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China's "Barely Noticed By The West" Pivot To Everywhere
Authored by Pepe Escobar, originally posted at RT.com,
The world’s leading economy is on a roll as it enters a new year in the Chinese zodiac. Welcome to the Year of the Sheep. Or Goat. Or Ram. Or, technically, the Green Wooden Sheep (or Goat).
Even the best Chinese linguists can’t agree on how to translate it into English. Who cares?
The hyper-connected average Chinese – juggling among his five smart devices (smartphones, tablets, e-readers) – is bravely advancing a real commercial revolution. In China (and the rest of Asia) online transactions are now worth twice the combined value of transactions in the US and Europe.
As for the Middle Kingdom as a whole, it has ventured much further than the initial proposition of producing cheap goods and selling them to the rest of the planet, virtually dictating the global supply chain.
Now Made in China is going global. No less than 87 Chinese enterprises are among the Fortune Global 500 – their global business booming as they take stakes in an array of overseas assets.
Transatlantic trade? That’s the past. The wave of the future is Trans-Pacific trade as Asia boasts 15 of the world’s top twenty container ports (with China in pride of place with Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou).
Sorry, Britannia, but it’s Asia – and particularly China – who now rule the waves. What a graphic contrast with the past 500 years since the first European trading ships arrived in eastern shores in the early 16th century.
Then there’s the spectacular rise of inland China. These provinces have a huge population of at least 720 million people and a GDP worth at least $3.6 trillion. As Ben Simpferdorfer detailed in his delightful The Rise of the New East (Palgrave MacMillan), “over 200 major Chinese cities with populations greater than 750,000 lay some 150 miles inland from the coast. In effect, we are observing the rise of the world’s largest landlocked economy, and that will change the way China looks at the world. From Guangzhou’s factories to Shanghai’s bankers, all are starting to look inward, not outward.”
This new way China looks at the world – and at itself - certainly has not registered in the way the world, especially the West, looks at China. In the West, the spin is always about China’s economy slowing down and bubbles about to burst. The real story is how China will develop and modernize its mid-and-large sized cities with populations larger than 750,000. China concentrating on itself is now as important as China spreading its tentacles across the world.
This is what’s at the heart of Beijing’s breathless “urbanization drive.”
During the 1990s, the imperative was massive investment in manufacturing. During the 2000s, the buzzword was massive investments in infrastructure - and a property boom. Now China is tweaking its model – from large-scale economic restructuring to absolutely necessary improvement of political governance.
Meet our new best friends
Geopolitically, China has also tweaked its model, but the West, especially the US, has barely noticed it.
Essentially, the Beijing leadership finally got fed up with trying to manage a possible reset of the China-US strategic relationship, and be treated as an equal. Exceptionalists don’t do equality. So Beijing came up with its own response to the Obama administration’s political/military “pivot to Asia” – originally announced, and that’s quite significant, at the Pentagon.
Thus, in late November 2014, during the Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference in Beijing, President Xi Jinping made an earth-shattering announcement; from now on China would stop treating the US – and the EU – as its main strategic priority. The new focus is on the fellow BRICS group of emerging powers, especially Russia; Asian neighbors; and top nations of the Global South, referred to as “major developing powers” (kuoda fazhanzhong de guojia).
This is not as much a Chinese pivot to Asia as a Chinese pivot to selected nations in the Global South. And based on a “new type of international relations centered on ‘win-win’ cooperation” – not the bully-or-bomb exceptionalist approach.
Key advisors of this policy should include Professor Yan Xuetong, Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, and very close to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligentsia.
China’s new foreign policy and strategic configuration is all the more evident in the courting of Asian neighbors, invited to embark on China’s extremely ambitious twin strategy and the greatest trade/commerce story of the young 21st century: the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, in short “Belt and Road initiative,” as it’s known in China, now officially launched with the first $40 billion attributed to a Silk Road Fund.
The enormity of the challenge is on a par with Beijing’s ambition: a pan-Eurasia trade/commerce utopia weaved by high-speed rail, fiber optic networks, ports and pipelines, and connecting East Asia, Central Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Europe.
Of course there will be myriad problems. As in the Chinese commercial push clashing with foreign interests; China having to learn on the go how to manage different cultural sensibilities; and how to coordinate a sort of global trade campaign capable of creating myriad of political and economic effects. The Chinese are already worried about finding the right terminology - so the Chinese dream, internally and globally, won't be lost in translation.
Plenty to be excited about then as the Year of the Sheep (or Goat) starts. What’s certain is that the Chinese caravan, much in contrast with the dogs of war - and austerity – pivoting across the West, has already pivoted towards “win-win” pan-Eurasia integration.
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Stopped reading here: The world’s leading economy is on a roll as it enters a new year in the Chinese zodiac.
