I wrote the following in the introduction of “What is going on ? ” and it describes perfectly well what the present CoronaVirus episode, in the History of Late-Modernity, is unleashing on human societies the world over :
Page 53 :
“ The American bully is trying to break the China shop. But there is nothing tangible to replace that shop. And soon as the world will awake, to the fact that the material reality that sustained US speculations has gone awry, that day the US stock market could tank by 50 to 70%. And American consumerism will immediately be pushed on the path of a long descent into social hell that big capital and its servants will feel entitled to contain within the governing framework of a totalitarian dystopia.
China will also suffer, no doubt about that, but as I wrote in “A growing disconnect between East & West” :
“ History will not fail to remember that the most important factor in the present historical moment is that MAGA and other types, of proliferating Western nationalism, are destroying the very possibility of a future unification of the world under the banner of Western-centric multilateral institutions that are captive of Western big capital holders. For the first time since the start of Modernity, the center of gravity of the economy-world is slipping out of Western control largely helped by its own strategic ineptitude. “
Page 120 :
“ China’s economic weight is increasing year after year. Its GDP, in PPP terms, surpassed the US GDP in 2014 and in 2017 it was already 1.3 times the US size. Within 2 decades its share of the economy-world is bound to dwarf any competitor. This progression is a natural path that can’t be broken. What will eventually happen is that the path will be slowed down. This is what the US under cocktail Molotov Trump’ is laboring at. But the fact is that all this laboring leads irrevocably to a financial crash to be followed by a great depression. And in such conditions all countries are going to suffer but the West, and more particularly the US, will appear to be naked... and its citizens will be plunged in the reality of a 3rd world country. This societal drama is not going to eclipse China but it might prolong its path to maturity. “
We are entering today this Great Depression that I alluded to on page 120 of “What is going on ?”. All it took was the outbreak of a new virus to pin the ‘financial bubble of everything” that was set in motion some 50 years ago by the launching of the age of fiat money that would unleash the reign of globalization and of the financialization of everything. As a result the stock markets crashed nearly 40% in less than one month. This beats all records including what was thought for a century to have been the most rapid fall ever during the legendary crash of 1929.
To sell more stories and images, to a jaded public, the Western media competed among themselves to see who could paint the most apocalyptic picture of China’s approach in dealing with the outbreak of Covid19. Some Western leaders could not even hide their ‘Schadenfreude’, at the spectacle of China’s fall, opining publicly that this could be a unique chance for Western countries to gain an economic advantage. (i)
They pounded without interruption on that country for over 2 months and the more their failure to crash the virus at home became evident to all the more they pounded. No wonder the minds of Western citizens were captured and became mesmerized by the pandemic story of societal chaos, sickness, and death that seemed to become the new normal.
In light of this propaganda blitz nobody should be surprised that when the virus blew back, on Europe and then the US, the resulting media noise unleashed a profound panic among the public. The Corona-virus has now literally captured Western minds and the big picture, about life and the world, has completely vanished from their consciousness. It’s as if the world had suddenly stopped and remained only fear of the unknown.
When reality sets in, later on, it will act as a powerful punch in the stomach of the individuals and they will be left to gasp for air. Western citizens will indeed discover that life has changed for them and not in any positive way. Inflation will rapidly swell the price of daily necessities while deflation will lower asset prices and their savings. It is the worst possible of any outcomes for Western populations and this will weigh heavily on the realignment of the cards on the desk of international relations.
What is taking place in the realm of Geo-politics is indeed absolutely stupendous :
1. A Western propaganda campaign demonizes China
When the virus knocked China to the ground the US initiated an insidious and relentless propaganda campaign that was meant to demonize China’s system of public governance and more particularly the Communist Party. That campaign had two objectives :
◦ demonize China’s system of governance in the eyes of the world in order to induce a rejection of the vision of China’s Communist party about humanity’s development into a community of nations sharing a common destiny by building an ecological future.
◦ overwhelm the capacity of its own citizens to think and assess what is taking place around them in order to ease the institution of dystopian mechanisms that will force them into greater and greater submission to big capital and its servants.
More on this in part “1. Western propaganda distorts facts”.
2. a super efficient Chinese model of governance.
Notwithstanding the intrinsic difficulty, of combating a disease that people did not know existed (an unknown unknown), China’s system of governance handled the epidemic extremely successfully and in the words of the representatives of the WHO it has set a new standard for the world in the way nations should handle viruses. In contrast Western countries’ handling appeared completely feckless.
