Adam Tooze on China's Geopolitical Strategy of Connections
Discussion
Adam Tooze:
"China is not just inheriting the world the West made, including through imperialism; it is actively engaged in reshaping it, or world making.
This difference is more than methodological, it may help us, perhaps, both to see the world more clearly and to come to terms of it in a less antagonistic manner.
China in the late 1990s effectively created a new Bretton Woods - some call it Bretton Woods 2.0 - by autonomously by pegging its currency at an undervalued exchange rate against the dollar, a peg that is hard to break. It has had many difficult side effects in China itself, but China can manage those. It is a way of asserting their sovereignty within this system.
In the last 10 years, precisely in the time that the US has lost the plot and the Europeans have being tying themselves in knots, the Chinese effort has broadened out. The result is a tripolar world trading system. One pole is American. It is far more modest than the noise made by US trade policy would lead you to believe. Chinese exports to the United States make up roughly 2.5% of global trade. And it is not even a rapidly growing part of this pie.
The other two major poles of global trade are around and within the EU and the series of networks around China, each one of which constitutes a set of connections, an act of world making, and an act of world ordering that we have to reckon with and that will shape the future. If you add up China’s foreign investment, its soft power, its technological links, its increasing military presence, does it add up to an American style new world order? No, it clearly doesn’t, but that is also a red herring. We have to stop thinking in those terms.
What it does constitute is a policy of connection. It may not be entirely consistent, but it is quite deliberate. And there are multiple different rationales being developed in Beijing that organise and coordinate these different elements.
If there is one aspect of that that is really quite fascinating and new, it is the challenges of large nations’ development on a global scale. This future that is being shaped is very likely to be formed by players, notably the Chinese but also India, Brazil, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, for whom the question about large national development really dominates the agenda. The EU, on the other hand, is rather focused on questions that are post-national, medium-sized and concern sustainability.
The large national development agenda is the one that the key players, who are currently actively building out systems, are going to be engaged in. Right now, we are all impatient with China claiming status as a developing economy. But unless we grasp that development is the focus, we cannot really understand what this programme of world making, of renewable energy, is about. The thing that makes it novel is not that it constitutes an order to replaces that built around the US between 1944 and 2015, but that it is actually about the realisation of a programme of national development on the global scale. In this sense it is less reminiscent of what John Darwin so aptly calls the British (global) Empire Project, and far more similar to the rise of the US as a continental national economy of global reach, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Except that the US in 1914 with a population of a mere 99 million, accounted for 5 percent of global population. China’s share today with 1.4 billion inhabitants is three times that. The scale and reach of technologies available today are far more gigantic in their implications than those mobilized by the US in the early 20th century. And the US rose to globalism on a planet whose frontier was only just closed, whereas we now face a new world of geopolitics on a finite planet with 8 billion inhabitants and dozens of capable nation states. Little wonder that Beijing places so much emphasis on the unprecedented challenges facing ”Large Nations’ Development on a Global Scale.”
(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-461-ordering-not-order)