The unipolar world of US hegemony is over. Not all have noticed. So before we discuss what the rise of China means, we should quickly take off the blinders and look at the world as it looks when viewed from a global perspective, not the provincial gaze of a West that continues to be the navel of the West World holds. Those days are over.
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Is the rapprochement of North Korea and South Korea a diplomatic coup by Donald Trump? Does this show the power of the USA? No. This shows only the total lack of understanding of Western observers for the balance of power between China and the United States.
Instead, the essence of the development is a rapprochement of South Korea to China, a liberation of South Korea from the status of an anti-Chinese front-line state of the United States. And this development has been apparent for some time. There is a process of diplomatic approach. On the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, leaders Xi Jinping and Moon Jae-in declared their joint intention to "normalize exchange and cooperation in all areas as quickly as possible."
USA lose, China wins
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This was preceded by a violent conflict between the two states after South Korea decided to install a US-made missile defense system called THAAD. China relinquished this relapse into old front-line behavior with the use of its strongest weapon: the power of the Chinese economy.
Even a Chinese boycott of tourism cost South Korea between 6.8 and 8.5 billion dollars within a year. Tourists from China make up half of 17 million South Korean travelers annually. In the wake of the THAAD conflict, the state tourism authority ordered Chinese travel agents to stop offering group travel to South Korea. As a result, the number of Chinese tourists fell by 60 percent.
In addition, China attacked the South Korean economic conglomerate Lotte. The Group was penalized for its advertising practices. A large number of Lotte supermarkets in China have closed due to fire safety regulations.
Since then, South Korea is rowing back.
It is a difficult tightrope walk for the country to keep its balance between ever-expanding China and its traditional ally USA. The trend, however, is clear. For many years there have been conflicts over US military bases in South Korea. At the same time, the South Korean's most important trading partner by far is China.
South Korea exported $ 124 billion worth of goods to China in 2016. At the same time, South Korea imports twice as much from China ($ 93.7 bn) than it does from the United States ($ 42.3 bn).
The export nation South Korea thus achieved one third of its foreign trade surplus from trade with China.
In the case of an unification of Korea, China would gain a powerful ally, and the US would lose its usual strategic position in an allied state.
Asia booming!
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All of Asia is forming a gigantic economic area: Indonesia's most important export destinations (128 million inhabitants) were in this order in 2016: China, USA, Japan, Singapore, India. In terms of imports, the United States then completely smeared off: China, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea delivered the most goods to the gigantic Indonesian market.
In almost all of the other 48 nation-states of Asia with its 4.5 million inhabitants, the most important trading partner is China, with a rapidly rising trend.
An exception in the wider area of ββChina is only India, with 1.3 billion people and its robust economic growth. But even this situation is about to change dramatically: In 2017, the Indian-Chinese trade volume reached a historic high, but still fairly clear $ 84.44 billion However, exports from India to China increased by a whopping 40% within a year ,
The third economic elephant in Asia besides China and India (still far behind) is still Japan. And this country is firmly on the side of the Western alliance. With China threatens war rather than cooperation.
Oh yes? As so often, this general knowledge is outdated and wrong. Japan is working hard to improve its relations with the People's Republic.
There is talk of a restart of relations. Again, one main reason for the rapprochement is the rapidly increasing trading volume with China. Although Japan's largest export market in 2016 was still the US ($ 130 billion). But China ($ 113 billion) is catching up to overtake, while the Chinese economy already exports twice as much to Japan as the US.
In fact, China has outstripped the USA in industrial production. In 2011, the 111-year dominance of the United States ended, and China took the lead in global output.
China is building fiscal institutions
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The irrevocable shift of world economic weights from west to east is the most significant fact of contemporary history. The pace of modernization in Asia is breathtaking - and no one should believe that the consequences are purely economic.
So far we are talking about a world built according to the will of the West. With the partial exception of the UN, which pays that special status with the greatest incapacity to act, all the major institutions of the world are created and dominated by the West.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank AIIB is a China-initiated response to the IMF and the World Bank. The list of "regional" member countries participating in the AIIB is already impressive, with the "region" of the AIIB apparently very broad. Also Israel and Australia are listed there. Russia is of course, but also Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Sensational is the list of "supraregional" member countries. Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Malta, Luxembourg, Ireland, Iceland, Hungary, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland ...
Great Britain is also there. The British were sensationally the first to get in, although Obama had expressly forbidden it.
On the waiting list for a recording are currently Kuwait, Bahrain, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Kenya, South Africa, Sudan, Greece, Romania, Armenia and many other countries.
And so only the USA is missing today in this Who's Who of the global economy.
Even without the United States, the AIIB is "of America" ββ- many American nations are already member countries! - suddenly became more important than the World Bank and IMF. It is also equipped with more capital. The show runs without the Americans, who are once more offended in the corner. Another strategic feat of Barack Obama.