The spectacle of Western ineptitude was blow-back for their initial demonization of China.
More on this in part “2. Timeline of the answers to the outbreak of ‘Covid19’ ”.
3. the spectacle of 2 systems of governance competing to eradicate a virus from their shores
The relentless demonization of China kept the minds of the citizens of the world focused on the virus, its health damages, and its comparative handling by the different nations. In turn, and in the greatest of ironies, this forced the world to witness the spectacle of how 2 sets of very different systems of societal governance are handling the outbreak of the virus. The Western establishment was taken by surprise at how the people of the world became spectators of a competition between the Western liberal and the Eastern Confucian societal models.
There was just no way for the citizens of the world to escape the comparison. As a result an unquestionable qualitative difference imposed itself in the eyes of the world : the Eastern model appeared to care first and foremost for the well-being of its citizens while the Western liberal model appeared to care exclusively about the profits of its big capital holders. This was the worst possible scenario for Western liberalism.
Western populations have still not digested the enormity of what has taken place. But Western big capital, (ii) their servants the state bureaucrats, and their intellectuals seem not to have missed the extraordinary nature of this particular moment in history and they are furious. The White House, in a hurry, unleashed a monster propaganda campaign to vilify China in the hope of deflecting the attention of the citizens of the Western world from the spectacle of the complete incompetence of their leaders. The Western establishment wants to avoid being judged by its populations for its dismal handling of the CoronaVirus. What it fears most is indeed that its populations start to claim changes in governance inspired by the Chinese model.
More on this in part “3. An unquestionable qualitative difference in the answers”.
4. 2 visions of relations with ‘the other’
Now that China is gradually restarting to work the rest of the world is shutting down. This means that the world will have no other choice than to rely on the purchase of Chinese medicines and Chinese medical equipment to handle its health crisis. (iii)
China will gracefully extend a helping hand to all countries that ask for it. This will cost resources that the country needs badly internally. But this sacrifice epitomizes China’s vision of “a community of nations with a shared destiny” that stands in such a stark contrast to the Western imperial vision of hegemony that imposed its unilateral domination and exploitation on the whole world during the entire span of Modernity.
No pounding of false accusations will ever succeed to hide the fact that China’s relations with other nations, small and large, are made of another material than that of the traditional Western hegemony.
China has been classified by European historians as having been an empire and that as an empire it would behave as all Western imperial powers over the last centuries. But that classification was an error stemming from the Eurocentric provincialism in interpreting the nature of the working of societies.
The fact of the matter is that China’s history can’t be modeled through the lens of Europe’s historical experience. China’s civilizational axioms, its historical worldview, and its daily culture are forging a radically different material than the Western axioms of civilization and its Christian worldview. This difference in its contextual material procured to the Chinese a radically different outlook on life and reality which translates in relations to the other (nations and individuals) that Europeans, in Europe and in its geographic extensions, simply never comprehended.
There was no commonality between Columbus’ voyages and Zheng He’ voyages. The first was on a mission of looting the other was on a mission of making friends.
China’s historical contextual material (iv) is simply incompatible with Western hegemony. But such an idea is incomprehensible for Western observers who think that there is only one way for China to behave which is the way the west has always behaved. No surprise then that the West is anxious at the prospect of China becoming the largest economy on earth.
For more see “Part 4. A gradual shift from a Western to an Eastern model of society”.
5. China as center of gravity of the economy-world ==> Globalization :
In the months ahead, after the Coronavirus is put to sleep, the world will come back to life and the Chinese factories will be ready to supply consumer goods and there will be no other choice to satisfy the desperate demand of the consumers of the world than to import those Chinese goods.
My description of the present episode in World history does not fit in the picture of an end of globalization as it is parroted without interruption by Western analysts. It is my contention that Covid19 will most probably appear in future history books as having been a Chinese opportunity to render its economy independent of the goods and services of its major Western competitors.
I think that Donald Trump will be despised by Western future generations for having given the Chinese a good reason to swing out of the tentacles of his trade war. Covid19 will be seen as the US moment of reckoning. The country will be forced to adapt its economic infrastructure to avoid the economic dominance of a more autonomous China. China’s internal market size, plus its access to the countries forming the core of the new silk roads, will indeed dwarf the size of its competitors and its “economies of scale” will be unbeatable.
