[Op-Ed] – A bipolar world is re-emerging, as China and Russia join hands (reddit.com).
What sanctions does Russia face? Here’s a list by country (msn.com)
Ukraine: why China’s hands are tied as Russia and the West face off.
In a joint statement on a new era of international relations, Xi and Putin have thrown down the gauntlet to the US-led world order. Those who thought history had come to
an end with the collapse of communism in the USSR might have another think coming
Philip J. Cunningham has been a regular visitor to China since 1983,
working as a tour guide, TV producer, freelance writer, independent
scholar and teacher.
Beijing and Moscow have good reason to feel isolated and unloved these days, and in their loneliness, they have found each other. The two erstwhile fraternal communist giants are closer to an alliance than they have been since Mao Zedong broke with Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. There’s still plenty of disparity between the national interests of China and Russia, but faced by containment on all sides, they are finding important points in common, too.
China has an economy six times that of Russia’s, but what Russian President Vladimir Putin lacks in wealth and manpower can to some extent be addressed by his unblinking willingness to engage in asymmetrical battles against better-equipped adversaries.
More troubling, not just for Putin’s foes but for the planet in general, has been Putin raising the spectra of a nuclear attack.
Despite its brevity and complications in Ukraine, Putin’s visit to Beijing during the Winter Olympics was more than a photo opportunity. After his meeting with President Xi Jinping, the two leaders issued a 5,000-word joint statement about a shared vision for international relations in a new era.
Journalist Robert Scheer describes the statement as a “historic articulation of the major shift underway from the unipolar world that has existed since the fall of the Soviet Union”.
Xi meets with Putin ahead of Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony
Xi and Putin have, for now, joined forces to throw down the gauntlet to
the US-led world order.
A week later, President Joe Biden’s White House released the “Indo-Pacific Strategy
of the United States”, a mix of democratic blather and muscular plans for containment.
“Enemies of My Enemy: How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order” by Michael Beckley, published in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, gives useful background to the current rearranging of the global chessboard.
Although Beckley’s conclusion that the US must prevail is open to question, he argues rather convincingly that niceties like “the liberal order” don’t exist in a vacuum but need an enemy.
Ukraine: why China’s hands are tied as Russia and the West face off
And it takes a truly frightening enemy to get self-interested nations to subordinate their own best interests to those of a larger grouping. Nato is a prime example of a grouping built and maintained on fear.
The Axis-versus-Allies fight divided the world into camps in the second world war,
while the Cold War, which was mercifully more smoke than fire, was never short on fear. The “free world” wasn’t uniformly free, but it was effectively united against the “Reds”. Allies were courted and whipped into line based on terrors both real and imagined.
The Sino-Soviet split brought the fault lines of the red world into the open,
cracking the bipolar order.
This led to the Sino-American rapprochement, which served to corner Russia.
Nixon in China: How a US presidential trip made history 50 years ago.
The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a political earthquake that informs the slightly paranoid worldview of Xi and Putin to this day.
The old duality began to erode and, depending on where you stood, either history had come to an end, with the US and its capitalist allies running a victory lap around the rubble of the discredited communist system, or as it might appear from Moscow and Beijing, it was not the end of history but merely a chapter in which it was necessary
to lay low.
The economics underpinning the growing Russian-Chinese influence 31 Jan 2022
During the Deng Xiaoping years, and those of his like-minded successors Jiang Zemin
and Hu Jintao, China made a concerted effort to guard its ambition and bide its time,
but that’s not to say China ever really embraced a unipolar world with the US in charge.
There were genuine feel-good moments during the high tide of cultural exchange and booming trade, but a careful read of what China was saying all along suggests that the much-heralded US-China partnership was provisional.
“You Should Look Back”, by Geremie Barmé for China Heritage, is a useful China watcher’s compendium which suggests not so much that China has changed under Xi,
as that it has been going in this direction all along.
In Russia, KGB-trained martial arts enthusiast Putin stepped into the ring with a sense
of purpose, and he is still in the ring, still trying to restore lost glory and lost territory.
The world is united in Ukraine, divided in America.
In Ukraine today, moves and countermoves by the newly assertive Russia and the U.S.
are attempts to get the other side to blink first. Between Nato, G7 and the Quad, the U.S.
has many more allies than China and Russia combined. It’s the isolation of Moscow and
Beijing which makes the growing closeness meaningful, even if they are not strictly allies.
