When the dragon talks

While the Russians are propping up the Assad government in Syria in a show of strength vis-a-vis an all-out effort by the West to install puppet regimes in oil-rich regions, China has bluntly told the European powers a few home truths.

Irked by an escalating trade row, China has told Europe quite undiplomatically that it should realise that its power is on the decline. China has made no revelation, though. Europe today has seemingly intractable economic problems to contend with, and therefore is not in a position to sustain its hold on the world, unlike in the past.

What has provoked Beijing into taking on Europe in this hostile manner is the latter’s trade protectionism, especially the duties that Brussels has slapped on Chinese solar panels.

Having targeted European wine in retaliation, against which it ordered an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe, China has trained its propaganda guns on Europe. The Chinese Communist Party organ fired a salvo at Europe the other day. The People’s Daily said editorially: “The change of the times and the shifts of power have failed to change the condescending attitude of some Europeans.”

Europe has no alternative but to take all these indignities lying down. They cannot do without China, which is expected to contribute as much as US$27 billion to an emergency fund to be utilised by the IMF to bail out the crisis-ridden euro zone. No other country could part with such a huge sum. Even the UK, thirsting for investment, has felt the need to be in China’s good books, as seen in the British deputy prime minister’s recent statement to Sky News. He said Britain has a very important relationship with China, as “it’s self-evidently one of the great economic superpowers of today, and particularly the future. We have a very important economic relationship with them”.

In 2012 alone, Chinese investment in Britain amounted to a whopping $8 billion, besides the purchase of US Treasury bonds to the tune of trillions of dollars. If China’s sovereign wealth fund refuses to invest, many a development project in Britain will be starved of money. This is the stark reality that the Cameron government has to come to terms with.

It is a supreme irony that Europe has had to resort to trade protectionism, which it used to frown on, while China is demanding that the West open its markets without imposing any restrictions. This is the reverse of what we saw before the rise of China as a global economic superpower; at that time it was Europe and the US making such demands.

On the other hand, whoever thought a few decades ago that the West would be dependent on Chinese funds to the same extent as Sri Lanka to keep its ailing economy afloat! Meanwhile, the US, too, has been constrained to practice the very antithesis of what it preaches to the rest of the world in saving its banking system in crisis. It has been pumping public funds into private banks to prevent them from going belly up.

The US and its capitalist allies are losing their control over the international lending institutions, which they employed as tools to control the world. Even the UK has chosen to place its human rights concerns on the backburner and curry favour with China.

The British government has reportedly refused to tender an apology for Prime Minister Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama last year in spite of China’s protests, but a leaked Downing Street document has exposed that Cameron, following that controversial pow-wow, asked his ministers to desist from meeting Tibet’s spiritual leader, as he did not want to ruin his country’s relations with China due to economic considerations more than anything else.

Time was when the West promoted the catchy slogan: “Better dead than red!” But, on seeing the volte-face on the part of the Western powers troubled by an economic morass of their own making, as regards the radical changes their economic policies have undergone, as evident from America’s statist interventions to save its banking sector, and their dependence on China for economic survival, one may wonder whether they will one day change the aforesaid slogan to “Better red than dead!”