https://www.globalresearch.ca/peaceful-modernization-china-offering-global-south/5796924
‘Peaceful Modernization’: China’s Offering to the Global South
Xi Jinping just offered the Global South a stark alternative to decades of western diktats, war, and economic duress. 'Peaceful modernization' will establish sovereignty, economy, and independence for the world's struggling states
President Xi Jinping’s work report at the start of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) this past Sunday in Beijing contained not only a blueprint for the development of the civilization-state, but for the whole Global South.
Xi’s 1h45min speech actually delivered a shorter version of the full work report – see attached PDF – which gets into way more detail on an array of socio-political themes.
This was the culmination of a complex collective effort that went on for months. When he received the final text, Xi commented, revised and edited it.
In a nutshell, the CPC master plan is twofold:
finalize “socialist modernization” from 2020 to 2035; and build China – via peaceful modernization – as a modern socialist country that is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” all the way to 2049, signaling the centenary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The central concept in the work report is peaceful modernization – and how to accomplish it. As Xi summarized,
“It contains elements that are common to the modernization processes of all countries, but it is more characterized by features that are unique to the Chinese context.”
Very much in tune with Confucian Chinese culture, “peaceful modernization” encapsulates a complete theoretical system. Of course there are multiple geoeconomic paths leading to modernization – according to the national conditions of any particular country. But for the Global South as a whole, what really matters is that the Chinese example completely breaks with the western TINA (“there is no alternative”) monopoly on modernization practice and theory.
Not to mention it breaks with the ideological straitjacket imposed on the Global South by the self-defined “golden billion” (of which the really “golden” barely reach 10 million). What the Chinese leadership is saying is that the Iranian model, the Ugandan model or the Bolivian model are all as valid as the Chinese experiment: what matters is pursuing an independent path towards development.
How to develop tech independence
The recent historical record shows how every nation trying to develop outside the Washington Consensus is terrorized at myriad hybrid war levels. This nation becomes a target of color revolutions, regime change, illegal sanctions, economic blockade, NATO sabotage or outright bombing and/invasion.
What China proposes echoes across the Global South because Beijing is the largest trade partner of no less than 140 nations, who can easily grasp concepts such as high-quality economic development and self-reliance in science and technology.
The report stressed the categorical imperative for China from now on: to speed up technology self-reliance as the Hegemon is going no holds barred to derail China tech, especially in the manufacturing of semiconductors.
In what amount to a sanctions package from Hell, the Hegemon is betting on crippling China’s drive to accelerate its tech independence in semiconductors and the equipment to produce them.
So China will need to engage in a national effort on semiconductor production. That necessity will be at the core of what the work report describes as a new development strategy, spurred by the tremendous challenge of achieving tech self-sufficiency. Essentially China will go for strengthening the public sector of the economy, with state companies forming the nucleus for a national system of tech innovation development.
‘Small fortresses with high walls’
On foreign policy, the work report is very clear: China is against any form of unilateralism as well as blocs and exclusive groups targeted against particular countries. Beijing refers to these blocs, such as NATO and AUKUS, as “small fortresses with high walls.”
This outlook is inscribed in the CPC’s emphasis on another categorical imperative: reforming the existing system of global governance, extremely unfair to the Global South. It’s always crucial to remember that China, as a civilization-state, considers itself simultaneously as a socialist country and the world’s leading developing nation.
The problem once again is Beijing’s belief in “safeguarding the international system with the UN at its core.” Most Global South players know how the Hegemon subjects the UN – and its voting mechanism – to all sorts of relentless pressure.
It’s enlightening to pay attention to the very few westerners that really know one or two things about China.
Martin Jacques, until recently a senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, and author of arguably the best book in English on China’s development, is impressed by how China’s modernization happened in a context dominated by the west: “This was the key role of the CPC. It had to be planned. We can see how extraordinarily successful it has been.”
The implication is that by breaking the west-centric TINA model, Beijing has accumulated the tools to be able to assist Global South nations with their own models.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, is even more upbeat: “China will become a leader of innovation. I very much hope and count on China becoming a leader for innovation in sustainability.” That will contrast with a ‘dysfunctional’ American model turning protectionist even in business and investment.
Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, makes a crucial point, certainly noted by key Global South players: the CPC “was able to creatively adapt the Marxism of the 19th century and its experience of the 20th century to new requirements and implement eternal values with new methods. This is a very important and useful lesson for us.”
And that’s the added value of a model geared towards the national interest and not the exclusivist policies of Global Capital.
BRI or bust
Implied throughout the work report is the importance of the overarching concept of Chinese foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its trade/connectivity corridors across Eurasia and Africa.
It was up to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin to clarify where BRI is heading:
“BRI transcends the outdated mentality of geopolitical games, and created a new model of international cooperation. It is not an exclusive group that excludes other participants but an open and inclusive cooperation platform. It is not just China’s solo effort, but a symphony performed by all participating countries.”
BRI is inbuilt in the Chinese concept of “opening up.” It is also important to remember that BRI was launched by Xi nine years ago – in Central Asia (Astana) and then Southeast Asia (Jakarta). Beijing has earned from its mistakes, and keeps fine-tuning BRI in consultation with partners – from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia to several African nations.
It is no wonder, that by August this year, China’s trade with countries participating in BRI had reached a whopping $12 trillion, and non-financial direct investment in those countries surpassed $140 billion.
Wang correctly points out that following BRI infrastructure investments, “East Africa and Cambodia have highways, Kazakhstan has [dry] ports for exports, the Maldives has its first cross-sea bridge and Laos has become a connected country from a landlocked one.”
Even under serious challenges, from zero-Covid to assorted sanctions and the breakdown of supply chains, the number of China-EU express cargo trains keeps going up; the China-Laos Railway and the Peljesac Bridge in Croatia are open for business; and work on the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway and the China-Thailand Railway is in progress.
Mackinder on crack
All over the extremely incandescent global chessboard, international relations are being completely reframed.
China – and key Eurasian players at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS+, and Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – are all proposing peaceful development.
In contrast, the Hegemon imposes an avalanche of sanctions – not by accident the top three recipients are Eurasian powers Russia, Iran and China; lethal proxy wars (Ukraine); and every possible strand of hybrid war to prevent the end of its supremacy, which lasted barely seven and a half decades, a blip in historical terms.
The current dysfunction – physical, political, financial, cognitive – is reaching a climax. As Europe plunges into the abyss of largely self-inflicted devastation and darkness – a neo-medievalism in woke register – an internally ravaged Empire resorts to plundering even its wealthy “allies”.
It’s as if we are all witnessing a Mackinder-on-crack scenario.
Halford Mackinder, of course, was the British geographer who developed the ‘Heartland Theory’ of geopolitics, heavily influencing US foreign policy during the Cold War: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
Russia spans 11 time zones and sits atop as much as one third of the world’s natural resources. A natural symbiosis between Europe and Russia is like a fact of life. But the EU oligarchy blew it.
It’s no wonder the Chinese leadership views the process with horror, because one of BRI’s essential planks is to facilitate seamless trade between China and Europe. As Russia’s connectivity corridor has been blocked by sanctions, China will be privileging corridors via West Asia.
Meanwhile, Russia is completing its pivot to the east. Russia’s enormous resources, combined with the manufacturing capability of China and East Asia as a whole, project a trade/connectivity sphere that goes even beyond BRI. That’s at the heart of the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership.
In another one of History’s unpredictable twists, Mackinder a century ago may have been essentially right about those controlling the Heartland/world island controlling the world. It doesn’t look like the controller will be the Hegemon, and much less its European vassals/slaves.
When the Chinese say they are against blocs, Eurasia and The West are the facto two blocs. Though not yet formally at war with each other, in reality they already are knee deep into Hybrid War territory.
Russia and Iran are on the frontline – militarily and in terms of absorbing non-stop pressure. Other important Global South players, quietly, try to either keep a low profile or, even more quietly, assist China and the others to make the multipolar world prevail economically.
As China proposes peaceful modernization, the hidden message of the work report is even starker. The Global South is facing a serious choice: choose either sovereignty – embodied in a multipolar world, peacefully modernizing – or outright vassalage.
