CHINA ADVANCE TO UP!

While the Anglo-American West continues to play the game of cheating and extortion, China continues to emerge as Asia's commercial locomotive for the whole world

 

By Sir Charlattam

More than a century has passed when, from London, the Foreign Office of the British Empire struggled to hold on to its colonies in Asia, especially in Qing imperial China. As always, the tongues of British gentlemen's intrigue were supplemented by the bayonets and cannons of the Royal Navy which they kept in the colonies. When the uprising of the peasantry in northern China occurred in 1900 and while Her Gracious Majesty extended her unwavering support to the Chinese Empress by sending Royal Welch Fusliers and British Royal Navy light infantry (including the 26th and 30th Bombay), the boys in the ‘SSB office’ (parent of MI6) were negotiating in the shadows with the Chinese nationalists not to placate or quash them but to be ready to join them if that was expedient.

Deception and betrayal were the building blocks of the British Empire and we all know that.

But since Mao's communists triumphed in 1949, that disorganised China of corrupt nobles, uneducated peasants and a primitive state gave way to what over the decades would become a powerful state, independent of the Western shadow and still rolling with hopes of rising to the sky.

Despite the problems caused by Washington's operations to try to curb China's legitimate ambitions for growth in the trade arena, China is forging ahead, albeit with some bumps in its domestic economy, but the political resolve remains firm and this is not only thanks to a determination by Xi Jinping and the Communist Party's political bureau but also by partners in the global south and potential partners.

Multilateralism remains the north for China and its BRICS partners. From this point of view, there is no doubt that this underpins the race to position itself in all markets with the sole logic of competing healthily on the basis of doing better than its Western and especially American partners. China's logic in this field is to deal with partners, not subjects.

On the contrary, the tariff war launched by Donald Trump and applauded by those who support him in the White House shows that they are afraid of this competition and the clearest reason for this is their own incompetence. It is a mean-spirited logic of which the US has been representative through its ‘economic neoliberalism’ that only thrives on the appropriation of other people's resources, the creation of zones of perpetual conflict that force policies of containment and user interest arising from parasitic financial business.

Aware of this reality and determined not to fall back under foreign domination, Beijing has also developed a respectable military capability, a necessary and self-evident condition for protecting not only its territorial and political sovereignty but also its well-earned commercial potential.

It is precisely through patience, discipline and unrelenting hard work that China has reached its current potential. As we know, patience is one of the characteristics of the Chinese, which they use in politics as well as in all walks of life. It is only because of this quality, which Lao Tse identified with non-action, that the Chinese people endured their most cruel emperors, famines, revolutions and the political shenanigans of the Western colonial powers. This in turn makes them highly disciplined, a quality the West lacks and which their governments view with suspicion. And obviously their industriousness is part of both of these qualities.

While for Washington and its European allies China is a threat to their decaying trade monopoly, for the global south and especially for Latin America and the African continent it is the prospect of a new and independent development, free from the financial governance that the US carries out through its agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank and their respective elites in each of the countries they parasitise.

There is no doubt that this generates fears in the West and because they know it is not possible to confront them directly and immediately, they rely on other Asian actors, especially India to create and nurture a geopolitical competitor sufficiently important to counterbalance and rival the market opportunities that the Chinese are proposing. With nationalist and sectarian-tinged governments like the one we see today with Narendra Modi, those ends are amply satisfied for bureaucrats in London and Washington DC.

Unlike the US and its British partners, China has not used military force or subversive operations (in their various degrees and forms) or economic-financial coercion to displace governments and enter foreign markets. It has done so by working steadily and exercising the patience we have mentioned, and while this takes much longer than Western methods, the results are more lasting and fruitful.