We have noticed that the embrace with China had become suffocating in the last twenty years. The West universe of consumers and China the factory of the world. We started with modest and low value-added materials and products, to refine the trajectory and revolution to the most refined and complex technologies, such as 5G and data superhighways.
We became more and more dependent on Beijing, shrugging on how and from whom everything cheap came. It seemed like the winning game for everyone, a fixed exchange rate to protect global large-scale distribution, freight rates that reminded us that shipping a container from Genoa to Milan was more expensive than from Shanghai to Rotterdam.
It mattered little if the costs of technological research were borne by the West and the object of intellectual theft from Beijing. In this regard, the Chinese have done what they have wanted for thirty years and with greater intensity in the last twenty.
The pendulum of history takes us back to looking at home because guaranteeing a cheap Chinese mobile phone to a worker is not worth the while if the worker no longer has a job and buys it on credit. Complex times, but the analysis of Vittorio Emanuele Parsi comes to our aid in his latest book “Titanic” that is to say “shipwreck or change of course for the liberal order”, embracing the Piketty trend reminds us that the promise of the West of a world founded by market and democracy failed in the 2000s, as a result of growing injustices and income distribution.
Suffering in the West due to an inequitable globalization, which pushes workers to become consumers with a greater and growing debt capacity, but with growth expectations that are reduced generation after generation. Production, debt and expectations, the game declines differently in Western countries, higher public debt in Europe, higher consumer credit in the United States until the real estate crash of 2008.
The economic news of recent years is therefore marked by decoupling or reconsidering the production chains of value, for reasons of economic and social expediency – the subject is the subject of major discussions of our time among those who consider the inevitability of an ever-increasing capitalism ferocious and those who think of system corrections, see Rocco Ronza analyst of the University Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, but also of geopolitics, if we have realized that the market does not guarantee the transition to a liberal economy system and to democracy and from there to a new homeostatic balance of the world.
Beijing preaches the free market in all circumstances, but the world and the markets have changed, the matter has become evident to them too and they run for cover. We thus read a good number of news items that go in this direction, they appear in no particular order and require a good dose of imagination and a nice red string to tie them all together. Let’s take a few,
China: It is preparing to create an alternative international payment
It has banned the cryptocurrency system, regulatory independence and lack of control
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/what-s-behind-china-s-cryptocurrency-ban/
https://fortune.com/2022/01/04/crypto-banned-china-other-countries/
The lockdown for health reasons, which is also a crash test on Western companies in China that show impatience and prepare to pack their bags
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61158566
A growing closure to the network beyond VPN navigation systems for the more curious and free
https://thediplomat.com/2022/02/china-and-russia-want-to-rule-the-global-internet/
https://www.asianews.it/notizie-it/Pechino-stringe-la-morsa-sui-giganti-del-web-52621.html
The replacement of the entire software and hardware park with Chinese products
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-orders-government-state-companies-to-scrap-foreign-pcs
The promotion of internal consumption
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202202/1252146.shtml
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-04-25/VHJhbnNjcmlwdDU0MjIz/index.html
https://www.economist.com/business/china-wants-to-insulate-itself-against-western-sanctions/21807805
The world seems to shrink a little, but it is only a course correction. Nobody gives up on anything and it’s just finding a way for a new phase for a more sustainable trade, I don’t say fair, please note.
No longer giving discounts to the Chinese in terms of political and trade union rights of workers, protection of trademarks and patents and containment of Beijing’s imperialist ambitions aimed at supporting growing domestic consumption.
We are certain of one thing, however, like Ronza, Parsi and Piketty, that the market does not bring freedom and liberal democracy. The market is not the repository of values, but of efficient capital accumulation mechanisms to the advantage of the few over the many.
The article was originally published on the Italian language site www.altriorienti.com
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