China pivots everywhere - RT Op-Edge - 0 views
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war & peace economic-warfare China pivot BRICS Eurasia major-developing-powers
shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Feb 15
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Geopolitically, China has also tweaked its model, but the West, especially the US, has barely noticed it. Essentially, the Beijing leadership finally got fed up with trying to manage a possible reset of the China-US strategic relationship, and be treated as an equal. Exceptionalists don’t do equality. So Beijing came up with its own response to the Obama administration’s political/military “pivot to Asia” – originally announced, and that’s quite significant, at the Pentagon. Thus, in late November 2014, during the Central Foreign Affairs Work Conference in Beijing, President Xi Jinping made an earth-shattering announcement; from now on China would stop treating the US – and the EU – as its main strategic priority. The new focus is on the fellow BRICS group of emerging powers, especially Russia; Asian neighbors; and top nations of the Global South, referred to as “major developing powers” (kuoda fazhanzhong de guojia). This is not as much a Chinese pivot to Asia as a Chinese pivot to selected nations in the Global South. And based on a “new type of international relations centered on ‘win-win’ cooperation” – not the bully-or-bomb exceptionalist approach.
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China’s new foreign policy and strategic configuration is all the more evident in the courting of Asian neighbors, invited to embark on China’s extremely ambitious twin strategy and the greatest trade/commerce story of the young 21st century: the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, in short “Belt and Road initiative,” as it’s known in China, now officially launched with the first $40 billion attributed to a Silk Road Fund. The enormity of the challenge is on a par with Beijing’s ambition: a pan-Eurasia trade/commerce utopia weaved by high-speed rail, fiber optic networks, ports and pipelines, and connecting East Asia, Central Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Europe.
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Plenty to be excited about then as the Year of the Sheep (or Goat) starts. What’s certain is that the Chinese caravan, much in contrast with the dogs of war - and austerity – pivoting across the West, has already pivoted towards “win-win” pan-Eurasia integration.
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China is also winding down its holdings of U.S. Treaury bonds. With $1.25 trillion in U.S. debt as of the end of October, China could sink the U.S. economy any time it chooses simply by placing all of its U.S. bonds on the market, then watching the dollar go splat. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-15/china-s-treasury-holdings-decline-to-lowest-since-february-2013 So China has a stick to keep the U.S. at bay. For the rest of the world, China offers carrots by the shipload. But the U.S. has only a stick, no carrots. B. F. Skinner established beyond question that positive reinforcement is a much stronger motivator than negative reinforcement. Too bad our oligarchs skipped Behavioral Psychology 201.