Part 5. “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony (TIDAA)
In this last part I’m using a few quotes from articles by Peter Lee to force myself to focus on how the worldwide rise of TIDAA takes place in a deeply troubled context. Peter is a writer whose views on China I generally find refreshing for pointing to facts that are rooted in the ground of daily reality.
My personal approach focuses more on the long historical context from which the daily present emerges. The narrative of such an approach may appear more detached from the ground of daily reality and may even be viewed as mired in the field of theory. But the fact is that from where I’m standing, here just north of the Forbidden city on the central axis that forms the back of the dragon, I observe the same things as those described by Peter.
The difference in our approaches is that he writes about his direct observation of the present moment while I write about the context that generates my direct observation of the emergent present moment.
We individuals are the product of our life experiences. Our experience gives each of us our personal internal and external outlook on life. And deriving from the personal outlook that our life experience generated for us our productions are necessarily different but they are in no way better nor worse than the productions of other individuals.
Having clarified this point I want to superpose my description of the historical context, that generates the emergent present, over Peter’s written description of his direct observation of the scene of the present moment. This should allow me to verify if there are discrepancies between our views. And if there are the fact, of checking what are their origins, might unveil some new angles of observation that remain most generally hidden.
5.1. The China that XI Jinping inherited
“I think Xi Jinping came to office in an atmosphere of crisis. Economy slowing; straightforward Keynsianism of throwing money into the banking system yielding decreasing returns, inflationary pressures, higher debt burden; unsustainable revenue model for local governments; SOE & local government indebtedness; growing disconnect between government economic objectives and priorities of the business sector; corruption; increasingly vocal and networked dissatisfaction; chafing at PRC pretensions at the margins (Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong); demographic issues; corruption; clear need to wean economy and employment from the easy but no longer valid export/infrastructure growth model to something more complicated; a general desire by the US, Japan, and much of the world to circumscribe the PRC’s freedom of action and its international opportunities. Plenty of opportunities for the wheels to come off.” (1)Peter’s observation of a “Straightforward Keynesianism”, and its consequences, is certainly plunging straight into the reality of China’s economy in 2013 and much of his quote describes the internal and external outcome of this Keynesianism. This quote dates from 2015 and it is strongly tainted by the ideological context of the place where Peter was sitting when writing this article.
But let’s continue to read how his thinking further evolved over time.
“Western discussion of Xi Jinping’s rigid economic, social, and pandemic policies focus in his red, Marxist-Leninist, politics takes command leanings.
What they ignore is that Xi Jinping is putting the PRC on a wartime footing, working to enhance China’s resilience and ability to withstand and deter aggression from the United States.
Because the PRC and the United States are at war.
...The United States blew up Huawei. It cratered China’s advanced semiconductor industry. It provided rhetorical and G*d knows what other kind of support to separatists in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Joe Biden has committed America to the defense of Taiwan come what may, we’re loading the island up with weapons, and the Pentagon has gone so far as to slyly place Taiwan under America’s nuclear umbrella. Japan has committed itself to its biggest arms build up since World War II for forces that can only operate overseas when embedded in US military operations. Guam is being hardened as an intermediate range missile base. And let’s not forget the AUKUS clown show.
… It would be a dereliction of duty for Xi Jinping not to assume things are going to get worse before they get better. ... for the CCP, the hot war can’t end in a stalemate, with the PRC bled dry and the United States driven back from the ruins of Taiwan and Okinawa but coordinating an open-ended economic and technological blockade of China with Japan and the rest of the G7.
You know, like the Ukraine model against Russia?
In my opinion, the CCP is preparing for war…but it won’t go to war until it believes it can break US global power decisively, and for all time.“ (2)
The liberal rationality of Western-Modernity, that overwhelmed the first quote has vanished. In this new quote appears a strong statement of disapproval of the Western outlook about China that had been initiated by Trump’s foreign trade harassment which got strategically amplified under Biden. In this new context Peter states the following :
“It would be a dereliction of duty for Xi Jinping not to assume things are going to get worse before they get better. After all, the guesstimate is that China has to get f*cked up in the next ten years or else it’s too late for Uncle Sam, so expect the next decade to get pretty tense.
So Xi’s putting China on a war footing so that the PRC military, its economy, and its society—and the CCP itself-- are hardened to withstand a menagerie of black swans and grey rhinos and “high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms” without descending into an abyss of dysfunction, panic, and failure”.
