Europe or later.
"The US response to the reach of the Belt and Roaf Initiative is to invest in the fuzzy “Indo-Pacific” – by committing a paltry $113 million in energy, infrastructure, and digital commerce. “Made in China 2025” is qualified as an absolute threat to “America First.”"
The BRI is nearly broke. China is investing or more accurately lending to countries that can’t pay back their indebtedness – think Venezuela.
Africa has rarely been a good investment. The dictators are corrupt and any reformers are usually overthrown by a junta backed by corporatists and some allied group of western powers looking for cheap resources. China is no different. Africa remains a bad investment until poverty is ameliorated and huge investments in education are implemented. How much is Xi’s BRI is invested in Africa’s children? Zip.
Relying upon Putin is a fool’s errand. Russia and China have rarely been allies or non adversaries. They share too much of a common border and simply don’t trust each other. As Nixon strategically cut the ties between them so it will happen when another world leader picks at the fissures between the two nations. In the meantime China has invested in another Ptomekin Village because Putin won’t last forever as Uncle Joe Stalin is a testament to human mortality. This is of course conjecturing that Putin isn’t overthrown before he leaves this planet through natural or other means.
Other countries China has lent money to is Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Italy, and Greece. Boy, that is where I want to invest given their geopolitical problems and indebtedness.
E. Europe is a cesspool of right wing fascits that can change their investment and geopolitical alliances on a whim. No. Look what Hitler did to Uncle Joe.
Asia without Japan, Australia, S. Korea is not likely to produce the results China is looking for. Indonesia, Mayasia, the Phillipines, doesn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy.
China does have one thing going for it – Trump. But he too will be gone by 2020 if not sooner unless of course the US military backs him when he loses the electoral college and/or the people of the US permit the doofus to remain in power. The latter two instances IMHO are remote at this time.
So Xi and China, please keep throwing your yuan down a rat hole. The US could provide you some lessons on it since we’ve done a bang up job in the Middle East of late.
Heavy, dude.
Joseph Lee Bonkers, more like
To prove your credentials as a good Sunni Mohammedan (and a rational human being) please tell us if you believe Mohammed rode to heaven on a winged goat !
The only big thing in China is Winnie XI pooh’s waistline
There was no middle class in China. Mao was the first to realize China was 90% farmers not industrial workers. Now it’s probably around 50% or so. Very few people in China, except migrant workers, have to spend 30+% of their income on rent or mortgage and property tax as most of them have ancestor homes or government issue units. Thus when Chinese workers lose their job they don’t have to worry about becoming homeless or lost their house to banks. Thus no fire to ignite. Even big natural disasters won’t incite the people to change regime in the current government.
Communism has transformed so much in China that it’s very different than the original especially USSR which Mao/Zhou openly split from. The transform is very similar to Buddhism which is a subset of Hinduism with enlighten reforms, and even Greek myths and ME ideas as it was integrated into Chinese to the end result that Buddhism doesn’t exist in India the place of its origin.
Pepe is right in that “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is hardly Marx. One can easily generalize that any ideology will be tamed significantly when it is transplanted in China. This is due to Chinese pragmatic approach and philosophy.
Angel Fair
If it makes sense and fits the topic, why not cut and paste? I encourate you to do the same if what you say is worthwhile.
Yashad Rizvi do you still wear diapers..cause your intelligence is 0..and yashad in scots language means you talk shite..
Alle Ibrahim
Pls do not answer YR. He seeks legitimacy, desperately.
People like him will first reduce you to their level, and then beat you with their experience.
Let him post freely. It provides comic relief, and only confirms that we are right.
lol, ‘Kermit’……some of what you say is true, can’t argue with you on some of what you said, however, if all of what you said were true, then China wouldn’t be a superpower today, and neither would India be rising economically like it is. And why not the narrative of Russia ought to have been dissolved/ disintegrated by now? but instead it is a big power in its own right……..surely the same could be said for Iran too, wonder how you can place Iran in the category of the known busted ass bankrupts of Greece, Pakistan and Turkey, with zero potential?……lol
What we do see instead is that Russia/ China/ India/ Iran type countries are very resilient. These are large insular economies, evidently some of them with imperial ambitions. Overnight nothing much will change, but change in the geo-political/ strategic sense is a generational thing, and you bet it’s already happening. Only 25 years ago, the world looked very different to what it looks today.