I underlined the punchline
I'm sure they'll do everything they can to aid us and our Western Banking allies, like buying even more gold bullion, because they know that helps us
American buyers of cheap chinese crap pay for the global expansion of their future overlords.
Whoever wrote this script is a twisted genius.
My condolonces to the physically, mentally, spiritually and financially raped population of America (and the world really)....
What crap.?. your i-phones are produced in China.
@mountainview ...You say that as if that is a good thing...
But...but...the USSA does the whole bomb thingy so well.
They do it for the good of others, freedom'n'democracy ya know.
<vomit>
Oh yeah? Well China may have industry, improving conditions for their people, massive civil works, and improving infrastructure but we have diversity, campus rape culture, F35s, Obama phones, Kardashians, George Soros, and Miley. So there.
And don't forget, we have Al Sharpton!
Yeah, right.
They are thinking about moving it to Bangladesh.
Like a friend of mine likes to say, "We're (Americans) fucked. Then the Chinese come."
The banksters need to repay us.
"Hey, your Chinese Chinese food isn't like our American Chinese food."
Well, for one thing, in China they just call it "Food." And when I've been in China, I've always been able to pick out the good Chinese Restaurants. They're the ones with all the Chinese people in them.
Bah-dump-bump-tshhhh
I haven't noticed much of a "no bullying or bombing" policy when China stole an island in the Spratlys and started building a naval base. At least they have the sense not to try to steal Senkaku from Japan -- yet.
All things considered, China is certainly "on a roll" compared to the USSA.....
As long as the yuan is still tied to the dollar, the USA doesn't have to worry too much.
True. But it only takes one statement to end that state of affairs. When it suits the Chinese government, the peg will be gone. Maybe tomorrow, or maybe twenty years from now, or maybe never. When it suits the Chinese rulers.
True. But who will be the consumer powerhouse to import all of the Chinese stuff?
NOT USA, surely. Been downtown any large US city and seen the homeless population? Seen how the MIddle Class in US is dissapearing fast?
Enough Americans have been importing enough Chinese goods to keep the ship afloat to date. My question is "who replaces the USA?" The answer is no one.
what is keeping the ship afloat isn't American spending, but Chinese lending. The US is insolvent.
The Chinese represent the largest market for their production. And the middle class there already spends an average of $35,000.00 US on a wedding. I don't think you understand how fu-king broke we are. We are not going to be the consumers for Chinese goods, as you put it. Especially after the Fed finishes destroying our currency, and the world defaults to other, more reliable, currency. At that point, inflation will be exported to US, and the holders of the world reserve currency will turn the whole game around and stick it up OUR ass for the next 40 years. So we can hope that the recent US college grad will be the "powerhouse consumer" of Chinese goods while he's paying back his $40,000 college loan and trying to buy a car and house at the same time, but I sure wouldn't count on it.
You still cannot even drink the tap water there and the air is dangerously deadly polluted 360/365 days of the year.
Remember America in the 60's and 70's? Oh wait, maybe you are too young.
I do and I remember one environmental scandal after another. All major rivers were severely polluted, the air was foul in every major city, some worse than others, and the water treatment plants were putting out shit for water. And that is just the highlights.
Do some research of the issues back then. You might be very surprised. We very nearly died from our Silent Spring.
Love Canal and that river??? that was flammable.
The Cuyahoga River
And American industry can still almost 'compete' with China and the world...except for the 38% corporate tax rate......
Except the 'net' average corporate tax rate is less than the 'net' average personal tax rate, even when you factor in half of Americans pay no Federal income tax. I wonder why?
Please elaborate.
You really believe we would have eradicated songbirds, and ourselves in the process, with pesticides?
Dramatic license. I just renewed it yesterday and wanted to try it out. Runs great. :-0
That book, more than anything else, turned the public's attention to the problems we were, and still are, facing. I find it sad those under 30 (40?) have little awareness of recent history.
Wow, just wow. I haven't read the book and currently am not planning to ever do so.
I consider it the trojan horse that took Scientific Method largely out of the picture for assessment of costs and benefits of first pesticides, then chemicals in general, and finally every technical invention.
You might want to read up on other pieces of recent history too:
- Did Malaria ever exist in the US, and if yes how was it eradicated?
- How many people die every year worldwide from Malaria?
- How much progress has been made in the treatment of Malaria patients, over the last 40 years?
- How much progress has the development of a vaccine (or similar) made, against Malaria?
- How likely is it a breakthrough will be made soon, especially considering the 20 year history of expectations/promises of such?
But it's cool hey, it's only brown people dying or suffering.
And we stick to the propaganda the pesticide is about as dangerous as spraying Plutonium dust, so we won't even contemplate starting a discussion on limited use.
