Unfortunately, China has always understood that the game works best if it’s a combination of chess and Monopoly, while the US this last decade has thought the game was Risk.
NYT: China’s Cash Buys Inroads in Caribbean
China’s economic might has rolled up to America’s doorstep in the Caribbean, with a flurry of loans from state banks, investments by companies and outright gifts from the government in the form of new stadiums, roads, official buildings, ports and resorts in a region where the United States has long been a prime benefactor.
The Chinese have flexed their economic prowess in nearly every corner of the world. But planting a flag so close to the United States has generated intense vetting ”” and some raised eyebrows ”” among diplomats, economists and investors.
”œWhen you’ve got a new player in the hemisphere all of a sudden, it’s obviously something talked about at the highest level of governments,” said Kevin P. Gallagher, a Boston University professor who is an author of a recent report on Chinese financing, ”œThe New Banks in Town.”
Most analysts do not see a security threat, noting that the Chinese are not building bases or forging any military ties that could invoke fears of another Cuban missile crisis. But they do see an emerging superpower securing economic inroads and political support from a bloc of developing countries with anemic budgets that once counted almost exclusively on the United States, Canada and Europe.
China’s imminent replacement of the West as the dominant international economic and political force in Africa epitomizes the most dramatic shift in geopolitics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet the United States and Europe, Africa’s traditional trading partners, seem incapable of responding to the challenge and retaking the initiative. Instead, their response has been to wring their hands in despair and make ineffectual noises about human rights and democracy.
A recent Senate hearing on the implications of China’s role in Africa, for instance, concluded that the United States is ceding both its economic and political leadership in Africa. Led by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), the panel urged the United States to respond by expanding trade and investments in Africa while defending its democratization agenda. This is a tall order, however, considering that the Obama administration’s top foreign policy priority in Africa is counterterrorism ”“ a policy that undermines both the trade and human rights agendas.
China has already overtaken the United States as the continent’s main trading partner. According to David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, China surpassed the United States as Africa’s main trading partner in 2009. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee on African Affairs meeting on November 1, Shinn estimated that China’s trade with African totaled $127 billion in 2010, a 40-percent increase from the previous year, compared to $113 billion for the United States. Today, the energy sector accounts for over 70 percent of China’s trade with Africa. China also imports 30 percent of its oil from African countries.
If the Iraq debacle was a gift to Iran, the GWOT overall has been a gift to China.
to the economists and political analysts who saw all this coming.
Starting with America ceding it’s place as a top manufacturer back in the 70′s, the deregulation of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, resulting in several crippling (and self-inflicted) blows to our economy, and culminating in the 2003-2008 public rape of the American economy by Goldman Sachs, BA, Chase, and other Too Big For Their Own Good Wall Street firms, this has been the trend.
Words like “new” “latest”, “unexpected” don’t belong in this conversation, and articles that use that terminology are wrong. This has been a long time in the making, and if we decide to do anything about it at all (which is doubtful because that might mean – HORRORS! – passing some real restraint regulation on mega banks and corporations – a beyond impossible task in todays political climate), it will take a long time to reverse it.
For my money, the Wall Streeters that knew they were crashing the economy in the 00′s also knew that would cost America its standing in the global economic ranks, and inflict severe damage on our economy that would curtail our ability to counter the rise of a power like China. Personally, I believe they knew this even then (because if even I could see it, certainly they must have been able to.) But the payoff was too big to resist, plus they figured they weren’t politicians anyway, so what did it matter. As for regular working Americans – when did they ever matter except once every four years, when they have to be lied to and propagandized into voting against their own interests?
Increasingly, so called “American” corporations do not care about what happens to America or its people. If they haven’t already relocated their official headquarters to a foreign country to avoid/evade taxes, then the decision was made a long time ago that if America has to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits, then so be it.
This is the culmination of that philosophy of growth. As they say, payback is a bitch.
And yes, the Chinese have been playing this game a LOT longer, and know it better, than we do.
and the United States thinking it is a game like poker. Inexorably the U.S. position deteriorates simply because bluffing doesn’t work in chess. Finally, the U.S. will have no options left. This all started out with racism and continued because of arrogance and will end because there no leadership worth a darn in the U.S.
Al Jazeera is running the story:
The United States as #2
By some measures, the Chinese economy has already overtaken the United States’ economy, by Dean Baker, a US macroeconomist and co-founder of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research.
In the article, mention is given that due to accounting data:
“A new study that carefully examined China’s prices and consumption patterns concluded that it is far wealthier than the widely used data indicate. According to this study, China’s economy may already be as much as 20 per cent larger than the US economy.”
and that:
“even if its growth rate slows to the 7.0 per cent annual rate that many now expect, China’s economy may be close to twice the size of the US economy in the span of a decade.”
Time to smell the bacon burning!
has ever wanted to admit it is in decline.
Finally, denial of reality is all that is left in their arsenal.