In this last quote Peter seems to approve the PRC’s response to the US policy. The next quote is from his report about his trip to China in August 2023. In this last article he finally realizes that the liberalism of Western-Modernity is on the way out in China. So in light of the liberal rationality of Western-Modernity, that overwhelmed his first article, we should expect some toning down of the positive approval of the PRC’s response to US policy that characterized his article from 2022. Here is a quote from his last article :
“ ... the PRC is trying to war-harden the country without cratering the economy, and postpone indefinitely the day when America feels it has the advantage and opportunity to escalate the China confrontation to total economic warfare.
… The PRC is also actively shaping public opinion to highlight China’s virtues and America’s vices and has a fair amount of good material to work with. Thank you gun violence, the Hawaii fire, and Joe Biden!
… The disruption of US-China exchanges due to COVID and the relentless US anti-China campaigning is creating a generation of Chinese whose expectations and outlook are shaped by a new Sinocentric reality in which American values and priorities (and, I should say, tourists) are increasingly peripheral.
People I spoke to were positive on China’s situation and did not blame Emperor Xi’s insane ambition for the deterioration of relations with the West. Instead they seemed bemused and disappointed that the US has surrendered to a policy of anti-China fear, hate, and aggression to try and stick it to a country 10,000 miles away. Well, maybe some selection bias here because that’s how I feel.
But that’s not the whole story.
There’s a whole generation of people—important people—who grew up and thrived in an environment of US-China engagement. For them, decoupling from the United States--and the damage it has inflicted on their interests and aspirations--is painful.
The expectations of these elites aren’t on life support, in my opinion. They’re in hospice. Their attitudes are divided between rage and resignation as they anticipate their final exit.
Meanwhile the CCP is recruiting and cultivating new elites centered on the BRICS international regime, a less glamorous, less rewarding, but possibly more resilient order seeking its future in Russia, South Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Africa. They’ll be talking to CGTN and RT instead of sharing their discontents with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.
The idea that elite and popular opinion in China could shift aspirations away from Disney, MacDonald’s, and McDonnell Douglas to telenovelas, couscous, and Sukhoi jets is perhaps inconceivable to Americans, but the CCP is trying to make it happen.
As they say, in the old world there is a new world struggling to be born.
Will the CCP succeed?
The product it’s pitching to its citizens and to the world—that’s multilateralism via economic engagement—is fundamentally more attractive to a lot of countries than the deficit driven global War to Save Democracy that the US is peddling. Given money, perseverance, luck, and time the PRC might be able to thread the needle.
But…there’s that “time” thing. There’s the rub.
My opinion is, if the CCP is succeeding, in other words if it shows significant progress in establishing a robust parallel international order that can shield it from US economic aggression, the US will start a hot war to see if it can truly f*ck China up.” (3)
The air of the times, that Peter was forced to breathe in China, made him realize that the 5th column of Chinese pushers, of a liberal view of Western-Modernity, is in “its final exit”. But the conditioning, of his American life, is overwhelming his mind and this makes him spill the beans : “People I spoke to were positive on China’s situation and did not blame Emperor Xi’s insane ambition for the deterioration of relations with the West”.
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I do not personally know Peter nor do I have any clue if he is a Caucasian or a Chinese born in the United-States. I just read his articles because, as stated earlier, the first dimension of his direct observation of the present moment. Having said this his insane contradiction, between “Emperor Xi’s insane ambition for the deterioration of relations with the West” and “...the relentless US anti-China campaigning is creating a generation of Chinese whose expectations and outlook are shaped by a new Sinocentric reality”, made me think that he must be an ABC (4), for, how otherwise can we possibly make sense of a single person conveying two radically different opinions ?
Having said this Peter’s text from 2015 indicates without a shred of a doubt his preference for the liberal militant version of Western-Modernity that he has lived under during his entire life. By the time of his text from 2022 his mind had turned. I suppose he could no longer stand the moral hypocrisy that characterizes the exceptionalism of US governmental actions. But his most recent article suggests a constant tension between his preferred societal ideology and the moral hypocrisy of the governance of his society.
The organic flow of “Chinese Traditional Culture” on people’s daily realities is so strategically empowering their lives that, as a Chinese, they just can not throw it away for the evasiveness of a Western nagging ideological vision.
