China Pivots Everywhere
By Pepe Escobar
February 20, 2015 "ICH"
- "RT"
- 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 the
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.
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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.
Pepe Escobar’s latest
book is
Empire of Chaos. Follow him on
Facebook.