Now is the time for monsters.”. China itself now heads four of the UN’s 15 specialist agencies. A third of Ecuador’s debt – $18.4bn (£15bn) – is owed to Chinese policy banks. One side is going to win. China has used this worldwide network to make its long march through the UN’s institutions, enabled by the US’s own shorter march out of the same forums. Demonstrators hold a banner during a protest against China in Delhi on 19 June. In recent years, China’s lending has grown to exceed the combined loans of the IMF, the World Bank and the Paris Club, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. The US is demanding that its allies not only admit to previous naivety but join it in an anti-China alliance. “There is little negotiating power among African countries. He never got to run an international thinktank, but the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, reflecting on a previous interregnum, was right: “The old world dying, and a new one struggling to be born. But as the rhetoric and the threats escalate, it is becoming ever harder to navigate between China and the US in this way. If Deutsche Telekom was forced to remove Chinese equipment suppliers from its network – a scenario called Armageddon – it would take 5 years and cost billions. The man widely seen as the intellectual author of the cold war recalled that if he had sent his telegram on the nature of the Soviet threat six months earlier, his message “would probably have been received in the state department with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. Once America’s backyard, Latin America is rapidly becoming China’s frontyard. “For Africa there is no other game in town when it comes to financing,” says the historian Niall Ferguson. ‘Rival’ on what? Hong Kong police detain people in December 2019 after a rally to show support for the Uighur minority in China. Menon has long argued that India should eschew permanent alliances: “The ideal position for India, of course, is to be closer to both China and the US than they are to each other,” he says. China, US: War games show America couldn’t beat China in a war China has surpassed Brazil as Argentina’s biggest trade partner. And if either attempts to force such a choice – if Washington tries to contain China’s rise or Beijing seeks to build an exclusive sphere of influence in Asia – they will begin a course of confrontation that will last decades and put the long heralded Asian century in jeopardy.”, Loong also urges the US not to see this as a rerun of 1946. That July vote was seen as an acid test of Chinese influence. But Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, is reluctant to be dragged into Trump’s all-out war. But it took on a new urgency with the advent of the Trump administration. Ten years ago during the financial crisis, China was the one to fill in the financial gaps when the US Fed[eral Reserve] had only swap lines with six major advanced economies.”. The so called “Like-minded Group of Developing Countries” all backed China or sat it out. For Aaron Friedberg, a counsellor at the National Bureau of Asian Research, China’s behaviour in response to coronavirus could represent a kind of clarifying moment. If China is at risk of blowing its chance to lead, then others have calculated that a fleeting chance exists for the middle-power democracies, some with nuclear weapons, to hold greater sway. Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has declared the Chinese Communist party to be the number one threat to security, greater than international terrorism, and a growing number of countries seem to agree. Six months later, it probably would have sounded redundant, a preaching to the converted.”. Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, preaches that “trade relations must be de-ideologised”. Yet at the 11th hour there may be a reversal of fortunes, largely caused by China behaving as foolishly as Trump. “China is far from a Potemkin village or the tottering command economy that defined the Soviet Union in its final years . “The terms of these loans are very opaque and will take a lot of time to restructure,” says William Jackson, the chief emerging markets economist at the research firm Capital Economics. Chances of war between China and USA increase by 90%: Zhang Zhaozhong. In Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro’s entourage have sent racist tweets about Beijing’s plans for “world domination”, exports to China rose by 13.1% in the first five months of the year compared with the same period in 2019. African countries have borrowed as much as $150bn – almost 20% of their external debt – from China, data collected by Johns Hopkins University shows. A similar scramble for neutral ground is under way in Europe. Mexico, Venezuela and Bolivia also have strong trading links with China. “At the same time, China is a reality on the doorstep. It feels instead as if a new cold war is brewing, fought as much through technology and tariffs as with conventional weaponry. Similarly, in Latin America some surprising countries are proving to be China-centric. Borrell ruminated “Words matter,” before tying himself up in linguistic knots asking “What does ‘rival’ mean? The episode demonstrated that any assumption that there is an inbuilt majority willing to take on Chinese authoritarianism in the way that the US wants is a fantasy. Asian countries do not want to be forced to choose between the two. America wants them both to decouple from China, but for them that is economic