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https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/20/caitlin-johnstone-the-lunatic-argument-that-nuclear-brinkmanship-makes-us-safe/
The Lunatic Argument That Nuclear Brinkmanship Makes Us Safe
The imperial spinmeisters for the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine are trying to get us to believe that de-escalation is dangerous.
Of all the narratives circulated about the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, the dumbest so far has got to be the increasingly common claim that aggressively escalating nuclear brinkmanship is safe and de-escalating is dangerous.
We see a prime example of this self-evidently idiotic narrative in a new Business Insider article, “Putin’s nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that’s ‘dangerous.’”
“An understandable desire to avoid a nuclear war could actually make the world more dangerous if it means rushing to implement a ‘peace’ in Ukraine that serves Russian interests,” writes reliable empire apologist Charles Davis. “Such a move, which some influential figures have called for, risks setting a precedent that atomic blackmail is the way to win wars and take territory troops can’t otherwise hold, a model that could be copycatted by even the weakest nuclear-armed states, and may only succeed at delaying another war.”
Davis’ sole source for his article is the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research’s Pavel Podvig, who is very openly biased against Russia.
“The West supports Ukraine with weapons and financial and moral and political support. Giving that up and saying that, ‘Well, you know, we are too afraid of nuclear threats and so we just want to make a deal’ — that would certainly set a precedent that would not be very positive,” says Podvig. “If you yield to this nuclear threat once, then what would prevent Russia in the future — or others — to do the same thing again?”
Like other empire apologists currently pushing the ridiculous “de-escalation actually causes escalation” line, Davis and Podvig argue as though nuclear weapons just showed up on the scene a few days ago, as if there haven’t been generations of Western policies toward Moscow which have indeed involved backing down and making compromises at times because doing so was seen as preferable to risking a nuclear attack.
We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis because U.S. President John F. Kennedy secretly acquiesced to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s demands that the U.S. remove the Jupiter missiles it had placed in Turkey and Italy, which was what provoked Moscow to move nukes to Cuba in the first place.
Throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union insisted on a sphere of influence to which U.S. strategists granted a wide berth, exactly because it was a nuclear superpower. Even as recently as the Obama administration the U.S. president maintained that “Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”
Nevertheless, we’re seeing this new “escalation is safety and de-escalation is danger” narrative pushed with increasing forcefulness by imperial spinmeisters, because it would take a lot of force indeed to get people to accept something so self-evidently backwards and nonsensical.
“All of you who are saying that we have to give in to nuclear blackmail are making nuclear war more likely. Please stop,” tweeted Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder recently. “When you give in to it, you empower dictators to do it again, encourage worldwide nuclear proliferation, and make nuclear war much, much more likely.”
Snyder, who has been photographed grinning happily with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, does not actually believe that people tweeting in support of de-escalation and detente will cause a nuclear war. He uses the newfangled buzzword “nuclear blackmail” to discredit calls for de-escalation and detente because he wants those who support de-escalation and detente to be silent. He says “please stop” solely because he wants peace advocacy to stop.
“Nuclear war comes because we’ve done too little not too much,” tweeted Alexander Vindman, a key player in advancing the Trump-Ukraine scandal, further pushing the narrative that greater escalation is where the safety is.
In response to a tweet by France’s President Macron saying “We do not want a World War,” Paul Massaro, a senior policy advisor for the U.S. government’s Helsinki Commission, tweeted, “Precisely this sort of weak, terrified language leads Russia to escalate.”
Imagine being so warped and twisted that you see that as a sane response to the most normal statement anyone can possibly make.
Meanwhile you’ve got Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger acting like he’s a brave tough guy by welcoming continual nuclear escalation while calling anyone who advocates de-escalation cowards:
The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel somehow pulled off the heroic feat of getting an article advocating de-escalation published in The Washington Post with a piece titled “The Cuban missile crisis was 60 years ago, but it’s urgently relevant today.” Reminding us how close we came to total annihilation and how we only survived getting so recklessly close to nuclear war by “plain dumb luck,” she argues that humanity cannot risk going to the brink like that again.
