Covid-19: Catalyst for the global crisis and China's new role
CLACSO Working Group: China and the World Power Map
The emergence of the novel coronavirus/Covid-19 has stimulated debate about its impact on the global power map that has been taking shape since the beginning of the 21st century. This reconfiguration of the geography of power is taking place within the framework of the global crisis that has plagued the system since 2008; and since January 2020, the pandemic has compounded the ongoing global crisis. Some systems theorists have attempted to present the pandemic as the cause of the crisis, when in reality it has been a fateful catalyst or accelerator of developing processes.
A new global geopolitics?
The effects that the combination of the crisis and the differentiated responses to the pandemic will have on the functioning of capitalism and on the global power map cannot be precisely visualized at this time. It is a time of uncertainty, but Covid-19, which appeared on the scene as a wild cardIt leaves us with one certainty: the world will not be the same as the one we said goodbye to in December 2019.
The changes on the horizon are linked to a new geopolitical order, a challenge to neoliberal globalization, a shift in the technological paradigm, and the global emergence of a new accumulation pattern centered in Asia, particularly China. This pattern is based on accelerating technological change and a citizen-state-market relationship grounded in a new form of social engineering distinct from that of the West. In this new context, a deepening of the geopolitical struggle over Latin America and the Caribbean between established and emerging global powers is foreseeable.
Following a fragile truce in the trade war, which at its core reflects a technological and geoeconomic conflict, the geopolitical dispute between China and the United States intensified during the pandemic, primarily on a rhetorical level, as part of a battle for legitimacy: accusing China of causing the pandemic (the "Chinese virus") and attributing to it the end of China's power (the "Chinese Chernobyl"). It took only a few days for reality to refute the West's predictions: China emerged as a major player in international cooperation, alongside Russia and Cuba.
In contrast, the biggest disappointments have come from the United States and the European Union. The latter's self-narrative has collapsed; there hasn't even been a common protocol for dealing with the pandemic, and the organization's belated apologies won't be enough to salvage the image of a project in crisis. When joint action was most needed, cooperation was nowhere to be found.
Not content with the disrepute caused by its irresponsible response to the pandemic in the United States, the nationalist and anti-globalist government has intensified its actions and is now attacking the multilateral institutions it helped create after World War II as part of its hegemonic architecture. The latest to suffer this attack is the WHO.
The pandemic is accelerating the consolidation of China's role as a global actor, but this process was already underway. Since 2001, the United States had recognized the Asian giant as a strategic competitor and was pursuing cooperative relations that simultaneously aimed to contain it. Between 2008 and 2009, the BRICS were launched, accompanied by a degree of institutionalization. China reduced its purchases of US Treasury bonds, increased its acquisition of global companies, and in 2013 launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), considered a response to the push for the TPP by globalist forces. These movements are part of the struggle to reconfigure the world order, exacerbated by US imperialist reactions and fueling hybrid and fragmented global warfare and geopolitical disputes.
Deglobalization, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the new Chinese pattern of accumulation
Post-pandemic forecasts point to a resurgence of nationalism in its most conservative form; however, signs of this process were already present. For several years, setbacks have been observed in the main indicators of neoliberal globalization. In this sense, the 2008-2010 crisis marked a turning point, after which there has been no recovery of dynamism in trade, foreign direct investment, and other economic indicators.
At the same time, the comparative effectiveness in combating Covid-19 has highlighted the role played by a new biotechnological paradigm, led and managed seamlessly by Asian countries, especially China. Alongside their capacity to integrate the state, clean technologies, and public health (as also demonstrated in the cases of South Korea and Vietnam), most developed Western countries have shown their inability to meet this challenge. China is validating a higher level of market socialism, advancing the construction of an economy with a superior capacity for projecting its development. To this end, it has developed material conditions that allow it to operate with almost no restrictions. This means it is a new variant of planning that operates virtually without constraints (financial, external, installed productive capacity, etc.). This is the foundation that supports the advanced human and social engineering whose strength was tested in the fight against the pandemic. And it is the antithesis of the financialization that accelerates the moral and intellectual decline currently affecting the West.
It is important to emphasize that, unlike the West after the 2008 crisis, China did not implement austerity policies, and today it is precisely these policies that prevent Western liberal governments from managing the crisis effectively, with their restrictions on public spending (with exceptions such as Germany and a few others). China has also made progress in addressing the classic dilemma between market economy and socialism. It is a society not without contradictions, in which environmental, social, and political problems persist, but there are policies aimed at resolving them, especially the transformation of the domestic market into the main engine of the economy, the regulation of foreign direct investment, and a perspective not framed within a general model, but rather the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The contradictions between the “decadent” European and American continentalist projects and the globalist forces are becoming visible, while China assumes leadership as the articulator of multipolarity, offering international aid in the face of the pandemic and promoting infrastructure works, which have their most visible concrete expression in the BRI, with advances even in Europe.
The impact of the pandemic has demonstrated the need to move away from neoliberal globalization to respond to its challenges, at least as an immediate reaction. China has no intention of convincing the rest of the world of the universality of its development model; for years it worked to design its own. When considering any development model, it is vital to ask what can and cannot be left to the market. Obviously, health, education, and certain economic sectors cannot be left to the government's invisible hand without paying extremely high economic, social, and human costs in the medium term. This is a sad lesson taught by COVID-19, which deals a blow to the neoliberal model that has dominated much of the world in recent decades.
The stagnation of globalization as we have known it, the acceleration of the crisis fueled by the struggle between capital, are interrelated processes that open up a range of contradictions, dilemmas, and challenges, such as the potential loss of economic structures in the periphery if they remain tied to financialization and the Global North; the intensification of capital-labor tensions; the attempt by many sectors of developing nations to recover their industrial production, generating further contradictions in the global economy; the obsolescence of previous forms of value creation (therefore producing enormous value destruction) and the emergence of new economic organizational forms for the functioning of value creation processes. At the same time, the Fourth Industrial Revolution presents the semi-periphery with the choice of integration or “absolute peripheralization,” and also creates the possibility of the reemergence of anti-hegemonic forces.
The new map of world power and Latin America
China has become a benchmark for the region and the world, willing to bear the economic costs of building its leadership and using geopolitical cooperation as a means to achieve this. However, China's adoption of a new development model based on domestic demand will have repercussions for African and Latin American economies. As the crisis of both the Western liberal democratic model and the development models established/imposed on the periphery intensifies, a new map of contradictions is emerging. While this is a critical moment for the region, marked by the convergence of the effects of the economic crisis and the pandemic, it also presents opportunities to rethink and rectify how we address: agricultural production, especially for export; healthcare and education; the increasing complexity of production; and integration.
For the region, the crisis presents an opportunity, and this moment demands a plan, a strategy for the relationship with China. We cannot leave it to the spontaneity that perpetuates relationships of dependency. The danger lies in reinforcing primary-export, extractive economies amidst a global crisis, lacking productive complexity in the domestic market and without control or democratization of the surpluses generated by extractive activities. Thinking about the region autonomously and grounded in Latin American critical thought is an urgent necessity. And so too is constructing a perspective on China from the standpoint of Our America, beyond the blinders of colonialism.
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