The efficacy of the “Chinese Traditional Culture”, in navigating the imperatives of individual daily life, is something that is very difficult to let go. Western societal ideologies rapidly appear fleeting at best. It is this kind of observation that forced me to focus on the concept of culture. I discovered indeed that most Western people unconsciously engage in a systematic epistemological confusion between the concepts of “daily culture”, “historically shared worldview” (religions for example), “Foundational worldview” and “civilization” and if you ask them what they mean by these concepts they are unable to distinguish them in their substantive reality. This observation motivated me to write “the continuum of the interactive cultural field of societies”.
By “the interactive cultural field of societies” I mean that the internal evolution, of an archetypal model of society, operates according to the interactions among the parameters of the cultural field of its societies. Marx had posited that “dialectical materialism” explained the whole of societal change.
“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.” (5)
Liberalism posited that the actions of the individual investors generate changes in the modes of production, and exchange, that result in the social reality of societies. Marx accepted that the social reality of societies is given by the modes of production and exchange but, on the ground of a Judaeo-Christian moral perspective, he rejected the private ownership of capital that monopolizes the returns on investment in the hands of a small minority of people.
By focusing on the different concepts of culture you are forced to recognize that, they relate to a same substance applying in different time-frames. This discovery shows that culture is a field that traverses the entire history of a society. And from that perspective “the final causes, of all social changes and political revolutions”, necessarily reside in the synchronization of the individual’s perception of their contextual settings with the continuum of their cultural field.
Changes in the modes of production, and exchange, are an important part of peoples’ daily contextual settings but they are not the whole of these settings. If you focus solely on the mode of production and exchange, as both Liberals and Marxist firmly believe, you are missing the fundamental role of the synchronization of the individuals’ perceptions of their contextual settings and you are then unable to explain why so many people are disenchanted by the feeling of leading meaningless lives. And if you are a political party, that views the social reality of societies as being given exclusively by the modes of production and exchange, then your disenchanted followers are necessary bound to wither away…
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After this digression let us come back to Peter’s post of 2015. He states “an atmosphere of crisis” that could potentially cause “the wheels to come off” the communist governance vehicle.
This statement was correct but not for the reasons that he noted. WEN Jiabao, the Prime Minister at the time, had duly noted during a meeting of the Central Committee in Late 2010 that the Communist Party was loosing its grip on the country’s movement forward and HU Jintao, as Secretary General, insisted that structural reforms were urgently needed to counter the rising difficulties encountered in the implementation of its decisions by the national government. HU called for nothing less than a re-centralization of the decision-making process as the best answer to counter the difficulties in the government’s implementation of the Party’s national decisions.
The awareness, among the top leadership of the CPC, was incisive and it thought that an intensification of internal and external contradictions called for a reinforcement of the center at the detriment of the periphery.
HU Jintao’s 10 years at the helm of the Chinese Communist party, will be remembered for turning China into an economic power-house. And the most representative moment of this turning came in 2008 when the government decided to inject a stimulus package, of some 4 trillion Renminbi Yuan (CNY) (USD 586.68 billion) (6), that came at the cost of centrifugal forces, local governments, private and public corporations, that rushed into over-indebtment. Christine Wong estimates that the stimulus over the following 3 years largely surpassed the government’s plans :
“... a conservative estimate would place the stimulus at CNY 9.5 trillion, or 27% of GDP, over the 27 months. This was 2.4 times the size of the announced stimulus package. In 2009 alone, it was CNY 6.5 trillion, or 19.3% of the current year GDP.”
By 2010 the authorities observed that, the internal potential destabilization by these overzealous centrifugal forces, was accompanied by an external policy trend by Western countries to counter China’s further development. In the eyes of the central leadership, of the CPC, this implied a need of re-centralization of the political decision-making process in order to gain a firmer grip on their nation’s further debt formation.
As soon as elected secretary general of the CPC XI Jinping rushed to implement these guidelines of the Central Committee while China analysts at Western Think-Thanks, and Western media outlets, rushed to picture him as a dictator. Time passing the USA’s actions, and those of its lackeys, were so arrogantly extreme that their absurdity was visible for all eyes to see. It became thus soon apparent that Biden’s slogan “democracies against autocracies” was part of the permanent propaganda campaign of the West against China and the other countries that refuse to acquiesce to the Western diktats of hegemony.
