US
journalists and commentators, politicians and Sinologists spend
considerable time and space speculating on the personality of China’s President Xi Jinping
and his appointments to the leading bodies of the Chinese government,
as if these were the most important aspects of the entire 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (October 18-24, 2017).
Mired
down in gossip, idle speculation and petty denigration of its leaders,
the Western press has once again failed to take account of the
world-historical changes which are currently taking place in China and
throughout the world.
World historical changes, as articulated by Chinese President Xi Jinping,
are present in the vision, strategy and program of the Congress. These
are based on a rigorous survey of China’s past, present and future
accomplishments.
The
serious purpose, projections and the presence of China’s President stand
in stark contrast to the chaos, rabble-rousing demagogy and slanders
characterizing the multi-billion dollar US Presidential campaign and its
shameful aftermath.
The
clarity and coherence of a deep strategic thinker like President Xi
Jinping contrasts to the improvised, contradictory and incoherent
utterances from the US President and Congress. This is not a matter of
mere style but of substantive content.
We will proceed in the essay by contrasting the context, content and direction of the two political systems.
China: Strategic Thinking and Positive Outcomes
China,
first and foremost, has established well-defined strategic guidelines
that emphasize macro-socio-economic and military priorities over the
next five, ten and twenty years.
China is
committed to reducing pollution in all of its manifestations via the
transformation of the economy from heavy industry to a high-tech service
economy, moving from quantitative to qualitative indicators.
Secondly,
China will increase the relative importance of the domestic market and
reduce its dependence on exports. China will increase investments in
health, education, public services, pensions and family allowances.
Thirdly,
China plans to invest heavily in ten economic priority sectors. These
include computerized machinery, robotics, energy saving vehicles,
medical devices, aerospace technology, and maritime and rail transport.
It targets three billion (US) dollars to upgrade technology in key
industries, including electrical vehicles, energy saving technology,
numerical control (digitalization) and several other areas. China plans
to increase investment in research and development from .95% to 2% of
GDP.
Moreover, China has already taken steps to launch the ‘petro-Yuan’, and end US global financial dominance.
China
has emerged as the world’s leader in advancing global infrastructure
networks with its One Belt One Road (Silk Road) across Eurasia.
Chinese-built ports, airports and railroads already connect twenty
Chinese cities to Central Asia, West Asia, South-East Asia, Africa and
Europe. China has established a multi-lateral Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (with over 60 member nations) contributing 100 billion dollars for initial financing.
China has
combined its revolution in data collection and analysis with central
planning to conquer corruption and improve the efficiency in credit
allocation. Beijing’s digital economy is now at the center of the
global digital economy. According to one expert, “China is the world leader in payments made by mobile devices”,
(11 times the US). One in three of the world’s start-ups, valued at
more than $1 billion, take place in China (FT 10/28/17, p. 7). Digital
technology has been harnessed to state-owned banks in order to evaluate
credit risks and sharply reduce bad debt. This will ensure that
financing is creating a new dynamic flexible model combining rational
planning with entrepreneurial vigor (ibid).
As a
result, the US/EU-controlled World Bank has lost its centrality in
global financing. China is already Germany’s largest trading partner
and is on its way to becoming Russia’s leading trade partner and
sanctions-busting ally.
China has
widened and expanded its trade missions throughout the globe, replacing
the role of the US in Iran, Venezuela and Russia and wherever
Washington has imposed belligerent sanctions.
While
China has modernized its military defense programs and increased
military spending, almost all of the focus is on ‘home defense’ and
protection of maritime trade routes. China has not engaged in a single
war in decades.
China’s
system of central planning allows the government to allocate resources
to the productive economy and to its high priority sectors. Under
President Xi Jinping, China has created an investigation and judicial
system leading to the arrest and prosecution of over a million corrupt
officials in the public and private sector. High status is no
protection from the government’s anti-corruption campaign: Over 150
Central Committee members and billionaire plutocrats have fallen.
Equally important, China’s central control over capital flows (outward
and inward) allows for the allocation of financial resources to high
tech productive sectors while limiting the flight of capital or its
diversion into the speculative economy.
As a result, China’s GNP has been growing between 6.5% – 6.9% a year – four times the rate of the EU and three times the US.
As far as
demand is concerned, China is the world’s biggest market and growing.
Income is growing – especially for wage and salaried workers.
President Xi Jinping has identified social inequalities as a major area
to rectify over the next five years.
