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.
