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<div class="entry-date">November 14, 2014<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-141114.html">http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-141114.html</a><br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="subheadlinestyle"><big><b><big>Further On Down the
Multi-Polar Road</big></b></big></div>
<h1 class="article-title">China’s Silky Road to Glory</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by PEPE ESCOBAR </div>
<div>If there were any remaining doubts about the unlimited
stupidity Western corporate media is capable of dishing out, the
highlight of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit
in Beijing has been defined as Russian President Vladimir Putin
supposedly “hitting” on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wife – and
the subsequent Chinese censoring of the moment when Putin draped a
shawl over her shoulders in the cold air where the leaders were
assembled. What next? Putin and Xi denounced as a gay couple?Let’s
dump the clowns and get down to the serious business. Right at the
start, President Xi urged APEC to “add firewood to<span
id="te-clr1-a7d1fbd5-2d55-426e-9ac4-61aeb39fb0fd-icon"><span
id="te-clr1-a7d1fbd5-2d55-426e-9ac4-61aeb39fb0fd-anch"><span
style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> </span>the fire of
the Asia-Pacific and world economy”. Two days later, China got
what it wanted on all fronts. </span></span>
</div>
<div>1) Beijing had all 21 APEC member-nations endorsing the Free
Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) – the Chinese vision of an
“all inclusive, all-win” trade deal capable of advancing
Asia-Pacific cooperation – see <a
href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1637765/xi-jinping-unveils-chinas-plan-asia-pacific-wide-free-trade-pact"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.scmp.com']);">South
China Morning Post</a> (paywall). The loser was the US-driven,
corporate-redacted, fiercely opposed (especially by Japan and
Malaysia) 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). [See also <a
href="http://www.tax-news.com/news/APEC_Leaders_Endorse_FTAAP_Roadmap____66373.html%22"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.tax-news.com']);">here</a>.2)
Beijing advanced its blueprint for “all-round connectivity” (in
Xi’s words) across Asia-Pacific – which implies a multi-pronged
strategy. One of its key features is the implementation of the
Beijing-based US$50 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
That’s China’s response to Washington refusing to give it a more
representative voice at the International Monetary Fund than the
current, paltry 3.8% of votes (a smaller percentage than the 4.5%
held by stagnated France).
<p>3) Beijing and Moscow committed to a <a
href="http://rt.com/business/203679-china-russia-gas-deal/"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://rt.com']);">second
gas mega-deal</a> – this one through the Altai pipeline in
Western Siberia – after the initial “Power of Siberia” mega-deal
clinched last May.</p>
<p>4) Beijing announced the funneling of no less than US$40
billion to start building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the
21st Century Maritime Silk Road.</p>
</div>
<div>Predictably, once again, this vertiginous flurry of deals and
investment had to converge towards the most spectacular,
ambitious, wide-ranging plurinational infrastructure offensive
ever attempted: the multiple New Silk Roads – that complex network
of high-speed rail, pipelines, ports, fiber optic cables and state
of the art telecom that China is already building across the
Central Asian stans, linked to Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Indian
Ocean, and branching out to <a
href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014livisitgrl/2014-10/18/content_18763272.htm"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.chinadaily.com.cn']);">Europe
all the way to Venice, Rotterdam, Duisburg and Berlin</a>.Now
imagine the paralyzed terror of the Washington/Wall Street elites
as they stare at Beijing interlinking <a
href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-11/09/content_18889698_2.htm"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.chinadaily.com.cn']);">Xi’s
“Asia-Pacific Dream”</a> way beyond East Asia towards all-out,
pan-Eurasia trade – with the center being, what else, the Middle
Kingdom; a near future Eurasia as a massive Chinese Silk Belt
with, in selected latitudes, a sort of development condominium
with Russia.
<p><b>Vlad doesn’t do stupid stuff</b></p>
</div>
<div>As for “Don Juan” Putin, everything one needs to know about
Asia-Pacific as a Russian strategic/economic priority was
distilled in his intervention at the <a
href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/putins-asia-pacific-economic-cooperation-apec-summit-speech-trade-in-rubles-yuan-will-weaken-dollars-influence/5413432"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.globalresearch.ca']);">APEC
CEO summit</a>.</div>
<div>This was in fact an economic update of his by now <a
href="http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/23137"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://eng.kremlin.ru']);">notorious
speech</a> at the Valdai Club meeting in Sochi in October,
followed by a wide-ranging Q&A, which was also duly ignored by
Western corporate media (or spun as yet more “aggression”).The
Kremlin has conclusively established that Washington/Wall Street
elites have absolutely no intention of allowing a minimum of
multipolarity in international relations. What’s left is chaos.
