Settling of accounts with China
The small global village blurred by Herbert Marshall McLuhan entered an orbit of geopolitical and geoeconomic transformation with the accelerating changes propelled by the regrettable terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States. It marked a watershed, between the recent past, with the end of the Cold War, and the more immediate future, with China playing a preponderant role as a believer in a balance that, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dismantling of the USSR, had leaned favorably towards the binomial of Washington's capitalism: democracy and economic freedom.
In those Twin Towers, besides the very painful loss of more than three thousand human lives of different nationalities, on that fateful day, the possibility of a lasting peace disappeared because the values of democracy in the West and its defense of freedom are a favorite target, not only for the extremist groups of the Middle East, but also for nations like China, Russia or India that have a different way of managing their internal policies and controlling their people.
No one doubts any longer that economic freedom, both of action and of enterprise, is a pivot for private initiative and that the great socio-economic and business structure is based on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. The model of subsidiary poverty of the former USSR has shown that socialism is the cancer of private initiative, of production, of ambition and of progress. Take Cuba, for example, or North Korea.
Nevertheless, China is defending its place in the world leadership in a variegated way due to the weight of its economy, and it does so, moreover, by reaffirming its communist vocation in its Constitution, as well as a market economy in full deployment and vortex. More and more Chinese and businessmen of this Asian nation occupy relevant positions of power and fortune beyond their natural hosts.
There is a dispute over corporate control positions in the large multinationals, the usual American magnates have been joined by new opponents and are Chinese... more and more Chinese capital is buying up European companies and penetrating Latin American and American corporations. But behind this money there are people, human beings who profess ideologies, beliefs and creeds that interpret their values according to the education they received, and the way they have absorbed the interpretation of the world.
Since September 11, 2001, the Washington binomial of democracy and economic freedom that it waves as the banner of capitalism has been met with an opposite: political oligarchy and economic freedom. China has shown that it can be a once-mighty nation that allows its citizens to become rich, but without practicing the values of Western democracy; without relinquishing political control of an oligarchy that believes its citizens are lambs at its mercy.
It is true that China was not behind the 9/11 attacks, because there are comments and pending legal actions against Al Qaeda terrorist cells, which were also sheltered by some means in Saudi Arabia, but no other country benefited more from the fog of uncertainty and fear that those events opened: China joined the WTO three months after the attacks.
And almost two decades later, today, the red dragon is an undisputed economic leader that, in addition, claims its own political and military leadership in the world; its tentacles are bifurcated in all continents with its New Silk Road. All it does is consolidate its economic expansion and becomes a new investor in infrastructure in a lot of countries in need of it.
China, unlike the United States, has not treated the rest of the world with the scourge of the stick and the carrot, we do not remember seeing it at war with Vietnam, or openly threatening the Korean "fat boy" or ripping apart multilateralism or global consensus with its hands. Besides, there is the stereotype that does not help the Americans either. If we think of a Chinese person, we associate him with a hard-working people who can imitate even the inimitable and sell us anything; instead, we associate weapons, violence and arrogance when we think of an American.
In the face of this arrogance, we arrive confined in the middle of the 21st century - in April 2020 - the worst leap year of our lives with an invisible enemy that the doctors themselves do not even know in its real dimension; while the dead are increasing in various parts of the world and the confinement continues in the midst of an economic debacle, Trump is ready to investigate whether or not China created the virus on purpose... Trump wants his 9/11, I say this so that we remember Bush, of course.