When future historians look back into 2022, they will be spoiled for choice when asking the question:
What was the most important thing that happened that year?
Brexit, Chexit, Ruxit or Trumpit?
Was the collapse of the world’s sixth largest economy, Britain, fueled in part by its reckless exit from the European Union in 2020?
it was the attempt crazy Vladimir Putin to wipe Ukraine off the map, which cut Russia off from the West, what I call Ruxitwreaking havoc on the world’s food and energy markets?
It was the almost total contagion of the Republican Party with the Big lie from Donald Trump that the 2020 election, or Trumpit, has been stolen, which is eroding our democracy’s most valuable asset: our ability to transfer power peacefully and legitimately?
Or it was China’s push under the president Xi Jinping for Chexit, the end of four decades of steady integration of the Chinese economy with the West, an end symbolized by the shorthand popularized by New York Times Beijing colleague Keith Bradsher to describe where are Western multinationals?
They plan to set up their next factory: “ABC-everywhere except China”. (ABC – everywhere except China)
It is difficult to decide on one.
And just listing them all together tells you how fundamental 2022 has become in history.
But my vote goes to Chexit.
We have had four decades of economic integration between the United States and China that have brought great benefits to American consumers.
It led to new export opportunities for some Americans and unemployment for others, depending on the industry they were in.
It helped get hundreds of millions of Chinese people out Extreme poverty.
It suppressed inflation and worked to prevent any war between the great powers.
In general, we will miss that era now that it’s gone, because our world will be less prosperous, less integrated and less stable from a geopolitical point of view.
But he’s gone.
As Chinese New Yorker Evan Osnos noted in October:
“In 2012, 40% of Americans had an unfavorable view of China; today, more than 80% do, according to the Pew Research Center. “
If China had a democratic government, someone there right now would surely ask to know:
“How did we lose America?”
Break
The United States is not blameless in the erosion of this relationship.
Since World War II, we have never had a geopolitical rival who was our closest partner both economically and militarily.
We have never felt comfortable growing challenge of Beijing, especially as China was not fueled by oil but by savings, fatigue and duties, that is, the willingness to sacrifice oneself to achieve national greatness, with a strong emphasis on education and science.
That was us.
But much more is in China.
To appreciate how much China has lost to the United States, you could start with this question in Beijing:
“How come he had the largest and most powerful lobby in Washington, and it didn’t cost him a dime, yet it ruined everything? “
I am referring to the United States-China Business Council and the United States-China Chamber of Commerce.
These powerful business groups, representing America’s largest multinationals, have lobbied for nearly four decades to increase trade with China and investments in and from China that are win-win.
The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China did the same.
Today, these pressure groups have remained largely silent.
What happened?
It was the culmination of four trends.
The first began in 2003, shortly after China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (thanks to the United States), when the Chinese prime minister, the main proponent of market reforms Zhu RongjiI quit.
Zhu wanted American companies to be in China because he believed Chinese companies had to compete with the best at home to compete effectively in the world.
But Zhu was opposed by many of China’s inland provinces, which were dominated by state-owned Chinese industries that had no interest or ability to compete globally as China’s coastal provinces would.
And they became more and more influential.
When China joined the WTO and gained massive duty-free or low-tariff access to Western markets, he vowed to sign a WTO side procurement agreement that would limit China’s ability to discriminate against foreign suppliers when making large government purchases.
But China never signed it.
Instead, it continued to direct its extraordinary state purchasing power to its state-owned industries and continued subsidizing them also.
Too many Chinese industries have simply copied or stolen the intellectual property of Western companies that had built factories in China.
Chinese industries then used their protected domestic market to scale up and then competed against those same Western companies at home and abroad,
And they received subsidies from Beijing.
As I explained in a column from 2018: Even when the US protested at the WTO, as it did when China unfairly kept US credit card companies out and then lost the arbitration case at the WTO, China has however walked slowly to deliver on its promise to do so in 17 years.
At that point, Chinese companies like UnionPayso dominated the Chinese credit card market that American companies like Visa kept the crumbs.
Is it any wonder that EU exports to China are currently only slightly higher than those to Switzerland?
This is why many American and European companies have switched from looking the other way at Chinese market manipulations, because they were still making money there, to complaining to their governments, but asking them not to complain to Beijing for fear of retaliation, to look today to expand their supply chains everywhere except China.
Even Manzana it is now diversifying the production on which to rely more Vietnam and India.
“The US business community loved China: there were always tensions, but before that there was a sense of opportunity and partnership.
It took a lot of work to get China back into the business world to get mad at China, but China did it, “Jim McGregor, who lived in China for 30 years as a business consultant and wrote three books, told me. on the subject.
No wonder an American business executive who had worked extensively in China told me after Trump started his trade war with Beijing that Trump was not the American president the United States deserved, but he was the American president who china deserved.
Someone had to decide the game on our side.
Now Xi has done the same for him.
As Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, said in an interview, Xi’s election to an unprecedented third term on a platform that emphasizes Marxism and market ideology and pragmatism “I shows that the opening up of the Chinese economy is not going to continue … We must assume that China is differentiating itself from other countries and will build at bench model to the liberal and market-oriented Western model.
The second trend dates back to the aftermath of Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership tried to dampen the democratic aspirations of Chinese youth with a fire hose of hyper-nationalism.
My Beijing Times colleague Vivian Wang recently interviewed political writer Wang Xiaodong, long considered the standard-bearer of nationalism chino, who once said that “China’s advance is unstoppable.”
However, Wang Xiaodong told the Times that under Xi, the Chinese nationalist movement, fueled by other social media influencers, had gone too far:
“I have been called the godfather of nationalism. I created them. But I never told them they were so crazy“.
I tested it in 2018 when I was in China talking to the government and corporate figures.
When I mentioned China’s unfair trading practices, the rejection sounded like this:
“Do you realize that the Americans are too late?
We are too big for them to keep pushing us. You should have done it ten years ago. “
I replied like that arrogance gets countries in trouble.
Which leads to a third trend: a Chinese foreign policy much more aggressive than it is trying to assert its dominance across the South China Sea, scaring off key neighbors China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India and Taiwan.
But the latest trend may be the most daunting: instead of importing effective vaccines Created in the West to keep the pandemic at bay, China relies on a “zero COVID” policy that uses entire blocked cities and all new tools. of a surveillance state: drones, facial recognition, ubiquitous CCTV, cell phone tracking, and even restaurant patrons, who must present a QR code to be scanned and registered.
Seems like Xi’s strategy to keep them from erupting so much andCOVID likes freedom.
What Xi fails to realize is that all the most advanced technologies of the 21st century, such as semiconductors and mRNA vaccines, require Chains from great global offer and complex, because no country can be the best in each of its increasingly sophisticated components.
But such supply chains require a lot of collaboration and trust between partners, and that’s exactly what Xi has wasted in the last decade.
Xi’s belief that China can be the best all alone It’s like believing that the Chinese basketball team can always beat the most famous basketball team in the world.
Call me doubtful. But also call me worried.
I confess, I don’t like to use the term “China”. I much prefer “one sixth of humanity that speaks Chinese”.
Capture the true scale of what we are dealing with.
I want to see the Chinese people prosper; it’s good for the world.
But today they are going in the wrong direction.
And when a sixth of humanity takes a wrong turn in our still highly connected world (China, for example, still has nearly $ 1 trillion in debt from the US Treasury),
Everyone will feel your pain.
c.2022 The New York Times Company
Source: Clarin