5.2. The cultural shock between liberal totalitarianism and the Chinese Traditional Culture
By the end of the 11th century a long chain of causes and effects had accumulated in the land of the Franks, in South-Western Europe, that eventually resulted in the emergence of the knowledge paradigm of Modernity sometime in the 12th century (7). That paradigm centered on the rationality, that was at work in what at the time was called the transformation of sterile money into merchant’s money, which de facto unleashed a process of capital accumulation.In the early-Renaissance Thomas Aquinas furthermore popularized the idea that human reason was complementary to the Christian god’s revealed truth. This idea rapidly spread and substantiated a Christian humanism that centered on the mastery of nature for the satisfaction of human needs. Aquinas de-facto instrumentalized Modernity making it complementary to religious belief and this ensured that its widespread development always stayed in harmony with the religious political order of Early-Modernity.
Aquinas’ instrumentalization of the knowledge paradigm of Modernity ensured that it would eventually give rise to the societal paradigm of Western-Modernity in the form of the nation-state, a specific form of the archetypal model of power-societies, that had already been put in practice in China over the past two millennia.
Finally at the peek of the Enlightenment, in the 18th century, Liberalism emerged as the ideology of the merchants capital holders and their university servants in France, the United Kingdom, Holland and Walloonia, who preached the virtues of philosophical rationalism and science against the darkness of religious and traditional belief systems.
Over the following centuries liberal parties opposed Christian parties and by the end of the 19th century the progressive left-wing quit the liberal parties to found socialist or social-democratic parties that formed the creative core of the welfare states of the 20th century.
By the 1960’s big capital holders observed a decreasing trend in the profits generated by their capital investments and they invested massively in the formation of Think-Thanks in the hope of finding theoretical answers to their conundrum. These Think-Thanks invariably advised the expansion of the reach of Western capital holders’ investments to the whole world.
But the transformation of sterile money into a process of capital accumulation, in the sense of the original paradigm of Modernity, rapidly appeared insufficient to satisfy such an ambitious program. A solution had thus to be found to address the limitation of available capital. The solution was a new iteration of the paradigm that complemented the transformation of sterile money by the transformation of debt into a dynamic process of capital accumulation.
This new iteration of the paradigm of Western-Modernity consecrated the primacy of bankers and lawyers over the engineers in the board of directors of corporations, and in state administrations, which signaled that a new era of financialization was imposing its rationality over any other consideration. This is also when quantitative methods were forced throughout the social sciences in order to satisfy the objectives of societal rationalization associated with the new iteration of the paradigm of Western-Modernity.
Western capital holders, and their servants, knew that, to be successful, such a radical program needed — to acquire the consent of the governments around the world without unleashing a public discussion — unlimited quantities of capital to rapidly reach an incontestable worldwide threshold of normality. The plan had thus to be executed without the public's knowledge by tweaking the Zeitgeist to the necessity of trumping the national conversations through a massive binge of individual consumption. Cheap Chinese productions certainly eased the implementation of this strategy.
The globalization of investments by major Western capital owners has de-facto been implemented without any public debate, while the public institutions have been subjected to the ideology of Neoliberalism, which has stripped them of any competence to protect, and while individuals were prevented from sharing their traditional worldviews, such as Christianity or Marxism, for example.
The results, of such a massive social engineering, were rapidly coming in without much of a reaction nor from the intellectuals nor from the media :
5.2.1. Western nations most important internal results from the globalization of the reach of their capital holders
- Trade-union membership entered into free-fall
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Blue collar incomes suddenly stagnated
Growth of real hourly compensation
for production/non-supervisory workers
and productivity, 1948–2018 (8) - Participation in church rites went in free fall
- Marxist ideology was suddenly on the way out
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Postmodernism and the loss of shared meaning
Western modernism had been searching in vain for new foundational narratives to replace the worldviews of early modernity. But it failed, and came to believe in the absurd proposition that "everything can be art".
The resulting zeitgeist of “whatever is art”, in the wake of World War II, was sized by the U.S. State Department, as an opportunity, to capture the art-scene which came thus under the control of merchants regrouping in New York for the occasion.
