Denial Doesn’t Confirm Truth

China launched an intercontinental ballistic missile this month, which predictably angered the major players in the Western hemisphere. The missile had the capability of reaching Japan, Australia, and parts of the United States. Much of the world maintained a studied silence. The communist country’s commanding position in controlling Asia-Africa trade can become a matter of acute consternation to its rivals and opponents in the traditionally capitalist world. The emerging future is for any power in a controlling position of the economies of the two continents.

Three of the world’s ten largest banks are headquartered in China—the superpower that has outpaced the US, the current No. 1 superpower, in space technology and many other technological spheres. Three of its universities were recently listed in the world’s top ten. The communist country is still at least a couple of decades behind the US for the overall top slot in the global index. But it is increasingly breathing closer down the neck of the lead superpower.   

Coinciding with the COVID-19 onslaught, especially since the Ukraine war in February 2022, the West moderated its maligning of that “hermit”-like nation, internationally “snubbed and isolated”. When the Russia-North Korean defence agreement was signed in 2024 after NATO and EU members tightened the screws against Moscow in Ukraine, Western propaganda barrage against Pyongyang has noticeably declined.

Bilateral relationships

It is a globally open secret that there is little or no love lost between Communist China and the United States, the capitalist world’s capital.

Iran war has had a fallout that the Trump team never anticipated. Tehran’s resilience in its ability to face the superpower with credible force has stunned a world fed with press propaganda, painting the Islamic country as a war-mongering rightist state with fanatics at the helm of power fuelled by vast oil money. A pariah state—and nothing more. The big media lapped up official background briefings—and at times, deep background narratives—that projected Russia and Iran as disruptors of the international system.

When the time of reckoning came on February 28 with the US-Israel’s coordinated attacks on Iranian territories even as hectic talks were going on for an agreement, Tehran gave every indication that it was in no position to take things lying down. Beijing watched the unfolding events with advantageous satisfaction without having to get bogged down directly in the conflict.

The Global Times questioned the ongoing “tit-for-tat” confrontation. Washington brandished tariff threats to put pressure on Beijing, whose retaliatory response put the US capital on the back foot. 

The South China Morning Post wrote an editorial terming the tension “another round of tit-for-tat measures triggered by fresh US tech restrictions ... the real damage is that Beijing will see Washington as less dependable and find it harder to put faith in what it promises”.

Washington miscalculated its power of leverage as a tool to confront China, without proper study of the communist country’s fast-enhanced capability to hit back with appropriate blows. Throughout the height of the trade war, China relentlessly maintained that trade and tariff wars produced no winners. The Global Times reminded: “China does not seek confrontation, but it will never sit idly by while its legitimate rights and interests are harmed or while international trade rules and the multilateral trading system are undermined.”

China is equipped well with the economic and military might that the US became during the entire 1990s—a monopoly, supported by NATO and the European Union. Seizing the US trade narrative, China rejected in April US President Donald Trump’s overtures to reverse trade tariffs on imports from the communist country. 

Trump’s prematurely confident claim that China would come crawling for an understanding did not happen. Trump blinked first and all but begged Beijing to lift the White House phone call for reopening a line of communication. China’s President Xi Jinping had had enough of Trump’s threats that climaxed with the prohibitive tariff war. Trump received his first taste of an angry Xi who refused to budge from his stance: retaliate in equal measure. 

Austerity constitutes a term reserved for very poor countries in Asia and Africa as against gluttonous consumerism that core capitalist countries regard as a robust economy. In reality, the top one per cent rich account for more than 40 per cent of their economies. Beijing has the satisfaction that the West will be divided over the issue and Washington’s clout and credibility even among allies will erode for the whole world to see. The development is yet another solid brick to an emerging new world order.

Calculated course 

China’s calculated course is to accept some pain initially but inflict a greater hurt on the capitalist opponent immediately and in the longer term. The rest of the world watches who wins and who wilts in the superpower contest. At the US prompting in 2022, Western banks froze Russia’s $300 billion. This sent a strongly negative message to other governments, which began to look for alternatives. Many of them began selling off the treasury bonds bought in the US.  

Competitive, inventive and industrious, China has edged out the US as the world’s No. 1 tech superpower. American media and scientists will admit it perhaps in the next decade, just as it took them years before grudgingly admitting that the communist country attained the No. 2 economic status no less than a decade earlier. Beijing watches, waits and makes its moves silently. A long-term approach is its policy in principle. But preparations are such that more often than not it responds to urgent situations fittingly. 

The US fears China taking the world No 1 economy spot within the next few years and the neck-and-neck competition for a technological edge over the Americans any time soon, whether Washington acknowledges it formally or not. China paces with a calculating approach. It first lays out the groundwork before striking hard and deep, and inflicting maximum damage to the target but with very few repercussions for itself.

(Kharel writes on int'l affairs & media.)