suicide.”, Mahbubani was Singapore’s lead diplomat at the United Nations, and the county’s current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is equally vehement that Asia does not relish Bannon’s choice. There is talk of a D10 of democracies – in essence, the G7 plus Australia, India and Korea. It is quite shocking. New York’s Empire State Building and Wuhan’s Yellow Crane Tower. According to news from the US Pacific Fleet, the USS “Reagan” and “Nimitz” aircraft carriers started the second dual-carrier exercise in the South China Sea on July 17. Dr Keyu Jin, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, says there is a global divide: “The attitude of many emerging markets to China is very, very different to rich industrialised nations. According to Kishore Mahbubani, a fellow at the Asia Research Institute, Trump has prepared for this battle chaotically. The threat posed to Hong Kong, and the conflicts on the border with India, are only symptomatic of a series of Chinese steps that have made the life of the non-aligned harder, and have left more traditional Chinese political scientists such as Lanxin Xiang fuming. Volkswagen sold 4.2m cars there in 2017 financial year. • This article was amended on 23 June 2020. Now, as the US squares up to China over the coronavirus pandemic, it appears as if many of the world’s democracies are, as rapidly as in 1946, reaching a new perception of the world order. A superpower rivalry had been brewing slowly, after all, under Barack Obama. Many countries are trying to hedge, but the scope for neutrality or non-alignment is narrowing. He argues that China, by indulging in “fantasies of self-glory”, is doing untold damage to itself and relations with the west. Prior to the election for director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2019, China wrote off $78m in debt owed by the Cameroonian government, whose nominated candidate coincidentally withdrew his bid afterwards. After video talks with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi earlier this month he unveiled the Sinatra doctrine – Europe would do it in its own way. She concludes: “Trump does not need legally to sever treaty alliances – by treating them as protection rackets for which the protected parties can never pay enough, he obviates them. They associate China with innovation in technology. eorge Kennan, the US charge d’affaires in Moscow at the end of the second world war and the author of the famous Long Telegram in 1946, captured in his memoir how quickly perceptions in international relations can change. “It is as if at every stage the unfolding of the crisis has pulled back another curtain, revealing yet more ugly facets of the regime’s character and highlighting the diverse dangers that it can pose to others.”. But it has not announced details, and the conditions of many of its loans are murky. China beat the French candidate, taking 108 of the 191 votes. An early warning for the west came in 2017 when Britain’s candidate to run the World Health Organization was crushed by the Chinese-backed Ethiopian candidate, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. George Kennan, the US charge d’affaires in Moscow at the end of the second world war and the author of the famous Long Telegram in 1946, captured in his memoir how quickly perceptions in international relations can change. With the closer economic links come political quiescence. Xi Jinping meets Angela Merkel in Beijing in 2018. Mahbubani argues that countries containing 20% of the world population are willing to join an anti-China alliance, but the rest would not. A few years ago, many thought these might be questions for later in the decade. In return they have secured infrastructure financing and investment. Chinese soldiers on patrol in 2019 on Woody Island in the Paracel archipelago, which is known in China as the Xisha Islands. An earlier version referred to a D10 of democracies being “in essence, the G7 plus Japan, India and Korea”. Posted on July 21, 2020 by CAS editor — No Comments ↓. The Australian government’s decision on Friday to call out a state-led cyber-attack – without naming China – was only the latest evidence of a new mindset. Or is it a systematic rivalry? For countries such as Germany this is not about a play on words. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has extended his signature foreign policy, the Belt and Road initiative, right across Latin America, signing up 14 of the region’s 20 countries. There are two interpretations”. From the airspace over Taiwan to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, the frozen Himalayas on the border with India and the reefs surrounding the Xisha/Paracel islands in the South China Sea, Chinese assertiveness is prompting a reassessment. This is the second time the US military’s dual aircraft carriers have conducted a military … A war between the United States and China would transform some aspects of the geopolitics of East Asia, but would also leave many crucial factors unchanged. In survey after survey they affirm Trump is a greater threat to world peace than Xi. They want to learn from and aspire to the China model. Chile, probably the most free-market economy on the continent, counts China as its main trading partner both in terms of imports and exports. After years as a shrinking wallflower, China has also become active in the UN Human Rights Council, sponsoring motions and in July 2019 crushing western criticism of China’s treatment of 1 million Uighur Muslims.