Yep. PCB's in the Hudson, etc.. All the Chinese have to do is to forego the use of LONG term pollutants. Because we've seen that the environment recovers from pollution from lots of things, once the feeding into it has stopped. You simply need to avoid the dozen or so of the real nasty things. But our government simply won't forego the nastiest thing, which supercedes anything we ever dumped into a river here. That happens to be nuclear weapons. The US is still "nuclear weapon happy". It's nice to know there won't be lead, or PCB's, or chromic acid in our water, just deadly radioactive isotopes unless they change their imperialist plans.
Pity the folks who do ot even know their own history.
http://www.businessinsider.com/manhattan-smog-photos-1966-2013-1
Water and air pollution can be fixed quite quickly in a society motivated to do something about the problems.
Here drink this glass from the Hudson.
Everybody has bottled water brought into their home, even the poor people. Nobody cares about drinking the toilet water.
Also. the residents of those "dangerously polluted cities" live longer than Americans.
The above post is an example of the quality thinking that can result from ingesting too much Mercury.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/china-health-miracle
"Hyper-connected" == Out of touch with nature. Are you sayijng "The hyper-connected average Chinese – juggling among his five smart devices", transacting 2x his US/EU lemmingpart, is twice as heavily engrained in the matrix?
Am I the only person who googled the definition of pivot to make sure it means what I think it means?
as a noun:
the central point, pin, or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates
as a verb:
turn on or as if on a pivot
Thank you Sherlock Holmes ...
Yes.
Stop whoring for Wall Street.
http://www.showrealhist.com/yTRIAL.html
http://patrick.net/?p=1223928
The only weapon the West retains to maintain its dominance is nuclear. China's 'pivot' away from the West was inevitable and also obvious, thus the growing belligerence and increasing impotence of the West evident for all to see.
The sun is setting in the West and rising in the East. Crumbling Empires do not go quietly....but eventually they do go.
It was idiotic for the US to announce a pivot to Asia. That was drawing a bullseye on China. So expect retaliation.
The US economy has been inflated for 3 decades by understating inflation by at least 3%, and such gimmicks as owner-occupied imputed rents (7.5% of GDP) and intangibles ($500 billion a year for iTunes and such stuff). How much greater will the Chinese GDP be if they resort to outright lying and manipulation as in the land of the free? Owner-occupied imputed rents would boost Chinese GDP by 20% to 25% given their much larger population.
And then destabilizing Ukraine and demonizing Putin is forcing a Sino-Russian alliance. And the Nobel Prize Winner is busy bombing seven Muslim countries after having wasted $6 trillion in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Washington's hubris knows no bounds. Nor does its idiocy.
The Chinese have been looking for ways to use their storehouse of US Dollars for a long time. About 6 years ago, I went to Shanghai to manage a corporate meeting I do most years. At the last moment, I lost the use of the hotel ballroom where I needed to set up, for the first day I was supposed to be working. The Chinese government just took it, for a meeting with the Chinese Foreign and Finance Ministries with the Finance Ministers of almost every nation in Africa. The hotel was almost sealed up, with metal detectors and heavily armed guards you could see, and who knows what I couldn't see.
If the US had a summit of 47 or so African Finance Ministers recently, working out deals, I hadn't heard of it.
The Chinese aren't at all surprised by the way NATO went after the oil infrastructure they had paid to build in Libya, nor the war that broke out to disrupt their oil operations in Sudan/South Sudan/Darfur, nor the violence that interferes with their oil pipeline projects going from South Sudan to the Red Sea. Not to mention the mercenary wars that just happen to flare up all around everywhere China invests in East Africa, anywhere within or within striking distance of the collapsed state of Congo.
China isn't going to invade anybody. They'll go after anybody who messes around on their borders, as they have in Korea, Viet Nam, Tibet, India, etc. There's no defending the brutality the Chinese regime is willing to use. But it's not hard to see what their strategy is and how they plan to pursue it. They're going to use their US foreign exchange to gain maximum leverage over the things they need.
We in the US tend to think of China as an emerging 3rd World nation. They see themselves as an Empire that has existed for 5000 years and has just had a couple of slow centuries since the British and Americans made them allow the opium trade at gunpoint. Sun Tzu was Chinese, if you recall (they certainly do). They'll fight the battle they want to fight, where they want to fight it, by the means they choose. If it takes several centuries, that's OK with them. If they have to retreat with heavy losses in order to win, they'll do that too. They don't care about the next daily news cycle, nor the next US election. Chou En Lai said in the 1970s about the French Revolution, "It's too early to tell." He wasn't just being cute when he said that.
China will look after Chinese interests, with Chinese methods, on China's timetable.
They'll go after anybody who messes around on their borders,
Their constantly EXPANDING borders.
The USSA borders do not need to expand. They don't really exist (unless you are inside them).
Those borders from the inside exist only in our minds, an alternative reality created by the rich and powerful to herd the slaves into different plantations.
"My master's country is better than your masters country. So there!"
Our freedom begins when our minds are no longer bordered.
