When future historians look to 2022, they will have many alternatives to choose from for the question: what was the most important thing that happened in the year? Brexit, chexit, ruxit or trumpit?
Was the meltdown of the world’s sixth-largest economy, that of the United Kingdom, caused in part by the country’s senseless exit from the European Union in 2020? Was it Vladimir Putin’s demented attempt to wipe Ukraine off the map that uncoupled Russia from the West — what I describe as ruxit — creating chaos in the energy and food markets? It is the contamination of nearly the entire Republican Party by Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — the trumpit — that is eroding our democracy’s most precious asset: the ability to effect a peaceful and peaceful transition of power. legitimate?
Or was it China’s campaign under leader Xi Jinping to effect chexit — the end of four decades of progressive integration of the Chinese economy with the West, an end epitomized by the abbreviation popularized by my New York Times colleague in Beijing Keith Bradsher. to describe where Western multinationals are now thinking of locating their next factory: “ABC” or “anywhere but China”.
It is difficult to point out the most important. And the mere fact of citing the four options together reveals to what extent 2022 has become a watershed in history. But I would opt for chexit.
We’ve had four decades of US-China economic integration that have benefited American consumers tremendously. They opened up new export opportunities for some and unemployment for others, depending on the industry. They helped lift hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of extreme poverty. They limited inflation and helped prevent wars between great powers.
All things considered, we will miss that era now that it is over, because our world will be less prosperous, less integrated and less geopolitically stable. But she finished.
As the New Yorker magazine’s China expert Evan Osnos pointed out in October: “In 2012, 40% of Americans had an unfavorable view of China; today, according to the Pew Research Center, more than 80% do.”
If China had a democratic government, someone there would surely be wanting to know right now, “How did we lose the US?”
The US is not blameless for the erosion of that relationship. Since World War II, we have never had a geopolitical rival that was almost a par in economic and military terms. We have never been comfortable with Beijing’s rising challenge, especially since China was not driven by oil but by its economies, hard work and homework — that is, willingness to make sacrifices to achieve national greatness, with a strong emphasis about education and science.
We were like this before.
But the far greater part of the blame rests with Beijing. To understand how utterly China lost the US, you might start by asking her, “How do you explain that you had the biggest and most powerful lobby in Washington that didn’t cost you a penny and still screwed it up?”
I mean the US-China Business Council and the US-China Chamber of Commerce. These powerful business groups, representative of the largest American multinationals, have vigorously defended for nearly four decades the idea that more trade with Beijing and more investment in China and from China were mutually beneficial. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China did the same.
Today these lobbies have practically silenced. What happened? It was the culmination of four trends.
The first of these began in 2003, shortly after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (thanks to the US), when the country’s main advocate of market reforms, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, resigned. Zhu wanted American companies to be present in China because he thought Chinese companies needed to compete with the best on their own turf in order to compete effectively in the world.
But Zhu faced opposition from many inland provinces, dominated by state-owned industries that had neither the interest nor the ability to compete globally in the way coastal provinces could. And these inland provinces gained increasing influence.
When China joined the WTO and gained immense access to western markets, free of tariffs or at reduced tariffs, it promised to sign a WTO side agreement on government supply contracts that would have limited its ability to discriminate against foreign suppliers when making purchases. huge for the government. But China never signed that agreement. Instead, it continued to direct its tremendous purchasing power from the state to state-owned industries—and continued to subsidize those industries.
Many Chinese industries simply copied or stole intellectual property from Western companies that had set up factories in China. Local companies then took advantage of the protected domestic market to gain more scale and competed with these same Western companies both in China and abroad. And they were still subsidized by Beijing.
Not surprisingly, an American executive who worked for years in China told me, after Trump launched his trade war with Beijing, that Trump was not the American president the US deserved, but what China deserved. Someone needed to make clear what Washington’s interests were in this game.
Now Xi did the same on his side. As the president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, Joerg Wuttke, said, Xi’s election to an unusual third term, based on a platform that emphasizes Marxism and ideology over markets and pragmatism, “says that openness of the Chinese economy will not continue. We need to assume that China is distancing itself from other countries and will build a model contrary to the liberal, market-oriented Western model”.
The second trend dates to the post-Tiananmen Square period in 1989, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership strove to cool the democratic aspirations of local youth, using a fire hose of hypernationalism.
And that brings me to the third trend: a much more aggressive Chinese foreign policy that is trying to assert its hegemony over the entire South China Sea area, scaring off its main neighbors: Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India and Taiwan.
But the latest trend may be the most unpleasant of all: Instead of importing effective Western-produced vaccines to control the pandemic, China is enforcing a zero Covid policy that utilizes the isolation of entire cities in addition to the new surveillance state tools. : drones, facial recognition, closed-circuit TV cameras positioned everywhere, cell phone tracking and even tracking restaurant patrons, who are required to present a QR code to be scanned and recorded.
It looks like a strategy by Xi to stop both Covid and freedom from spreading.
I confess that I don’t like to use the term “China”. I prefer “the one-sixth of humanity that speaks Chinese”. This captures the true scale of what we are dealing with. I want to see the Chinese people prosper — it’s good for the world. But he is going the wrong way. And when one-sixth of humanity goes astray in our still highly connected world — China, for example, still holds nearly $1 trillion in US Treasuries — we will all feel their pain.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