P.S. What makes you think the Chinese are holding their breath on the BRI countries paying back the Chinese loans?..lol….You think the Chinese didn’t know this when they loaned the money to these countries in the first place? is cash payment the only way to service a debt? Surely you are aware of other modes of payment.
you dirty dalit, go wash yourself before you come here………
Pepe Escobar. I doubt whether Sun Tzu applies in a trade war. In fact I doubt whether Sun Tzu applies in any war between East and West. It is obvious that the Americans are still hung up about maintaining global hegemony and a unipolar world and thus their mental psyche of the Thucydides Trap in their trade war strategy. The Chinese will see reality transcendentally and stick to their Taoist ‘weiqi’ against Western medieval ‘chess’. The Chinese have never ever played ‘offence’, being conquered but never having been a conqueror. Thus the rest of Asia know it is total nonsense to think that reclaiming some islets and reefs by China would extrapolate into a WW2 Japanese like invasion. But China is an expert of ‘defence’ with their antiquated ‘Great Wall’ mentality. A homogenous society like the Chinese hellbent to preserving their culture and tradition of a continuing living antiquity of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (Zhongguo) is virtually indefeasible. The average Chinese knows how the Western mind thinks but the converse is not true. To win any battle you must first ‘know thy enemy’! And the Chinese are genetically engineered and hardwired through generations of drought and famine and abject poverty and hunger to suffer for Zhongguo and for the survival of the ‘species’. And they are not individually minded or self-centred. They think and move like a mass collective marching to the same beat. Ask any American frontline veteran of the Korean War!
Vincent Cheok @ https://whirlwindrambler.com/
the Chinese will think like how they play their chinese chess which is quicker and more offensive than the Western chess
"china is 4 times the size of the us. both in geographically and population then us"
What an illiterate but then you can’t even spell your name correctly.
WuKong Sun Well said comrade, 0.5RMB for you
We live in a world of lies, and everything can happen … The project of the Chinese, everything rolled, as if they had thought to succeed and also, they deserve it for their own merits. What exists, is a fact of the past, bad, terible, genocide in exchange for money that goes to the hands of the owners of the World, while the citizenship dies of deficiencies, Etc. I want the change, we need it and, hopefully, the next movations, are for a more humanly decent life … Vfg
Vivimos en un mundo de mentira, y todo puede suceder… El proyecto de los chinos, sale todo rodado, como si lo hubiesen pensado para triunfar y además, se lo merecen por méritos propios. Lo que existe, es un hecho del pasado, malo, terrible, genocidio a cambio de dinero que va a parar a las manos de los dueños del Mundo, mientras la ciudadanía muere por carencias, Etc. Yo quiero el cambio, lo necesitamos y, esperemos que, los próximos movimientos, sean para una vida más humana y decente… Vfg
Richard Truong I do care because China is TBTF IMHO at this time.
Ahson Aftab , China is not a superpower. It is a regional power. I haven’t seen the PLA patrolling three large oceans at the same time? They can only project power in some parts of Asia. And just how many ships does China’s navy have? The same is true for India. They too are a regional power. Russia is a gas filling station with nukes and a small navy. Their air force is comparable to the US but navies determine the outcome in conventional wars. It always has and to date still does. Putin has played a bad poker hand tactically that any card shark would envy. His strategies not so much. His dumping of the dollar for gold has cost his reserves to be cut in half. Not smart. He is overextended in the Middle East. Not smart. He needs China more than China needs him. Not smart. His economy is in the dumper. The oligarchs can’t be happy suffering under US sanctions and the W. Europe also in sync with the US on sanctions. Iran is a regional power. It should not be trifled with in the Middle East. It is a real power in that region. Trump IMHO has shot himself and the US in the foot by antagonizing Iran and placing sanctions on them. Cooler heads in the US need to prevail otherwise the Middle East may combust in the not too distant future. Iran is a basket case of an economy in that 80% of its exports are oil and nat gas. The economy is another giant filling station that is not diversified. What happens when the price of oil depreciates? Like all nations dependent upon one commodity for revenue it will suffer bigly. China is not insular. The US is more insular than China. You need to brush up on what China exports and imports vis-a-vis the US. Russia is not important economically. They are smaller than Italy as to GDP. If not for nukes and regional power status no one would care about Mother Russia. India could be a rival of China’s down the road. At this time IMHO, Japan is the threat to China should Trump or the US retrench due to economic doldrums. TBD. We agree that the world has changed from 25 years ago. Since neither of us have a crystal ball we don’t know what will happen by 2043. As to China’s outstanding loans, when a banker calls in bad loans they must write-off a portion of the principal. Venezuela’s debt owed to China is for all tense and purposes gone. Can China absorb the loss. Yes. Can they absorb the losses of Pakistan, Kenya, Italy, Greece, etc. should a debt crises across the globe ensue? No.