The US: Chaos, Retreat and Reaction
In
contrast, the United States President and Congress have not fashioned a
strategic vision for the country, least of all one linked to concrete
proposals and socio-economic priorities, which might benefit the
citizenry.
The US
has 240,000 active and reserve armed forces stationed in 172 countries.
China has less than 5,000 in one country – Djibouti. The US stations
40,000 troops in Japan, 23,000 in South Korea, 36,000 in Germany, 8,000
in the UK and over 1,000 in Turkey. What China has is an equivalent
number of highly skilled civilian personnel engaged in productive
activity around the world. China’s overseas missions and its experts
have worked to benefit both global and Chinese economic growth.
The
United States’ open-ended, multiple military conflicts in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Niger, Somalia, Jordan and elsewhere have
absorbed and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars away from
productive investments in the domestic economy. In only a few cases,
military spending has built useful roads and infrastructure, which could
be counted a ‘dual use’, but overwhelmingly US military activities
abroad have been brutally destructive, as shown by the deliberate
dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.
The US
lacks the coherence of China’s policy making and strategic leadership.
While chaos has been inherent in the politics of the US ‘free market’
financial system, it is especially widespread and dangerous during the
Trump regime.
Congressional
Democrats and Republicans, united and divided, actively confront
President Trump on every issue no matter how important or petty. Trump
improvises and alters his policies by the hour or, at most, by the day.
The US possesses a party system where one party officially rules in the
Administration with two militarist big business wings.
US has
been spending over 700 billion dollars a year to pursue seven wars and
foment ‘regime changes’ or coups d’état on four continents and eight
regions over the past two decades. This has only caused disinvestment
in the domestic economy with deterioration of critical infrastructure,
loss of markets, widespread socioeconomic decline and a reduction of
spending on research and development for goods and services.
The top
500 US corporations invest overseas, mainly to take advantage of low tax
region and sources of cheap labor, while shunning American workers and
avoiding US taxes. At the same time, these corporations share US
technology and markets with the Chinese.
Today,
US capitalism is largely directed by and for financial institutions,
which absorb and divert capital from productive investments, generating
an unbalanced crisis-prone economy. In contrast, China determines the
timing and location of investments as well as bank interest rates,
targeting priority investments, especially in advanced high-tech
sectors.
Washington
has spent billions on costly and unproductive military-centered
infrastructure (military bases, naval ports, air stations etc.) in order
to buttress stagnant and corrupt allied regimes. As a result, the US
has nothing comparable to China’s hundred-billion-dollar ‘One Belt-One
Road’ (Silk Road) infrastructure project linking continents and major
regional markets and generating millions of productive jobs.
The US
has broken global linkages with dynamic growth centers. Washington
resorts to self-defecating, mindless chauvinistic rhetoric to impose
trade policy, while China promotes global networks via joint ventures.
China incorporates international supply linkages by securing high tech
in the West and low cost labor in the East.
Big US
industrial groups’ earnings and rising stock in construction and
aerospace are products of their strong ties with China. Caterpillar,
United Technologies 3M and US car companies reported double-digit growth
on sales to China.
In
contrast, the Trump regime has allocated (and spent) billions in
military procurement to threaten wars against China’s peripheral
neighbors and interfere with its maritime commerce.
US Decline and Media Frenzy
The
retreat and decline of US economic power has driven the mass media into a
frenzy of idiotic ad hominem assaults on China’s political leader
President Xi Jinping. Among the nose pickers in print, the scribes of
the Financial Times take the prize for mindless vitriol. Mercenaries and holy men in Tibet are described as paragons of democracy and ‘victims’ of a …flourishing modernizing Chinese state lacking the ‘western values’ (sic) of floundering Anglo-American warmongers!
To
denigrate China’s system of national planning and its consequential
efforts to link its high tech economy with improving the standard of
living for the population, the FT journalists castigate President Xi
Jinping for the following faults:
1.) For not being as dedicated a Communist as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaopeng
2.) For being too ‘authoritarian’ (or too successful) in his campaign to root out corrupt officials.
3.)
For setting serious long-term goals while confronting and overcoming
economic problems by addressing the ‘dangerous’ level of debt.
While
China has broadened its cultural horizon, the Anglo-Saxon global elite
increases possibility of nuclear warfare. China’s cultural and
economic outreach throughout the world is dismissed by the Financial
Times as ‘subversive soft power’. Police-state minds and media in the
West see China’s outreach as a plot or conspiracy. Any serious writer,
thinker or policymaker who has studied and praised China’s success is
dismissed as a dupe or agent of the sly President Xi Jinping. Without
substance or reflection, the FT (10/27/17) warns its readers and police
officials to be vigilant and avoid being seduced by China’s success
stories!
