China-US rivalry like a rerun of a bad movie

THE Beijing Winter Olympics begins in a week. We can expect that the Chinese government will pull out all the stops to ensure the Games will be a spectacle worthy of the world's premier sporting event.

This despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which made especially challenging given that China stands alone with its tough zero-tolerance policies towards the virus.

Beijing 2022 will also be marred by the diplomatic boycott of it by Western nations led by the United States.

This means that while Western athletes may be taking part in this winter-sports extravaganza, Western leaders and officials will not show up, ostensibly to protest against what many Western Parliaments have decided is "genocide" perpetrated by China against its Uighur Muslim minority.

The last time there was a major Olympic boycott was in 1980 when the US again led Western countries in staying away from the Moscow Olympics entirely, in protest over the then Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan the year before.

The Soviets hit back when they led a boycott by their Warsaw Pact allies of the Los Angeles Olympics four years later.

If what we are witnessing now with Beijing 2022 looks like a reprise of Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984, it is.

Unfortunately, whether it is officially pronounced as such, a new Cold War by geopolitical rivals China and the US has begun in earnest.

This is most regrettable on several counts. Unlike the earlier US-USSR rivalry that spawned the first Cold War, the current Sino-US rivalry leading to the second Cold War is not strictly over ideological differences.

Although the Chinese Communist Party still rules China, the country is now almost unrecognisable as a communist country.

It was the adoption of capitalist policies under Deng Xiaoping that led to economic reforms and foreign investments that catapulted the people's republic into the so-called factory of the world within a generation and, now, the second largest economy in the world.

As globalisation took hold, "Chimerica" became a byword for the interlocking and symbiotic embrace of the two top global economies, the US and China.

For a while, it was thought such a breathtaking embrace would last as it was mutually beneficial: American capital and know-how powered Chinese factories, which in turn exported goods to the US (and, indeed, the world) at a fraction of what they would have cost if produced in the US or anywhere else.

But the ensuing industrial hollowing-out in the US inevitably led to severe political blowback, which culminated in the election of Donald Trump as president, with a mission to cut China down to size.

China, reasonably or otherwise, had meanwhile given every indication that it was not content with just being the world's factory floor.

Like other successful developing countries before it, China is within its rights to go up the value chain.

The Washington-initiated division of labour, where the US retained lucrative service-sector jobs while industrial-sector ones were shipped to China, is perhaps inevitably breaking down.

It is an open question whether, had China behaved like other nations in its economic rise and political liberalisation, it would still have reaped such a whirlwind of animosity from the West that now threatens the decades-long good economic run for all the major players.

This is plausible. But, China under President Xi Jinping will hear none of it. The "new" China that Xi decided has emerged will beat its own path forward and, almost Nikita Khrushchev-like, will "bury" a declining West in the process.

The latest Olympic boycott is therefore like a rerun of a bad movie. All that remains is to see if this rerun will end the way two proud and formidable global antagonists predict it will.


The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching

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