Franklin Roosevelt I’d bet my money on Russia/ China/ Iran coalition any day. The West has nothing much to offer the east now. Other than Intel, MS, Apple, Boeing and LM/ GE and a handful of corporations left who can make a buck, Western (US in particular) industry lies in tatters. Once these BRI/ NSTC projects come together, they will transform the region. At least these eastern powers are doing something. I don’t see the West doing anything other than bikering and losing to these three countries, everywhere. China’s $4.5 trillion soverign fund, its 7% annual growth etc etc, even in these tough times….and Russia and Iran’s massive natural resources and geo-political clout almost guarantee a result in their favor. Won’t happen overnight, but it will. China will gradually find new markets to whatever its lost in the US, and as far as those BRI loans go, there’s always the ‘takeover’ and manage the assets option. What China has invested in these countries is money outta its own pocket, so it will probably like to manage these assets to recoup. However, it’s far from certain that the BRI will fail.. It has potential, just by shear weight of population/ momentum and location of the client countries like Turkey, Iran and Pak etc. It’s wishful thinking that an investment of billions in infrastructure will somehow result in failure.
Ahson Aftab , We will have to agree to disagree. To retort or comment anymore since you are not responding to my questions becomes nonsensical.
President Trump will break China , and this is all on China they could have been a peaceful country but china has chosen the path of pain.So be it.
The last thread by Jeff Voeks says it all———-Donald John Trump will break the Chinese——–I am sorry if I offend anyone BUT since Xi became President for Life I now call him "KING" Xi. The funny thing about Xi was this BLUNDER of being President for Life has caused the dude to go slip sliding away with this trade fight with Trump——it was a bad move and it will cost him dearly. The disease of arrogance can be terminal——–Trump is not like the weak, coward Obama——–Trump is not DUMB like George Walker Bush (who will go down in History if History is told honestly as the worst US President.)———Trump is not Bill Clinton who sold out America with these horrible trade deals and Trump is not George Herbet Bush who if he had won a second term was the US Global Master and when he lost to Clinton in 1992 passed along the Global playbook to Clinton. Here is the deal——–Donald John Trump is the US President and his mission is to slow down the Chinese train——–and YES he will succeed——-MONEY talks and BULLSHIT walks———-just look at the Chinese stockmarket———it is in a bear market and it has been years since it hit all time highs. I will say this——-in the end the Americans will stand aside as the Chinese will become top dog are the two World Powers will just co-exist BUT that ain’t going to happen till at least 2032!!
Jeff Voeks, Donald Trump relied on Chinese in HK to rescue him from falling into bankruptcy twice before. Those bailed him out said Donald Trump likes to sue a lot but not much brain or gut. Those HK tycoons tested his gut before engaging him in business by betting on one million dollars a par on a golf game, but Donald Trump declined. Donald Trump is not a big shot to play big game with China, in fact the Trump administration stuffed with people with small minds for small games but with a big mouth loose cannon.
On the other hand there is no pain no gain, if the American expect to gain without pain, then the American indeed are in decline, they are lazy, greedy, soft and expecting unearned rewards.
Franklin Roosevelt, can the USA be broke? No, USA prints its dollars thru the thin air and pays everything with that dollars painted thru the thin air. So how can BRI be broke? As China funds the BRI with RMB printed like the USD. You are showing the Americans are uneducated, with a mindset belonging to the past, stalled in the old days of colonialism, constrained by the zero-sum cold war mentality.
The West (Europeans and their offshoots like the American, Aussie, etc.) is where is now, because of those hundreds of millions of people all over the world who were robbed and murdered, those who become victims of their very madness of colonialism and orientalism, of the crusades and the slave and Opium trades. Cathedrals and palaces, museums and theatres, train stations – all had been constructed on horrid foundations of bones and blood, and amalgamated by tears.
The West squandered all the wealth they obtained thru stealing, looting and murdering hundreds of millions of people all over the world in the scrabbling of a dog-eat-dog play rough over the monopoly to plunder the rest of the world in two World Wars, one on the edge of Armageddon, and on the verge of another Armageddon. It proves the West is incapable of bringing peace and prosperity to the mankind because of their flawed culture, civilization and religion. The chaos and suffering of the world in the last few hundreds of years under the dominance the West proves they are a failure.
Any money spent in Africa is better letting the West to have, because the Africans can not start wars that will destroy this globe like the haunted and sick West.
Trump is just another brainless puppet like all other puppets before him 🙂