What a Year, Right?
By David Smith
December 2021
Oh, the sound and fury of this year. Think of the pictures we have seen on our screens. From armed folks in Native American head-dress storming the U.S. Congress back in January, to Greta Thunberg and friends telling world leaders they are ‘bla-bla’ merchants come late November in Glasgow. In between came the tragedy of Afghanistan, war and famine again in Ethiopia, not to mention our world living through pandemic. Yet there has been a big-picture backstory playing out too.
The contrast in 2021 between our world’s two superpowers could hardly have been more stark. The United States has been reeling from a mosaic of crises, everything from that assault on the U.S. capitol in the new year, to the debacle in Kabul in June, to questions about Joe Biden’s attention span come this winter. China, in contrast, ended 2021 making President Xi supreme leader for life, sending strong messages abroad—think Taiwan or Hong Kong, or Xi’s new nuclear arsenal, then relaxing the rules at home, permitting folks to have another child.
To my eye this is an indicator that 2021 has been one of those banner years, reminiscent of my Moscow days in 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Soviet Empire shrunk every week after the fall of the Berlin wall. We’re not there yet, but the tell-tale signs of a dramatic shift in global power, reminiscent of the end of the Cold War, are writ large. And this in a year when the entire world has been dealing, endlessly, with a pandemic which started in China.
I’ve little experience of China, limited to a stretch after the Tiananmen square massacre, but the abiding lesson was of a Communist party that cared not a jot what we in the West thought and said of their decision-making, or their tactics. This year it’s been striking to hear, from former colleagues at the U.N., that China has defiantly prevented the World Health Organisation from investigating, seriously, the source of the Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, supreme leader Xi ignored the climate summit in Glasgow. No matter the consequences. China charts its course, only a matter of time before becoming the world’s number one economy.
The world’s number one economy.
In contrast, the news from my long-time habitat, Washington, D.C., could hardly be more illustrative of a superpower in turmoil. In the days when I stalked the corridors on Capitol Hill, to conduct impromptu interviews with Senators and such, you’d always find voices insisting they had to negotiate with the other side, in the name of doing the ‘people’s business.’ Today it seems you can forget that. It’s open warfare.
Democrats and Republicans have drawn such battle lines. Witness the way one side prevents the other from investigating that January assault on the Capitol. Or how Republican states refused to make mask-wearing obligatory, let alone push the vaccine programme, when the world’s richest country has suffered such a disproportionate number of Covid deaths (one statistic says so much: USA 4% of world population, USA 15% of world’s Covid fatalities).
Judging by their marathon zoom call the other week, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will spar, rather than confront, in the days ahead. But the markers of that shift in power abound. You see it in foreign policy, Biden withdrawing from the world, preaching “America first” as he did over the shambolic, humiliating exit from Afghanistan. While Xi expands his arc of influence, most notably in the developing world, typically Africa and Latin America.
I live in a country, Argentina, where China has invested heavily in recent years, buying food and resources from this bread-basket economy over the next 20-25 years. Then there is Uruguay next door, small maybe, but it boasts a huge, gateway port in Montevideo, and they have gone to the table with China, to make Montevideo the entry point for China’s exports to Latin America, and the exit point for Latino products heading to China.
Then I think of Congo, the largest country in Africa. Working there for the United Nations a few years ago, I was stunned to see the Chinese army building roads to facilitate their extraction of Congo’s vast mines of minerals: gold, diamonds, copper, tin, but above all coltan, an essential element in the mobile phone. Such investments give the Chinese enormous leverage. And clout, in regions of our world where the United States, not to mention the U.K., are increasingly seen as “bla-bla” merchants, sadly.
No New Year’s predictions from me, I learned long ago that’s a fool’s game. What seems obvious is that we are living already in China’s century. That Beijing controls not just the world’s largest nation, but soon the planet’s number one economy, already tasting the political muscle, global reach, we have always ascribed to the United States.
How I wish we had the leaders capable of confronting that new world. Politicians who could go to the table—and make the Chinese Communist party realise that, if they want to lead, they have to bring others on board, stop talking just about China’s interests, not just issue diktats, and certainly not torture and murder their opponents. Not sure we have such titans on our team these days.
¡Basta! As we say in this part of the world. A peaceful, happy new year to all.
