Ihe Munich security conference has just confirmed this: even when they talk to each other, Americans and Chinese do not get closer, quite the contrary. The Chinese representative, Wang Yi, criticized the destruction of the meteorological “balloon”; US Vice President Kamala Harris has criticized Chinese support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Another recent episode confirms the abyss that separates Washington and Beijing.
Twenty-four hours before US President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on February 7, Xi Jinping also presented his vision for the future. Both in substance and in form, two worlds are opposed. The setting: the Capitol for Biden, the Central School of the Chinese Communist Party for Xi. The public: members of Congress, the president’s guests and the media on one side; the leaders of the Communist Party, the main officials of the provinces and the official media on the other.
The bottom : “I’m not going to apologize for investing in making America strong. To invest in American innovation, in the industries that will determine the future and that the Chinese government intends to dominate,” Biden said. For him, “over the past two years, democracies have become stronger (…). And weaker autocracies (…). It’s never a good bet to bet against America. Yet this is what the Chinese number one does.
“More efficient than capitalism”
According to the New China agency, Xi now considers Chinese modernization to be a new model for human progress. She breaks “the myth that modernization can only be Western”, he said. Thanks to its success, Beijing is now in a position to provide emerging countries “a Chinese solution to explore a better social system for humanity”.
How to define Western modernization? Xi did not say so, but, like good Marxists, his exegetes explain that this is based on industrialization which, itself, has led to the plundering of natural resources, the colonization of the rest of the planet and, ultimately, two world wars and the enslavement of nature. Nothing to do, according to Beijing, with modernization made in China. If this is officially based on five criteria, Xi Jinping, in his speech on February 6, insisted on two essential aspects: innovation and social justice. Two criteria that Joe Biden would not deny. But unlike the American president who says he is “capitalist”Xi intends to be “more effective than capitalism in more effectively preserving social justice”.
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