[Nr.10]

In China neemt men de telefoon vanuit Washington niet meer op. Daar zijn redenen voor. Navolgend artikel gaat op zoek naar de oorzaken.

The Chinese leadership – fed up, at being hectored by US and the EU over
Ukraine - and with the ‘spy balloon’ shoot down being the final straw, has
ceased taking calls from Washington.

European North Atlanticists (Von der Leyen and Annalena Baerbock) did get
to visit China (to relay messages from Team Biden), yet they also got a
frosty warning to cease the attempts to disrupt China’s relations with Russia.

So, Secretary Yellen entered the fray. She delivered a speech on the US-
China relationship. Though billed as a conciliatory gesture (the FT highlighted
its message as being: ‘De-coupling: A disaster for all’), the underlying
‘plumbing’ was ‘anything but [conciliatory]’.

Yellen implied that China had prospered on the back of the global ‘open-
market’ financial order, but that now China was pivoting toward a state-
driven posture; one that is confrontational towards the US and its allies. The
US wants to co-operate, ‘yes’ indeed; but wholly and exclusively on its
terms.

The US seeks constructive engagement, but is subject to the US securing its
security interests and values: “We will clearly communicate to the PRC our
concerns about its behaviour … And we will protect human rights”. Secondly,
“we will continue to respond to China’s unfair economic practices. And we will
continue to make critical investments at home – while engaging with the
world to advance our vision for an open, fair, and rules-based global
economic order”.

Yellen finishes by saying that China must work with the US on issues of
mutual interest, but for the relationship to be healthy, China must ‘play by
today’s international rules’.

In other words, Yellen’s address stands in the long line of Administration
speeches, all exalting the Western-dominated ‘Rules-Based Order’.

Unsurprisingly, China will have none of it -- noting that the US seeks to gain
economically from China, whilst demanding a free hand to pursue exclusively
US interests.

Put simply, the Yellen speech is not only a diplomatic ‘faux pas’ in demanding
China’s subjugation to US setting not just the geopolitical ‘rules’, but also
those of the financial system, the technical protocols, and the manufacturing
standards for the planet.

The speech displays a complete failure to comprehend that the Sino-Russian
‘revolution’ is not confined to the political, but extends to the economic
sphere too. Or is it that the West simply pretends not to notice?

President Xi had made this clear in 2013 when he asked: “Why did the Soviet
Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to
pieces? … To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet
Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate
Stalin - was to wreck chaos on Soviet ideology and engage in historical
nihilism”, Xi said.

Put plainly, Xi was implying that, given the two poles of ideological antinomy
-- that of the Anglo-American construct, on the one hand, and the Leninist
eschatological critique of the western economic system on the other -- the
Soviet “ruling strata had ceased to believe” in the latter, and consequently
had slid into a state of nihilism (with the pivot to the western liberal-market
ideology of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era).

Xi’s point was clear: China had never made this detour. And what Yellen’s
speech wholly misses is this geo-strategic paradigm change: Putin has
brought Russia back, and into broad alignment with China and other Asian
states on economic thinking.

The latter have in effect, been saying for some time that ‘Anglo’ political
philosophy is not necessarily the world’s philosophy. Societies may work best,
Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and others have said, were they to pay less
attention to the individual, and more to the welfare of the group.

Xi Jinping says it straight: “The right of the people to independently choose
their development paths should be respected … Only the wearer of the shoes
knows if they fit or not”.

Marx and Lenin however, were not the only ones to challenge the Anglo-
liberal version: In 1800, Johann Fichte published The Closed Commercial
State; in 1827, Friedrich List published his theories which took issue with the
‘cosmopolitan economics’ of Adam Smith and JB Say. In 1889, Count Sergius
Witte, a Prime Minister in Imperial Russia, published a paper citing List, and
justifying the need for a strong domestic industry, protected from foreign
competition by customs barriers.

Thus, in place of Rousseau and Locke, the Germans offered Hegel. In place of
Adam Smith, they had Friedrich List.

The Anglo-American approach is premised on the basis that the ultimate
measure of a society is its level of consumption. In the long run however, List
argued, a society's well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by
what the society can buy, but by what it can make (i.e. value arising from a
real, self-sufficient economy). The German school argued that emphasizing
consumption would eventually be self-defeating; it would bias the system
away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as
much, or to employ so many.

List was prescient. This is the flaw so clearly now exposed in the Anglo
model: the original failing now aggravated by massive financialization -- a
process that has led to the building of an inverted pyramid of derivative
financial ‘products’ which has sucked the oxygen from the manufacture of
real output. Self-reliance erodes, and a shrinking base of real wealth
creation supports ever-smaller numbers in adequately-paid employment.

Put simply (for Hegel and List said much, more besides), where Putin and Xi
Jinping come together is their shared appreciation of China’s astonishing
sprint to the ranks of an economic superpower. In Putin’s words, China
“managed in the best possible way, in my opinion, to use the levers of central
administration (for) the development of a market economy … The Soviet
Union did nothing like this, and the results of an ineffective economic policy
impacted the political sphere”.

Washington and Brussels clearly don’t ‘get it’. And Yellen’s speech is the
prime ‘exhibit’ of this analytic failure: The world doesn’t work that way
anymore.

BRON
_{Alastair Crooke
29 apr 2023}