Re-acquiring the necessary productions capabilities, to ensure their future autonomy from China, will be an extremely costly enterprise for Western countries. And this will have to be realized while their fight against the CoronaVirus is landing them in the Greatest of all Depressions. Their debts will have soared to astronomical levels. Their levels of social inequality are already resulting in tensions that could explode at any moment which big capital hopes to contain in the future by transforming Western systems of governance into totalitarian mental prisons.
What will big capital holders be thinking about once the picture I just described suddenly illuminates their minds ?
Me think that most of them will run because Western consumer bases will appear too constrained to justify the size of investments that would be necessary for rebuilding a local industrial base. They’ll flee to China, or the core countries of the New Silk Roads, where they’ll have access to the biggest consumer market on earth. Big capital holders will never miss such an opportunity.
The satisfaction of local Western needs will thus have to be realized by the nationalist branch among big capital holders who will invest in the local production of goods and services. But the capital base of nationalist capital holders is limited and certainly not sufficient to rebuild a national production base. China will furthermore retain such a considerable competitive advantage that the investments of Western patriotic capital holders will at best only succeed to develop local production niches.
So at least in the near and medium term China’s productions will remain an essential part of Western life. But its role in global supply chains will shift accentuating what has already been happening for a decade which is that Chinese factories transfer a large number of low-value-added manufacturing jobs to neighboring countries while keeping the higher-value-added productions at home. This is how hi-tech innovation hubs are emerging all around China powered by the capital accumulated along the first phase of low-value-added productions.
Within the next few years this restructuring of the supply-chains and the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world will eventually be framed in a new light due to the fact that all nations are in need to share the burden of the worldwide side-effects of Modernity that have been accumulating over the decades, and now start to pose a serious threat to our species.
Nations will thus soon be forced to work together in order to find and apply solutions to those problems and along the way they will inevitably discover so many more reasons to trade goods and services while exchanging culture and knowledge.
In other words globalization is not destined to go away any time soon. It will adapt to the new realities of our times and will eventually be complemented by the localization of the production of goods deemed necessary to satisfy the basic need of the populations : food, housing, furnishing, schooling, and so on.
The failure of Western nation-states and the pauperization of Western populations will most probably be answered by local living and a mode of survival based on local autonomy. Goods that necessitate large scale productions and high-tech productions will most probably continue to be manufactured in a few industrial corridors distributed mostly in Asia and the countries along the new Silk Road. With a near monopoly on sales of high-tech goods their R&D services are bound to dwarf what can be achieved at the local level with a very limited capital input in the West.
For more see “Part 4. A gradual shift from a Western to an Eastern model of society”.
6. Life is threatened by the side-effects of Modernity
The urgency to tackle the side-effects of Modernity, – pandemics – climate change – pollution – peak energy and resources – mass extinction of species – and so on, will soon affirm to be our new normal. So the future of the world’s community of nations necessarily resides in sharing a common destiny by building an ecological future as well as sharing a holistic worldview to illuminate the minds of the citizens of the world to the systemic nature of that ecological future. For more see “Part 5. The double paradox of humanity’s predicament”.
The servants of Western big capital holders (v) are well aware that China will inevitably play the leading role in the global economic recovery that will follow after humanity has won its war on the Corona-virus. This infuriates them so much that they are literally losing their minds and this unfortunately frees their ideological prejudice to take precedence over the observation of the facts :
• First they transformed the appellation COVID-19 into the “Chinese virus” or the “CCP virus” and unleashed a media campaign to blame Beijing for the pandemic. This blatant racist attitude could only result in deteriorating international relations at a time when the solidarity between nations is essential to answer the medical urgency and to free the world of the virus.
The racism of white colonialists is well known by all people around the world but this latest outburst of propaganda is such an ugly sight that it will definitely be imprinted in the minds of the future generations of world citizens as being the caricature of a despised Western hegemony.
• Secondly they let their ideological prejudice for individualism, capital and finance, take the better over pragmatism and knowledge. But by doing so the West demonstrates to the world that it privileges the economy, I mean the financial interests and profits of big capital holders, over the life of its citizens. The contrast, between systems of societal governance, could not have been made to be any starker.
As a result an image is fixing in the minds of the citizens of the earth (vi). The West appears to privilege big capital holders and their profits while the mass of their citizens live in fear while suffering economically. In the meantime China is more and more perceived to privilege the life of its citizens, even at the cost of its economy. And this explain why its citizens literally live care free ! I bet that the people of the earth will walk forward without any doubts about what path they want to follow.