China’s
growing leadership in automobile production is evident in its advance
towards dominating the market for electric vehicles. Every major US and
EU auto company has ignored the warnings of the Western media
ideologues and rushed to form joint ventures with China.
China has
an industrial policy. The US has a war policy. China plans to surpass
the US and Germany in artificial intelligence, robotics,
semi-conductors and electric vehicles by 2025. And it will —because
those are its carefully pronounced scientific and economic priorities.
Shamelessly
and insanely, the US press pursues the expanding stories of raging
Hollywood rapists like the powerful movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein, and
the hundreds of victims, while ignoring the world historic news of
China’s rapid economic advances.
The US
business elites are busy pushing their President and the US Congress to
lower taxes for the billionaire elite, while 100 million US citizens
remain without health care and register decreased life expectancy!
Washington seems committed to in State-planned regression.
As US
bombs fall on Yemen and the American taxpayers finance the giant Israeli
concentration camp once known as ‘Palestine’, while China builds
systems of roads and rail linking the Himalayas and Central Asia with
Europe.
While
Sherlock Holmes applies the science of observation and deduction, the US
media and politicians perfect the art of obfuscation and deception.
In China,
scientists and innovators play a central role in producing and
increasing goods and services for the burgeoning middle and working
class. In the US, the economic elite play the central role in
exacerbating inequalities, increasing profits by lowering taxes and
transforming the American worker into poorly-paid temp-labor – destined
to die prematurely of preventable conditions.
While
Chinese President Xi Jinping works in concert with the nation’s best
technocrats to subordinate the military to civilian goals, President
Trump and his Administration subordinate their economic decisions to a
military-industrial-financial-Israeli complex.
Beijing
invests in global networks of scientists, researchers and scholars.
The US ‘opposition’ Democrats and disgruntled Republicans work with the
giant corporate media (including the respectable Financial Times) to
fund and fabricate conspiracies and plots under Trump’s Presidential
bed.
Conclusion
China
fires and prosecutes corrupt officials while supporting innovators.
Its economy grows through investments, joint ventures and a great
capacity to learn from experience and powerful data collection. The US
squanders its domestic resources in pursuing multiple wars, financial
speculation and rampant Wall Street corruption.
China
investigates and punishes its corrupt business and public officials
while corruption seems to be the primary criteria for election or
appointment to high office in the US. The US media worships its
tax-dodging billionaires and thinks it can mesmerize the public with a
dazzling display of bluster, incompetence and arrogance.
China
directs its planned economy to address domestic priorities. It uses its
financial resources to pursue historic global infrastructure programs,
which will enhance global partnerships in mutually beneficial projects.
It is no
wonder that China is seen as moving toward the future with great
advances while the US is seen as a chaotic frightening threat to world
peace and its publicists as willing accomplices.
China is
not without shortcomings in the spheres of political expression and
civil rights. Failure to rectify social inequalities and failure to
stop the outflow of billions of dollars of illicit wealth, and the
unresolved problems with regime corruption will continue to generate
class conflicts.
But the
important point to note is the direction China has chosen to take and
its capacity and commitment to identify and correct the major problems
it faces.
The US
has abdicated its responsibilities. It is unwilling or unable to
harness its banks to invest in domestic production to expand the
domestic market. It is completely unwilling to identify and purge the
manifestly incompetent and to incarcerate the grossly corrupt officials
and politicians of both parties and the elites.
Today
overwhelming majorities of US citizens despise, distrust and reject the
political elite. Over 70% think that the inane factional political
divisions are at their greatest level in over 50 years and have
paralyzed the government.
80% recognize that the Congress is dysfunctional and 86% believe that Washington is dishonest.
Never has an empire of such limitless power crumbled and declined with so few accomplishments.
China is a
rising economic empire, but it advances through its active engagement
in the market of ideas and not through futile wars against successful
competitors and adversaries.
As the US declines, its publicists degenerate.
The
media’s ceaseless denigration of China’s challenges and its
accomplishments is a poor substitute for analysis. The flawed political
and policy making structures in the US and its incompetent free-market
political leaders lacking any strategic vision crumble in contrast to
China’s advances.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Prof. James Petras, Global Research, 2017
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