Chinese sunflower seeds for Tehran
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We should finally begin to grasp the following: No region and no land of the earth will remain unaffected by the rise of China - and even now the Chinese factor is far more powerful than we realize.
Take Iran. The US and Israel are massively pressuring a war with Iran. Europe is slowing down. What is China doing? Nothing? Because it does not speak in this conflict situation? Because it does not exclude any sanctions against anyone? Because China is not shifting troops or raising drones or fighter planes?
China could do all that. It would have considerable military potential. But that China does not do that does not mean that China is inactive in the conflict over Iran. China's answer once again was infrastructure and trade.
A few days after Donald Trump abandoned the nuclear agreement with Iran, China announced the opening of a new railroad and was the first to ship a freight train carrying 1,350 tons of sunflower seed. The runs from the city of Banyannur in north China's Inner Mongolia via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan 8,352 kilometers to Tehran.
The trade distance from China to Iran is being shortened by 20 days compared to container ship transport as a result of this massive new infrastructure project. And while the US is putting pressure on its allies and many companies to stop working with Iran, and it is already clear that the Europeans will grumble, but once again follow Big Brother, China is doing just the opposite.
In the past, Chinese companies and Russia have also been very effective in undermining Western sanctions. And the reluctance to submit to the US sanction dictates is increasing internationally. The Washington Post fears that China might even act as an intermediary for the Europeans this time to help them avoid US sanctions, and warns, "Trump's Iran decision could weaken US sanctions threats in the long term." The former US diplomat Carlos Pascual fears trouble-free oil sales of the Iranians via China and Russia in the whole world.
Of course, a war in which the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia attack Iran together could also affect rail traffic to China and other trade. However, Chinese policymakers could also undermine the ever-waning wartime fortunes of US-led alliances ...
China dominates the Internet
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Apart from that, the total fixation of the USA on its military trump card is no longer a sign of strength. The Americans are trying to make up for the fact that they are increasingly falling behind financially.
But on the Internet, the US is the world's number one powerhouse? That just looks like if you do not know anything about the world because you live in the West. Does Alibaba tell you something?
The Chinese Internet giant is one of the ten most powerful companies in the world and had a market value of $ 527 billion in January 2018. Its online sales and profits in 2015 already exceeded the combined (!) Result of Walmart, Amazon, Ebay and all other US competitors , In the media sector, Alibaba has recorded growth rates in the three-digit percentage range for years. Alibaba's cloud operation is bigger than Google, Amazon or Microsoft.
Recently, Alibaba also went on a shopping spree in Germany and got two big, fat companies from Rocket Internet's portfolio.
Meanwhile, we only discuss censorship in Germany when it comes to China and the Internet. This is a fundamentally legitimate, but of course completely hypocritical debate, which should distract from the increasing online censorship in our home. But most of all, we miss the actual story once again: the Internet is not purely "American", it is increasingly an Asian event globally.
China dominates high-tech
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China will also technologically storm to the top. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, the Wall Street Journal warns Google and Intel of the impending Chinese dominance just a few days ago.
Forty percent of Huawai's 170,000 employees work in research and development.
In the province of Guizhoe, there is now a 500-meter-wide radio telescope for the search for extraterrestrial life. The Sunway Taihu Light supercomputer is by far the fastest in the world. Similar sensational reports, which of course do not reach us in the German valley of the unsuspecting, exist in stem cell research or in the development of new batteries.
And the tech giants of the West are just beginning to come under pressure. China is currently attacking the drone market in the USA. The drone Mavic Pro, produced in China, flies faster and twice as high as the comparable product GoPro Karma, weighs 25 percent less, can fly 30 percent longer and costs $ 50 less.
Trump now reacts with punitive tariffs and a trade war. For example, there has recently been a 25 percent penalty on Chinese robots. At the same time, the Chinese robot industry is just starting to make a difference. The government plans to produce 150,000 industrial robots per year by 2020, from 260,000 to 2035, and it does not seem unrealistic to talk about 400,000 robots a year by 2030.
In the context of these efforts, the Chinese Midea Group has bought for 4.5 billion euros 95% of the shares of Kuka, the German pride in robotics.
Will Kuka from Augsburg now be punished with US punitive duties? Trump's trade war is a miserable reaction to an unstoppable Chinese dynamic. The US will crash the war.
World power China: good or bad?
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Is the rise of China good news or bad news? What does this shift mean for the world?
Well, before we talk about the consequences, we should recognize the fact:
The unipolar world of US hegemony is over. Not all have noticed.
So before we discuss what the rise of China means, we should quickly take off the blinders and look at the world as it looks when viewed from a global perspective, not the provincial gaze of a West that continues to be the navel of the West World holds. Those days are over.
If we understand that, we can go on a hard journey to understand China. A country with 5000 years of history. Lao-Tse and Kung-Tse (Confucius) continue to shape Chinese governance today. They lived 2500 years ago. We are dealing here with an independent civilization, with an incredibly rich cultural heritage. I therefore recommend that you first read a few books about China, its history, its culture and philosophy.