This ideological contrast is so stark that it will be printed in human minds. And all the western blaming of China will thus come to be seen by the world population for what it really is : the manifestation of the sheer ugliness of a losing Western rambunctious child that can’t accept her/his loss.
In contrast the Chinese treatment of the virus, its mastery at helping other nations fight it successfully, and its answer to the economic needs of the world will be seen as a confirmation of the country’s truthfulness in its guidance of the world on the path of a community of nations sharing a common destiny. This is how the paradigm of Western exceptionalism comes to an end while opening the field to a more holistic Asiatic paradigm that views the individuals and their societies as the necessary polarities whose interactions materialize as the life of species.
This whole episode of the Coronavirus is shaping up as the first real bump in the road that deflates the bubble of Western Modernity. A cascade of other bumps are bound to follow that will eventually force a new historical era to emerge (vii)...
What comes after Modernity will be an era characterized by a Community of Nations that share a Common Destiny steeped in a holistic worldview and an ecological future.
China will gracefully accept to share its millennial knowledge and experience in societal governance (viii) with the rest of the world in order to ensure that this vision materializes. As I wrote, in “What is going on ? 3.8. emergence of a new world order ” :
“ Nowadays something new is starting to arise which should have a direct impact on how the world will govern its affairs in the future. I mean that the Chinese willingness to grab from Modernity and capitalism, all the elements that help to restore the greatness of the Chinese nation, has deepened China’s contact with the rest of the world as never before in its entire history.
The depth of this encounter, and the awareness by its governing elite about the multiple side-effects of Modernity, are resulting presently in a rising new awareness in China about the fact that humanity is a community of nations that share a common destiny.
There is no way to overstate the importance of this new reality. The leading actors at the core of the Chinese governance system believe that the human species faces a dire need of collaboration if it is to counter its present predicament. This new awareness, of being part of a species that is distributed among a community of nations, deepens China’s resoluteness to do the right thing to counter the side-effects of Modernity.
But this Chinese vision of the future of humanity, as a community of nations, certainly stands in stark contrast with the view of the West that can’t seem to distance itself from the perception that humanity is driven by a ferocious competition between nations that want to impose their hegemony over the rest of the world.
Sensing that its economic centrality is slipping away the West is now wildly accusing China of all the nasty hegemonic behaviors that have characterized its own actions over the past centuries. In matter of fact the West is now experiencing a nervous breakdown and acts like a gangster who tries to bully the rest of the world into submission.
But to the rational observer its words and actions make no longer any sense. Humanity is presently confronted with two clear choices of Geo-political futures :
▪ or lay down, shut-up, and acquiesce to the will of a brutal and violent Western master
▪ or participate as equals in a concert of nations that freely execute the symphony of humanity. “
The path to the future, of the nations of this earth, is already given. They want to “participate as equals in a concert of nations that freely compose and execute the symphony of humanity”.
Notes
ii. “Profits
or People“
From Radio
Open Source. Mark Blyth interviewed by Christopher Lydon. 2020-03-26
iv. About the material of national
attitudes = 1. civilizational
axioms, 2.
historical worldviews,
3. daily culture.
See
“What
is going on
?
2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions”.
v. Big
capital is represented by the biggest Western capital holders. They
own the largest chunk of the capital invested by the large assets
management firms and they rely on servants to manage their interests
: managers of assets management firms, corporate managers, state
bureaucrats, intellectuals, and heads of civil society organizations
like NGO’s and other.
vi. Check
this video
“The
Coronavirus Pandemic Forces Leaders To Decide: Save Lives Or The
Economy? “ by
Chris Martenson
vii. One
virus caused Covid-19, scientists say thousands more are in waiting
by Simone McCarthy in the SCMP, 6 Apr, 2020.
viii. The
West pretends to know best but it ignores that the richness of
China’s national experience dwarfs the Western short experiment.
Here are some good places to start to learn about the theoretical
treasure trove of China’s public governance :
-
the Yi-Ching (more than 3000 years old divination classic)
-
the DaoDeJing (the ‘bible’ of philosophic Taoism)
-
the Confucian classics (philosophy about societal governance)
-
the Qunshu Zhiyao (Compilation of 14,000 books and 89,000 scrolls of ancient writing on the Important Governing Principles from, the era of the Five Legendary Emperors – circa 2700/2200 BC –, to the Jin dynasty – 265/420 AD)