Later, postmodernism, like science, focused on snippets of reality that prevented the sharing of foundational truths with the majority of individuals who had fallen into an anxiolytic void of meaning. -
The capture of loneliness by social media
The loss of buying-power converged with a general loss of meaning, to share with others, which locked the large majority of individuals into a pervasive feeling of loneliness that web entrepreneurs seized as an opportunity to gain information about individuals by gluing them to their screens. Data accumulation became a goldmine that advertisers, marketing engineers and state institutions were eager to pay for in order to surveil the populations and to sell them entertainment. -
Social media and the loss of empathy
Social media have rapidly boosted the ego of the individuals, fostering a generalized hyper-individualism that has crushed the traditional respect for the authority of the men of power, the authority of the men of knowings, the authority of traditional institutions such as family, school, state, etc.
Startled by this sudden evolution, the men of power began to tweak the communication channels in order to limit the scope of the individuals' freedom of expression. Some got excluded from social media platforms, while the mainstream media systematically relayed the messages of men of power. But in the process the nature of information suddenly changed. The mainstream media became the propaganda arm of the institutions of power, while alternative media was positioned as an opposition force that attempts to give a truer picture of everyday reality.
Unfortunately, the alternative media were soon flooded by propaganda organs, and it quickly became very difficult to distinguish between "fake news" and "true news". The invasion of the media sphere by organs of pure propaganda, often peddling articles or videos written by AI, generates a deafening background noise that obscures our perception about our daily reality. -
Societal atomization and the death of societies
In the process, trust between individuals and institutions vanished. Societies became atomized, and lost their traditional ability to successfully undertake large-scale national projects — such as responding to the needs of populations after a major natural disaster — such as responding to the societal need to protect populations against pandemics — such as re-industrializing Western wastelands - or such as winning a world war for that matter...
In the final stage of the atomization of societies, when the last drop of inertial energy is consumed, societies fall dead, which may take the form of a financial collapse leading to the collapse of societal institutions, or a civil war, or the flight of the individuals into local forms of autonomy that spread and marginalize the societal life organized by men of power, and so on.
5.2.2. Most important external results from the globalization of the reach of Western big capital holders
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Western Hegemony and Neo-colonialism
“In theories of imperialism, the hegemonic order dictates the internal politics and the societal character of the subordinate states that constitute the hegemonic sphere of influence, either by an internal, sponsored government or by an external, installed government. The term hegemonism denoted the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over other countries, e.g. the hegemony of the Great Powers established with European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”. (9)
Hegemony is a Western concept that was applied and continues to apply to Western international and national governance. It is interesting to observe how the West today is using its hegemonic media power to force this concept on China’s governance behavior towards the rest of the world. But even more interesting is the disbelief of the rest of the world toward such an egregious Western attitude. In other words the present Western-centric imposition of beliefs, on the rest of the world, is back-firing which portends a rejection of Western concepts and beliefs during the inevitable negotiations of a new world-order in the near future.
Neocolonialism is the continuation or reimposition of imperialist rule by a state (usually, a former colonial power) over another nominally independent state (usually, a former colony). Neocolonialism takes the form of economic imperialism, globalization, cultural imperialism and conditional aid to influence or control a developing country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control or indirect political control (hegemony).
Neocolonialism takes the form of economic imperialism, globalization, cultural imperialism and conditional aid to influence or control a developing country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control or indirect political control (hegemony).
Neocolonialism differs from standard globalization and development aid in that it typically results in a relationship of dependence, subservience, or financial obligation towards the neocolonialist nation. This may result in an undue degree of political control or spiraling debt obligations, functionally imitating the relationship of traditional colonialism. Neocolonialism frequently affects all levels of society, creating neo-colonial systems that disadvantage local communities, such as neo-colonial science.
Neo-colonialism is a concept used by non-Western-countries to qualify Western governance behaviors towards them. The concept is also used by developmentalist economists, like Jeffrey Sachs for example, who believe that non-Western-countries have an inherent right to economic development in the sphere of Western-Modernity which Western countries now try to counter under various pretexts like environmentalism, climate change, human rights, and so on.
I personally believe that, during the coming negotiation of the forms of the new world-order, “the inherent right of economic development” will become one of the major points of contention highlighted by non-Western-countries and their contention will be accompanied, I believe, by a right of reparation for centuries of cultural and economic genocide. And in this context the moment is rapidly approaching when Western countries will be confronted to growing demands to dismantle their debt trap holding non-Western-countries hostage to their pretensions at recovering the principal and the interests on the debts they contracted to them… -
Loss of Sovereignty
Western imperial hegemony today takes the form of neocolonialism or the indirect management of non-Western-countries governments by indoctrination and corruption of their elites :
- Indoctrination of non-Western elites
The elites of non-Western-countries have been systematically indoctrinated to the tenets of Neo-liberalism that have been peddled over the last 50 years by the institutions of the United-Nations and a bunch of international organizations, like the Trilateral Commission, that are financed by Western big capital holders.