“Humanity cannot afford to spin the cylinder again in this game of Russian roulette; we must unload the gun. Our only path forward is de-escalation,” vanden Heuvel writes.
Indeed it is. It’s absolutely insane that humanity is risking its own extinction over these games of empire-building and planetary domination when we’ve got so many other existential hurdles we need to focus on clearing....
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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/10/07/will-biden-regime-dark-forces-stage-a-tactical-nuclear-strike-on-ukraine-to-lay-blame-on-russia/
Will Biden Regime Dark Forces Stage a Tactical Nuclear Strike on Ukraine to Lay Blame on Russia?
Hegemon USA has been staging false flag attacks since at least the mid-19th century grand theft of Mexican territory — to expand the nation from sea to shinning sea by stealing land to accomplish its diabolical aim.
California, Utah, Nevada, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming and Colorado were Mexican territory — until US aggression unlawfully seized it.
At the time, the Rio Grande became the Texas-Mexico border.
One US false flag after another followed grand theft of Mexican land — notably the 9/11 state-sponsored mother of them all.
If a Biden regime tactical nuclear false flag strike on Ukraine occurs — to falsely blame Russia for its own war crime — the risk of possible global war will be more greatly heightened than already.
On all things related to hegemon USA’s invented enemies, nothing can be ruled out.
The empire of lies and forever wars long ago abandoned the rule of law in pursuit of its diabolical aim for unchallenged global dominance by brute force and other dirty tricks.
In stark contrast, Russia prioritizes peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other nations in strict compliance with international law.
The Kremlin vowed never to use nuclear weapons — except in retaliation of their use against the Motherland or if its security is greatly jeopardized.
In stark contrast, a same day article explained hegemon USA’s self-declared right to wage preemptive nuclear or convention wars against invented enemies at its discretion.
Reading lines pre-scripted for him to recite on Thursday, Biden reinvented reality about invented enemy Russia — falsely claiming that Kremlin authorities may order a first-strike nuclear attack against the US/West or Nazified Ukraine.
Was he instructed to make this outrageous claim without having been briefed on plans by US dark forces to stage a tactical nuclear false flag strike on Ukraine to wrongfully lay blame on Russia?
Not a shred of evidence suggests that Russia would go this far — or that its forces might use chemical, biological and/or other banned weapons against any adversary — what’s been longstanding US practice throughout its history from inception.
In stark contrast, consider reality about dominant US dark forces.
The dominant US criminal class staged the 9/11 mother of all false flags to unjustifiably justify preemptive war on nonthreatening Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Syria based on bald-faced Big Lies.
Nearly two decades later, dominant US dark forces topped their earlier criminality by waging war on humanity at home and abroad by kill shots and all else flu/covid — with mass-extermination of unwanted billions and elimination of remaining freedoms in mind.
Given what’s indisputable, there’s nothing too unthinkable off-the-table that hegemon USA won’t try in pursuit of its diabolical aims.
For good reason, Pink Floyd rock band co-founder, musician, performer, Roger Waters, called the empire of lies and forever wars “the most evil of all (nations) by a factor of at least ten times,” adding:
Hegemon USA “kill(s) more people…interfere(s) in more people’s elections,” and blames victims for the worst of its crimes of war and against humanity.
Everything it claims about Russia and other invented enemies are “all lies, lies, lies, lies!”
It bears repeating what I stressed in a same-day article and said earlier as well.
If US/Western regimes operated like Russia, a new era of peace, stability, equity, justice and compliance with the rule of law would replace perpetual hegemon USA-dominated NATO wars of aggression against invented enemies.
While hegemon USA prioritizes use of nukes at its discretion, Russia prohibits this practice — except in self-defense as explained above.
With the worst of its megalomaniacal aims in mind, have things passed a point of no return toward full-scale US war on Russia with nukes.
What’s unthinkable is never off the table in pursuit of its diabolical aims.
Rogue state USA is by far humanity’s greatest threat, especially with crazed Dems intending a repeat of grand theft Election 2020 to stay empowered next year and beyond — at the expense of world peace and a nation fit to live in.
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