In an across-the-board analysis dated 14 October, 2019 for a controversial online platform, the Unz Review, Godfree Roberts delineates China's rapid and alarming catchup with the United States, including ascendance and even dominance in a panoply of great power metrics including Government, Leadership, Economy, Infrastructure, Geopolitics, Finance, Science, Technology, Trade, Social Indicators, Education, Law and Order, Faith in Future, Socio-Economic Ecology; Politics, Defense, Morale, and Long-term Economic Ascendancy.
The analysis, however, fails to acknowledge the unyielding dominance of the greenback, America's military sophistication and global reach, its leadership on the frontier of science and technology, its global network of allies, and the soft power of the "City upon a Hill". Nearly two and a half centuries of American ascendance and exceptionalism have driven a strong sense of self-denial that a "dictatorial" China, a once-backward country for well over a century, cannot be allowed to share power with the United States imbued with a "manifest destiny".
Nevertheless, much of the prognosis has given substance to American paranoia or hysteria that an emerging "Frankenstein" (in Secretary of State Mike Pomeo's words) with a diametrically-opposed value system and an alien civilization is setting out to destroy the US-led global liberal order. Across the political aisle, there is American consensus that China's rise must now be pushed back, contained, and thwarted across-the-board, at all costs, before it is too late. The outcome is the increasingly decoupling from China, protectionism, de-globalization, and the return of the rule of the jungle.
China is deeply and intricately embedded in the whole world's supply and value chain, exemplified by concentration of the world's largest container ports on its shores. Some 124 countries across the globe have China as the largest trading partner, compared with 76 countries with the US. Many products, components and processes are globally diversified but with China as the central hub. Vigorous anti-China decoupling and fragmentation are massively disruptive to markets and economies worldwide.
The Age of Disorder has arrived, according to a Long-term Asset Return Study by Deutsche Bank, London dated 8 September, 2020, referring to upheavals of epochal US-China rivalry, a struggling European Union, Covid-19 impacts, rising inequality, worsening demographics, inter-generational divide, and climate change coming up close and personal. US strangling notwithstanding, the study expects that in nominal terms, China's economy will overtake the US by end decade, or thereabouts (p.6).
Be that as it may, too much doom and gloom may be premature. The outcome of the coming US presidential election, China's next Five Year Plan (2021-25), recovery from Covid-19, coming-into-being of the world's largest free-trade bloc - the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the advent of 5G and "Internet of Things", emerging Eurasian economic and geopolitical gravitas, and maturing of international relations, all could recalibrate how the next new normal is going to work.