China’s economic elites, for example, have been recruited primarily among USA trained economists from the 1980’s until sometime after 2010 when locally trained economists started to be selected in priority.
The CPC was well aware of the contradiction of sending hundred thousands students to the US annually where they would be submitted to a strict indoctrination to an ideology of Neoliberalism that favors the implementation of the rationality of Modernity above all else. But it judged this was the price to pay to gain specialized knowledge in the social sciences.
Under his 3rd term as President Xi Jingping is now cleaning up the CPC and China’s state administration from USA trained economists, and other social sciences specialists, who pushed the country in over indebtment and in the throat of Western corporate cultural massification while encouraging the experimentation of Postmodernism in the arts.
The paradox of Western-Modernity, that I develop in the Volumes 2 and 3 of the series about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, on the one hand unleashes the production of an abundance of cheap consumer goods that generate the envy of the individuals all around the world. On the other hand, Western modernity generates in the minds of non-Western elites the perception that they must acquire the rationality of Western modernity, which is at work in all the specialized fields of the social sciences.
This invariably leads to the death of their societies' traditional approaches to knowledge formation, which invariably concludes with the genocide of their traditional cultures. Western modernity also generates a series of side-effects that are responsible for the rapid extinction of living species. But Western elites want at all costs to avoid discussions about the systematic externalities of Western modernity that are the cause of the current avalanche of its side-effects ! -
Corruption or blackmail of non-Western elites
Where and when the indoctrination, of non-Western-elites, is not working satisfactorily Western countries customize special programs that are especially adapted to the realities of resisting non-Western-countries.
Over the last century the US 3 letter agencies have accumulated a panoply of specialized knowings about the engineering of social consent through the spread of propaganda, the manipulation of the news, the propagation of Neoliberal and Postmodern so called universal truths by Non Government Organizations (NGO’s), the adoption of legislation that is tainted by Neoliberalism, the militarization of institutions of force, and so on and on.
Ultimately the black budgets, of US 3 letter agencies, unblock any resistance to the panoply of their specialized knowings. -
Cultural genocide
It is undeniable that Western-Modernity’s ultra successful production of material goods, and the envy of the citizens of the whole world to participate in the splurge of consumerism, resulted in the mass-conversion of nearly all humans on this earth to its paradigm and its societal logic.
In the process traditional systems of knowledge formation, and the cultural fields of societies, collapsed in a worldwide cultural genocide that forced everyone to follow the normality of the rationality of Western-Modernity which is the expression of its totalitarianism !
The resulting cultural destabilization, of non-Western-societies, became the opportunity of Western countries to impose their governance diktats. This process sums up the societal reality of non-Western-countries over the last 2 centuries. -
Continuous economic dependency
The cultural destabilization, in the context of a Western Neo-colonial hegemony, inevitably leads to a systemic economic dependence. It is at this stage that the loss of sovereignty through the indoctrination of the elites, or their corruption, provides the most favorable context for the capture by Western economic actors of the resources of non-Western countries.
Breaking out of their captive context has always been the dream of non-Western countries. But their systemic dependence has been proven by history to be extremely difficult to shed, for, they were like dwarfs fighting against titanic forces.
- Indoctrination of non-Western elites
5.2. 3. The west rejects the evolution of Western-Modernity
As I have laid out exhaustively, in book1 of the Volume 2 of the series about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, Early-Western-Modernity emerged with the conversion of Frank long distance merchants sometime in the 12th century and the implementation of a voluntary program of assistance to their commerce by the Counts of Champagne.Over the following 5 centuries Western-Modernity has expanded its rationality to all there is under the sun. This culminated with the triumph of philosophic rationalism and science under the Enlightenment which facilitated the explosion of material productions under the industrial revolution.
The silent revolution of the 1970’s finally expanded the realm of investment of Western big capital holders to the whole world. Unfortunately this silent revolution went against the interests of the citizens, of Western nations and their societies. This silent revolution resulted indeed in a long chain of causes and effects that led to the transfer of Western industrial activities to Southern countries.
