A recent report by the New York Times starkly illustrated the changing contours of the global economic order. It confirmed what many others have observed, that China is on the way to surpass the US as the world's top economy. During the 1980s, some 75 percent of China's population were living in "extreme poverty," according to the NY Times. Today, less than 1 percent of the population is in that dire category. For the US, the trajectory has been in reverse with greater numbers of its people subject to deprivation.
China's strategic economic plans -- the One Belt One Road initiative -- of integrating regional development under its leadership and finance have already created a world order analogous to what American capital achieved in the postwar decades.
American pundits and politicians like Vice President Mike Pence may disparage China's economic policies as creating "debt traps" for other countries. But the reality is that other countries are gravitating to China's dynamic leadership.
Arguably, Beijing's vision for economic development is more enlightened and sustainable than what was provided by the Americans and Europeans before. The leitmotif for China, along with Russia, is very much one of multipolar development and mutual partnership. The global economy is not simply moving from one hegemon -- the US -- to another imperial taskmaster -- China.
One thing seems inescapable. The days of American empire are over. Its capitalist vigor has dissipated decades ago. What the upheaval and rancor in relations between Washington and Beijing is all about is the American ruling class trying to recreate some fantasy of former vitality. Washington wants China to sacrifice its own development in order to somehow rejuvenate American society. It's not going to happen.
That's not to say that American society can never be rejuvenated. It could, as it could also in Europe. But that would entail a restructuring of the economic system involving democratic regeneration. The "good old days" of capitalism are gone. The American empire, as with the European empires, is obsolete.
That's the unspoken Number One agenda item at the G20 summit. Bye-bye US empire.
What America needs to do is regenerate through a reinvented social economic order, one that is driven by democratic development and not the capitalist private profit of an elite few.
If not, the futile alternative is US failing political leaders trying to coerce China, and others, to pay for their future. That way leads to war.
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