engdahl is a widely respected individual who regularly presents the world as it is instead of the world we're expected to believe it to be. in this he presents much reality about china and its place in 'our fears';


The bizarre and escalating “trade war” being waged by Washington against the Chinese is not at all about balance of trade surpluses. The Chinese have apparently recently concluded this as well. It is about an all-out assault on China’s strategy to become an advanced, self-reliant economic leading economy, technologically on a par with the West, perhaps even more advanced. This is the basic content of the Xi Jinping Made in China:2025 national economic strategy .
The United States as the world’s dominant superpower will in no way allow this. Just as the British Empire set the stage for World War I to destroy the potential threat of a German superpower, now Washington confronts a Chinese economic colossus and weighs its options. This clash will likely get very ugly in coming months unless the US backs down, something at present unlikely.
Long Guoqiang, vice president of the Development Research Center of the State Council, in a recent statement reflecting the current view of the Chinese government and party, declared that what he accurately calls“strategic containment” is a central American aim with the trade war. He argues this is being done by “interests extortion” such as threatening trade wars or actually going through with them to force the opening of markets, with the aim of attacking the Chinese “state capitalism” model of development to preserve American hegemony.
Washington launched a similar attack, using private hedge funds, in 1997 to destroy the Asian “Tiger Economies” of South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and other fast developing Asian economies. The upshot of the speculative attacks and ensuing currency crises was the forced reorganization of the state-guided economic model on demand from the IMF, the so-called Washington Consensus. Prior to that, beginning with the infamous dollar-yen Plaza Accord, Washington engineered a Japanese real estate and stock market bubble and the subsequent Bank of Japan long economic deflation to control Japan’s enormous economic advances. The global hegemon—Wall Street and its Washington representatives in the Fed, the IMF and Treasury don’t appreciate competitive equals.
This time, China, whose current trade surpluses are to a large extent derived from Chinese production on license for Apple, GM and countless other US and EU companies for re-export, is determined to become as soon as possible a self-sufficient high-technology economy, no longer dependent on access to critical US technologies such as computer processors. It’s understandable, especially in light of recent crippling sanctions against key Chinese electronics leaders Huawei and ZTE, that China would read the Washington handwriting or more precisely political graffiti on the Great Wall. As Malaysia’s Mahatir recently stressed in the aftermath of his talks in Beijing about cancellation of billions of dollars of Chinese infrastructure projects in Malaysia “pending thorough review” of the terms agreed by the former Prime Minister, allowing the Chinese to “save face” is major. Washington strategy at present is rather to rip off the Chinese “face,” and to try to replace it with one more to Washington’s liking for vassal client states.

A China-Japan rapprochement

China’s first response was to try to capitalize on the escalating tensions between Washington and the EU over not only trade, but also NATO funding. China first went to propose a form of anti-Washington trade front together with the EU in July. China Prime Minister Li Keqiang proposed cooperation opposing the US trade war actions on both the European Union as well as China, only to get a blunt rejection. Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker bluntly declared he sees “no perspective in the short term” for EU-China talks on a common free trade agreement, noting sarcastically, that “if China wishes to open up it can do so.”


http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO3Sep2018.php