China was the sole Southern country that, over the last 3 millennia, had accumulated a political theory and a theory of governance under chaotic conditions that was rooted in its historical practice. The “Chinese Traditional Knowledge” formation, and the “Chinese Traditional Culture” accompanying it, procured the insight to Deng Xiao Ping and his comrades to gamble on the financialization of Western economies to acquire on the cheap their production know-how and their capital. And by positioning itself as having the most favorable contextual settings to maximize the profits of Western big capital holders China succeeded to capture the bulk of Western know-how and capital that were shifting to the South.
This resulted in 30 glorious years of extreme profits for Western capital holders and extremely cheap mass commodities craved by Western populations. But the glory suddenly turned sour when the World Bank announced in 2014 that China’s economy was on the verge of surpassing the US economy in PPP terms. This announcement was followed by a short period of silence that was suddenly interrupted by Donald Trump’s win of the presidential title in 2016.
The Trump Presidency originated a trade war and, under the authority of Robert Kadlec (10), it was most probably the source of repeated biological attacks against China in 2018 and 2019. The last such attacks was in Wuhan and caused the Covid pandemic. The Biden Presidency expanded Trump’s trade-war, against China, into a technological and financial war that has backfired and is badly hurting the Western world.
Western Europe's embrace of the United States, which uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder against Russia, has led to a new episode of de-industrialization of its chemical, mechanical engineering and automotive industries, which will cause a fall in its GDP and widespread unemployment. The US technology sector, while still the most advanced in the world, has suffered a massive and direct loss of market share as a result of China's counter-sanctions. This loss of market share will inevitably translate into a reduction in research budgets in the field of technological development, as the Chinese state redirects the massive investment of its real estate sector towards basic science, research and technological development.
Over the last ten years, the United States' strategy has been to impose diktats on the rest of the world. Europe was forced to sanction Russia, and in the process it lost most of its supplies of cheap, high-quality Russian resources, resulting in huge consumer price rises and the loss of a significant share of its export market. For years, Russia had been preparing its economy to counter what it saw as inevitable Western sanctions. So, when the West sanctioned it, for its "special military operation" in Ukraine, the country was ready to seize the opportunity to rally the whole country behind a program of import substitution and reorientation of its exports from Western Europe to East Asia. Sanctions against China focused on reducing its imports of advanced technologies, with the aim of reducing its production of advanced consumer products. But China had also been preparing for this American move for years, and launched package after package of programs to support technological innovation in its most strategic industrial sectors: semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and 6G communications standards and wireless internet, the internet of things (IOT), quantum computing, robotic process automation (RPA), genomics, space technologies, military applications, etc.
Backfiring sanctions are puzzling Western decision-makers. The more ideologically oriented are shouting for retribution in the form of more sanctions and the threat of economic blockades that could easily turn into a kinetic conflict. The more pragmatic are questioning the sanity of digging an ever deeper hole for their nations and are asking for dialogue with China and Russia. But they are still a minority. China and Russia furthermore doubt of the Western capability to implement its agreements.
The Western silent revolution of the 1970’s is now reaching its conclusion in the form of an explosion of the trade, finance, and technological war that could possibly turn into a kinetic war characterized by the launch of intercontinental hypersonic missiles. The launch of such missiles would stop after a few hours to let the survivors count their losses. What follows would assuredly depend on the registered losses by both sides. I’m afraid that if one side were to have inflicted far worse damages, than those it suffered, it would most probably be tempted to launch all it can to cause the extinction of the other side…
5.2.4. There Is Definitely An Alternative to the West
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The unexpected rise of China
China’s strategy of positioning itself as having the most favorable contextual settings to maximize the profits of Western big capital holders ensured that it captured the bulk of the Western know-how and capital involved in the expansion of their reach to the whole world.
In the process the country built the most extensive — national infrastructure that the world has ever seen — national production apparatus that the world has ever seen. But while this feat had been planned all along by Chinese strategists its successful outcome was unexpected in the eyes of Western strategists who were literally taken by surprise.
China’s national infrastructure and its national production apparatus, stimulated the concentration of large chunks of production chains within the confines of its territory. And the delocalization by Chinese enterprises, of their lowest technology production capabilities, to ASEAN countries exploded the GDP of these countries while unifying a tight knit Regional Economic Block (REB) that completes China’s production chains with the supply of low cost parts and the procurement of machinery and consumer goods.