"Kaiserhoff": What do you mean? Tibet? What's constantly expanding about China's borders? I'm being serious, not snarky.
The Senkaku Islands thing is a manufactured dispute, left over from a sloppy treaty at the end of WWII. The disputes with Russia date back to another poorly-defined treaty at the end of the 1905 war. Other than that, China's borders have been remarkably stable for a couple thousand years, more or less, as far as I know. Am I missing something?
You are right about the islands. China has no prospects as a sea power, but since WWII the have taken over all of Tibet most of Nepal and recently, a third of Kashmir (from India). They continue to move west while making noise about the east.
That is why any alliance between Russia and China is such a bad joke. China wants Siberia, and they may well get it. In any case, they are competing with the Russians for control of Mongolia and almost everything in that area. Zionist media is a sick joke.
Thanks for your response. I hadn't been seeing it that way, and I'm not sure I do now, but I'll most definitely give it some thought. I'd certainly never thought about a Chinese ambition to own Siberia, as opposed to renting it or buying its products with the proceeds of its foreign trade. Chinese ForEx, particular from the US, is kind of like cornering the market in popsicles on a very hot day; a great moneymaker for a very short time, and if you don't move quickly enough, just a sticky soggy mess. I'll have to do some more reading.
I've never seen China (never mind Russia) as a benign power, but I have a lot more exposure to the sordid underbelly of US Empire so my first tendency is to support whomever opposes it. The enemy of that which I oppose is not necessarily someone I would support either, however (to torture a phrase).
swmnguy: Excellent analysis, thank you.
This, this is THE story. All else is U.S. bravado and bluster. Planting the narrative of "what interests we explore in common will help us prosper together" is very different from "if you don't do as i say (or often even if you do) I will make you a nation of slaves." China is the Scandavian design, MacIntosh philosophized, Googley ubiquitous point upon whith this century's pivots turn. Pepe Escobar stays at the head of the class.
Zion stole the west with their "printed" theft, fiat, only to find the east in possession of it.
The inevitable global war will not be about civilization, but about Zion trying to steal back what they stole.
The banksters need to repay us.
...but betting on a hard-eight. Welcome to the year of th Goatse.
"...the spin is always about China’s economy slowing down and bubbles about to burst."
Excellent point. Been a revolving door of Chinese economic 'implosion' stories since long about 2009. Any day now in fact... Gee, sorta like the daily 24/7 imminent demise/implosion/failure, etc., of the Russian Federation and its leader... Any day now I tell Ya...!!!
Maybe you should tell Xi and the boys before they blow $1.1T then. ;)
Some countries send the military to invade and bomb other countries, making enemies everywhere.
China sends money and cheap products, constructs roads and infrastructure, making friends everywhere.
We'll see which approach will succeed.
Agreed vincenze, but it is also important to remember that a mercantilist will do business with just about anyone. That's not a slap to the Chinese, it is simply in their way and anyone who has done business with them (I have for the past 15 years on a daily basis) knows this. You are a 'friend' as long as there is business to be done and that they benefit. Like the old saying: 'Nothing personal, just business'...
Everywhere with an oil company for sale. Wake up.
The US is looking behind and don't realize that when the SHTF, China & the BRICS will be doing their own thing whilst the Zionist controlled West wonder WTF happened.
A very good piece to string the focus of China's foreign policy shift. I've witness these shifts first hand and I can tell you when the Chinese government set their goal, they poud away. Now I just need to figure where the fark I can squeeze in to make another fortune. hehehe.
Check this out at Google Trends
WAR - worldwide - 2004 - now: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=WAR
WAR - China - 2004 - now: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=WAR&geo=CN&cmpt=q&tz=
Something brewing there?
Speak for yourself.
In the end the industrial disease will just meet collapse, whether it's US made or China made. A disease simply remains a disease. Either you treat it or you go down with it. Really.
Fuck the author's misbegotten obsession calling USA FU policy as "exceptionalist" because that's really a slur against honest self-government models. The problem is not that.
Banker imperialism that has taken over elections, self government, and made nation states irrelevant. Hence, there's nothing exceptional to what is now going on because it's what you'd expect as things devolve back to another top-down diktat system.
What made the USA 'exceptional' was it's declaration of self government 200 years ago and the dispensing of class systems. Historically, that condition is very exceptional. It only occurs very infrequently and only lasts for brief periods of time. And........ it's gone serfs.
If this is the case, what is going to happen to that ambitious Pacific – Atlantic cross Nicaragua Canal?
Of course, with other selected locations of the Global South, China's approach is, "It's all ours. Stand down."
Hey we "pivot everywhere" too.
We just do it with hellfire missiles, drones and bombs.
I give it three years before fedgov starts drilling US shitizens here at home with all the above.
15?
We'll get the details from mainstream media in about 10 years or so.