"Because of the credit crisis, a 'Beijing Consensus'
has become popular. The key words are: state capitalism, centralized market
regulation and authoritarian central government. That is a fundamentally
different world and humanity about which, for the moment, America has precious
little to say."
Politics and economics can hardly be clearly
distinguished in the
relations between the United States and China. In the aftermath of the U.N.
climate summit; the announcement by Internet company Google to leave China due
to its structure of censorship; a modest American weapons delivery to Taiwan; a
meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama; and the back-and-forth threats
of protectionist measures as sanctions over violations of World Trade
Organizations (WTO) rules; right now, everything has to do with everything.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
The tone with
which this mixture of politics and economics is discussed is becoming ever-more
heated. Yesterday, Obama announced that the U.S. government would increase the pressure
on China to stop allowing the yuan to remain artificially low in relation to
the dollar.The desire for a more
expensive Chinese currency is long standing, and has grown along with the amount
of China's foreign currency reserves, currently $2.4 trillion.
Until recently,
the Chinese responded graciously, albeit negatively, to this kind of pressure.
Those times are past. China is openly threatening tough countermeasures if, in
its turn, the U.S. government doesn’t block the $6.4 billion weapons deal with
Taiwan.
No one can tell
what kind of verbal altercations will follow. But certainly, these confrontations
aren't only about interests, but reflect a psychological reversal as well. As
the result of the credit crisis, the U.S. and the rest of the Western world is
more uncertain then anytime since the Cold War. Self-confidence is growing in
China, which has hardly been touched by this crisis. According to conservative
estimates, it will be less than fifteen years before China surpasses the United
States as a superpower. It was just 2003 when this was predicted to occur in
about 2040.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
This rate of
acceleration has important political implications. Since the early eighties,
the so-called Washington Consensus (deregulation, liberalization, and
privatization) dominated the world. Because of the credit crisis, a "Beijing
Consensus" has become popular. The key words are: state capitalism,
centralized market regulation and authoritarian central government. That is a
fundamentally different world and humanity about which, for the moment, America
has precious little to say.
This realization
doesn't have to lead to passivity, however. The rise of China is occurring in many
areas. But without the West as a consumer market, China couldn't generate the
double digit growth that it currently enjoys. And without the West's production
of innovative cultural products, even repressive China couldn't keep the
material and spiritual wishes of its citizens in check.
Obama’s recent assertiveness
may be, in the short term, a somewhat impotent gesture. It may also be a basis
for the inevitable shift in geopolitical proportions of the economic one and
two in the world.
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