The rise of ASEAN as an appendix of China was progressive but rapid. Most importantly all the parties remained cool headed and never boosted about the reality of their future potential. When both sides, sometime in the beginning of the 2020’s, became their most important trade and investment partners the West awakened to the new reality on the ground and started to search for fissures in the new South-East-Asian REB that could be exploited to cause its future downfall. All in all it can be said that all ASEAN members are skillfully skirting Western poison-pills intended to derail their future potential growth.
Once again, while this feat had been planned all along by Chinese strategists, its successful outcome was unexpected in the eyes of Western strategists who were literally taken by surprise. But this time around the whole world awakened to what had just happened… This was a confirmation that the Chinese approach is working and can be reproduced elsewhere. -
China proves that “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony
China’s economic rise, and the subsequent rise of ASEAN, is awakening the whole world about the fact that Margaret Thatcher and TINA had been wrong all along. Western hegemony is suddenly losing its luster. The low-tide of pessimism in the collective subconscious seems to be turning into a high-tide of optimism at the prospect of the fall of Western hegemony.
TINA is shifting into TIDAA or “There Is Definitely An Alternative” to Western hegemony. But the hope is still merely related to the potential of a future new world order. Before this new world order materializes a lot of water will still have to flow in the oceans.
TIDAA is about the hope of a better future than what Western-Modernity has given us. But this hope is accompanied by growing risks of :
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Kinetic conflicts
In the words of some US high level military commanders the USA will soon use force against China in order to restrain its further economic development. Whatever their words might be worth we are forced to observe the de-facto build-up of military forces by countries on both sides of the present Geopolitical divide. But only time will tell how factual history will unfold, so while remaining clear-minded, we'd better keep quiet. -
Western societal atomization → institutional collapse
As I laid out in “Modernity 02. 4.10. the cultural continuum breaks down” societal atomization will conclude with “the death of Western societies”. -
Numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity
I laid out this aspect of Late-Western-Modernity in “Modernity 02. Part 2. Great Convergence of late-Modernity”. In substance the paradigm of Western-Modernity forces numerous externalizations of costs that are absorbed by the habitat of life and the individuals of the different species living in this habitat. But this comes with costly consequences for their future generations. During this Late-Western-Modernity these consequences are already inflicting us with a predicament of interruption of life as usual.
But these growing risks, on our present horizon, are not only isolated. They are converging and an acceleration has occurred on the path to their individual thresholds which implies that the time-frame to their tipping-points has considerably narrowed.
In the Volume 2 and 3 of the series about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity” I call this convergence and the accompanying acceleration of its consequence “the great Convergence of the numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity”.
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Kinetic conflicts
Notes
1. “Twilight of the CCP…AND Shambaughism?” , China Matters, by Peter Lee. 2015-03-13.
2. “Unlocked: Xi Jinping Prepares for War” , Patreon, by Peter Lee. 2022-10-23.
3. "Traveler’s Tales: My August 2023 Trip to China" , Patreon, by Peter Lee. 2023-08-30.
4. ABC’s = American Born Chinese.
5. "Historical materialism', Wikipedia.
6. "The Fiscal Stimulus Program and Public Governance Issues in China", OECD Journal on Budgeting, Vol. 11/3., by Christine Wong. 2011-10-19.
7. "The Transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity. Volume 2. Modernity-01. Part 1. Pre-Modernity was the context of Modernity's emergence" by laodan
8. "The wedges between productivity and median compensation growth", Economic Policy Institute, by Lawrence Mishel. 2012-04-26.
9. “Hegemony”, from Wikipedia
10. “Neo-colonialism”, from Wikipedia
11. "Battlefield of the Future. Chapter 10. Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare", by Lt Col Robert P. Kadlec, USAF.
"If the target commodity was a principal cash crop or food source, using BW may inflict a grave blow to that nation’s economy or society and possibly result in some political impact. History has recorded the chaos and instability created by such natural catastrophes as famines and epidemics. Using BW in this fashion would have applications to waging low-intensity warfare with strategic outcomes.
... The real and hypothetical examples cited highlight the opportunity offered by BW as a means to attack the agricultural infrastructure of an adversary. The existence of naturally occurring or endemic agricultural pests or diseases and outbreaks as described permit an adversary to use BW with plausible denial.
... In the post-cold war era and as we enter the twenty-first century, the economy determines superpower status. The threat posed by biological weapons deserves prudent consideration."
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