Trade between the two giant neighbours would go a long way towards reducing the impact of sanctions and having each other’s back could make a huge difference if fighting breaks out in either realm.
A Brown Hand Lifts The Lamp Beside That Golden Door.
I did not know that the Statue of Liberty was originally meant to celebrate the
liberation of slaves, and that her face may have been modeled after that of an
Egyptian woman.
America is browning. By 2044 less than half America’s population will be white.
Despite the most heinous (and hopeless) efforts of some to hinder the progress of minorities and to put an end to America’s tradition of immigration, most Americans
take pride in supporting civil rights and welcoming immigrants to our shores.
As well we should. For all America’s flaws, it is those two factors that will preserve our nation’s greatness. Yes, this claim sounds over-the-top, but that’s what the statistical
data show, validating everything Ezra Lazarus wrote in her poem “The New Colossus”
at the foot of our Statue of Liberty. Why?
Look at the above list of problems faced by China due to their declining population,
and how the same problems (if to lesser extents) are faced by so many other nations.
With the sole exception of our slowly depleting Social Security trust fund, America is
not facing any of those problems.
Yes, our white population is declining — more are dying and fewer are being born — but our minority (i.e., Black/Hispanic/Asian) population is continuing to grow and reproduce, more than making up for the deficits of white people.
As a direct result, instead of the eventual (and unavoidable) decrease in the Chinese
GDP, America’s GDP growth will be concomitant with our continuing population growth.
What are the estimates of our population growth in the coming years?
Here’s a graph from the U.S. Census Bureau:
Estimated U.S. population by year (U.S. Census Bureau)
One might think that a big part of that population growth will be the elderly
who are no longer able to contribute to the workforce, but in reality, not so much?
By 2050, one-third of Chinese will be over the age of 60, but the Census Bureau
data indicate that only one-fifth of Americans will be over the age of 65.
Yes, the estimates are of different ages — 60 for China and 65 for America —
but that five-year gap cannot account for the 12% difference in proportion of
our nations’ respective populations.
Remember the earlier estimate that by 2100:
China’s population will decline to about 480M people? That same year, according to Census Bureau statistician Tammany Mulder, America’s population will be about 571M. Yes, you read that right — America will have more people than China. To be sure, that particular estimate is over 20 years old, but it’s not far off the trends delineated in the
five-year-old Census Bureau graphic above.
Side note: China recently raised its mandatory retirement age in an effort
to keep its elderly from becoming too much of a burden on their economy.
The mandatory retirement age had been among the lowest in the world —
60 for men and as low as 50 for women.
As most who read this article know, America has no nationwide mandatory retirement age. We can keep working (and contributing to the economy) as long as we want, as long as we’re physically able to work (though most of us would really prefer to be able to afford retirement, to be able to choose to retire once we’re old).
America’s Black, Brown, and immigrant populations will not only be providing our nation’s continued population growth, but — even more importantly — preserving
the relative youth of our population. This not only provides a more physically capable workforce but also avoids the trap China faces of having too few younger people to care
for too many elderly people.
Many who see that projection of a 571M population for America will immediately think that that means America will be far too overcrowded, living elbow-to-elbow in a dystopia right out of Soylent Green (which was supposed to occur in 2022, btw), but here’s a reality check:
“If you look at the density for the United States, we are not even coming close to
the densities that you see in Europe,” said Census statistician Tammany J. Mulder.
“The U.S. population density in 2100 would be 161.4 people per square mile, about
one-fourth the current population density of Germany and the United Kingdom.”
Too many white Americans “rage, rage against the dying of the white” as it were
(With apologies to Dylan Thomas), but we should instead be deeply grateful for the Black people, Brown people, and immigrants around us. Demographic trends conclusively show that they — and not we — are quite literally the future of our nation. It would be in all our best interests to stop decrying the ‘Browning of America’, and instead do our level best to ensure they have every tool and every advantage we can provide.
We’ve had our time at the wheel for many, many generations.
It’s their turn now.
Addendum: Of course, none of the estimates above take into account factors such as major wars, pandemics, or — most worryingly — global warming. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Alibaba founder Jack Ma both stated that the biggest threat the world will also face in 20 years is population collapse and its effect on global trade.
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