<p>There’s no question that Moscow pivoting away from the West and
towards East Asia is a process directly influenced by President
Barack Obama’s self-described “Don’t Do Stupid Stuff” foreign
policy doctrine, a formula he came up with aboard Air Force One
when coming back last April from a trip to – where else – Asia.</p>
<p>But the Russia-China symbiosis/strategic partnership is
developing in multiple levels.</p>
<p>On energy, Russia is turning east because that’s where top
demand is. On finance, Moscow ended the pegging of the rouble to
the US dollar and euro; not surprisingly the US dollar instantly
– if only briefly – dropped against the rouble. Russian bank VTB
announced it may leave the London Stock Exchange for Shanghai’s
– which is about to become directly linked to Hong Kong. And
Hong Kong, for its part, is already <a
href="http://en.ria.ru/business/20141108/195319981/Russian-Energy-Giants-Consider-Listing-Securities-on-Hong-Kong.html"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://en.ria.ru']);">attracting
Russian energy giants</a>.</p>
<p>Now mix all these key developments with the massive yuan-rouble
energy double deal, and the picture is clear; Russia is actively
protecting itself from speculative/politically motivated Western
attacks against its currency.</p>
<p>The Russia-China symbiosis/strategic partnership visibly
expands on energy, finance and, also inevitably, on the military
technology front. That includes, crucially, Moscow selling
Beijing the S-400 air defense system and, in the future, the
S-500 – against which the Americans are sitting ducks; and this
while Beijing develops surface-to-ship missiles that can take
out everything the US Navy can muster.</p>
<p>Anyway, at APEC, Xi and Obama at least agreed to establish a
mutual reporting mechanism on major military operations. That
might – and the operative word is “might” – prevent an East Asia
replica of relentless NATO-style whining of the “Russia has
invaded Ukraine!” kind.</p>
<p><b>Freak out, neo-cons</b></p>
</div>
<div>When Little Dubya Bush came to power in early 2001, the
neo-cons were faced with a stark fact: it was just a matter of
time before the US would irreversibly lose its global geopolitical
and economic hegemony. So there were only two choices; either
manage the decline, or bet the whole farm to consolidate global
hegemony using – what else – war.We all know about the wishful
thinking enveloping the “low-cost” war on Iraq – from Paul
Wolfowitz’s “We are the new OPEC” to the fantasy of Washington
being able to decisively intimidate all potential challengers, the
EU, Russia and China.
<p>And we all know how it went spectacularly wrong. Even as that
trillionaire adventure, as Minqi Li analyzed in <i>The Rise of
China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy</i>, “has
squandered US imperialism’s remaining space for strategic
maneuver”, the humanitarian imperialists of the Obama
administration still have not given up, refusing to admit the US
has lost any ability to provide any meaningful solution to the
current, as Immanuel Wallerstein would define it, world-system.</p>
<p>There are sporadic signs of intelligent geopolitical life in US
academia, such as <a
href="http://www.wilsoncenter.org/book/the-sino-russian-challenge-to-the-world-order-national-identities-bilateral-relations-and-east"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.wilsoncenter.org']);">this</a> at
the Wilson Center website (although Russia and China are not a
“challenge” to a supposed world “order”: their partnership is
actually geared to create some order among the chaos.)</p>
<p>And yet <a
href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2014/11/10/china-is-not-the-next-global-superpower"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.usnews.com']);">this</a> opinion
piece at USNews is the kind of stuff passing for academic
“analysis” in US media.</p>
<p>On top of it, Washington/Wall Street elites – through their
myopic Think Tankland – still cling to mythical platitudes such
as the “historical” US role as arbiter of modern Asia and key
balancer of power.</p>
<p>So no wonder public opinion in the US – and Western Europe –
cannot even imagine the earth-shattering impact the New Silk
Roads will have in the geopolitics of the young 21st century.</p>
<p>Washington/Wall Street elites – talk about Cold War hubris –
always took for granted that Beijing and Moscow would be totally
apart. Now puzzlement prevails. Note how the Obama
administration’s “pivoting to Asia” has been completely erased
from the narrative – after Beijing identified it for what it is:
a warlike provocation. The new meme is “rebalance”.</p>
<p>German businesses, for their part, are absolutely going bonkers
with Xi’s New Silk Roads uniting Beijing to Berlin – crucially
via Moscow. German politicians sooner rather than later will
have to get the message.</p>
<p>All this will be discussed behind closed doors this weekend at
key meetings on the sidelines of the Group of 20 in Australia.
The Russia-China-Germany alliance-in-the-making will be there.
The BRICS, crisis or no crisis, will be there. All the players
in the G-20 actively working for a multipolar world will be
there.</p>
<p>APEC once again has shown that the more geopolitics change, the
more it won’t stay the same; as the exceptional dogs of war,
inequality and divide and rule keep barking, the China-Russia
pan-Eurasian caravan will keep going, going, going – further on
down the (multipolar) road.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><em><b>Pepe Escobar</b> is the author of <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War</a> (Nimble
Books, 2007), <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Red
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge</a> and <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Obama
does Globalistan</a> (Nimble Books, 2009). </em><em>He may
be reached at <a href="mailto:pepeasia@yahoo.com">pepeasia@yahoo.com</a>.
<br>
</em></p>
</div>
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