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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 6/22/13

The Chimerica Dream

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All of this was essentially sketched out by senior PLA colonel Liu Mingfu in his recently republished 2010 book, China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era. On one thing Liu and Xi (along with all China's recent leaders and PLA commanders) agree: China is "back as the most powerful nation where it's been for a thousand years before the 'century of humiliation'." The bottom line: when the problems start, Xi's dream will feed on nationalism. And nationalism -- that ultimate social glue -- will be the essential precondition for any reforms to come. 

In April, one month after the National People's Congress, Xi repeated that his dream would be fulfilled by 2050, while the Party's propaganda chief, Liu Yunshan, ordered that the dream be written into all school textbooks. But repeating something hardly makes it so. 

Xi's father, former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, was a man who thought outside the box. In many ways, Xi is clearly trying to do the same, already promising to tackle everything from massive corruption ("fighting tigers and flies at the same time") to government rackets. (Forget lavish banquets; from now on, it's only supposed to be "four dishes and a soup.") 

But one thing is certain: Xi won't even make a gesture towards changing the essential model. He'll basically only tweak it. 

Fear and loathing in the South China Sea

Everyone wants to know how Xi's dream will translate into foreign policy. Three months ago, talking to journalists from the emerging BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the Chinese president emphasized that "the China Dream also will bring opportunities to the world."  

Enter the charm offensive: in Xi's new world, "peaceful development" is always in and "the China threat" is always out. In Beijing's terms, it's called "all-dimensional diplomacy" and has been reflected in the incessant global travel schedule of Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang in their first months in office. 

Still, as with the dream at home, so abroad. Facts on the ground -- or more specifically in the waters of the South China Sea -- once again threaten to turn Xi's dream into a future nightmare. Nationalism has unsurprisingly proven a crucial factor and there's been nothing dreamy about the continuing clash of claims to various energy-rich islands and waters in the region.  

Warships have recently been maneuvering as China faces off against, among other countries, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. This unsettling development has played well in Washington as the Obama administration announced a "pivot" to or "rebalancing" in Asia and a new strategy that visibly involves playing China's neighbors off against the Middle Kingdom in what could only be considered a 21st century containment policy. 

From Washington's point of view, there have, however, been more ominous aspects to China's new moves in the world. In bilateral trade with Japan, Russia, Iran, India, and Brazil, China has been working to bypass the US dollar. Similarly, China and Britain have established a currency swap line, linking the yuan to the pound, and France plans to do the same thing with regard to the euro in an attempt to turn Paris into a major offshore trading hub for the yuan. 

Nor was it an accident that Xi's first trip abroad took him to Moscow. There is no more crucial economic and strategic relationship for the Chinese leadership. As much as Moscow won't accept the infinite eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Beijing won't accept the US pivot strategy in the Pacific, and Moscow will back it in that. 

I was in Singapore recently when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel dropped in at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asian defense and security forum, to sell the new US focus on creating what would essentially be an anti-Chinese alliance in South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Pacific. 

Major General Qi Jianguo, deputy chief of the general staff of the PLA, was there as well listening attentively to Hagel, ready to outline a Chinese counter-strategy that would highlight Beijing's respect for international law, its interest in turbo-charging trade with Southeast Asia, but most of all its unwillingness to yield on any of the escalating territorial disputes in the region. As he said, "The reason China constantly patrols the South China Sea and East Sea is because China considers this to be sovereign territory." 

In this way, the dream and nationalism are proving uncomfortable bedfellows abroad as well as at home. Beijing sees the US. pivot as a not-so-veiled declaration of the coming of a new Cold War in the Asia-Pacific region, and a dangerous add-on to the Pentagon's Air-Sea Battle concept, a militarized approach to China's Pacific ambitions as the (presumed) next rising power on the planet. 

At the Shangri-La, Hagel did call for "a positive and constructive relationship with China" as an "essential part of America's rebalance to Asia." That's where the new US-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) -- essentially the economic arm of the pivot -- would fit in. China's Ministry of Commerce is reportedly even studying the possibility of being part of it. 

There is, however, no way a resurgent Beijing would accept unfettered US economic control across the region, nor is there any guarantee that TPP will become the dominant trading group in the Asia-Pacific. After all, with its economic muscle China is already leading the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that includes all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. 

In April, after visiting Beijing, Secretary of State John Kerry began spinning his own "Pacific dream" during a stopover in Tokyo. Yet Beijing will remain wary of Washington's dreaming, as the Chinese leadership inevitably equates any dream that involves moves everywhere in Asia as synonymous with a desire to maintain perpetual American dominance in the region and so stunt China's rise. 

However nationalism comes into play in the disputed, energy-rich islands of the South China Sea, the notion that China wants to rule even the Asian world, no less the world, is nonsense. At the same time, the roadmap promoted at the recent Obama-Xi summit remains at best a fragile dream, especially given the American pivot and Edward Snowden's recent revelations about the way Washington has been hacking Chinese computer systems. Perhaps the question in the region is simply whose dream will vanish first when faced with economic and military realities. 

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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