{"id":228216,"date":"2023-01-30T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=228216"},"modified":"2023-01-27T05:19:26","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T05:19:26","slug":"can-you-smell-what-the-year-of-the-rabbit-is-cooking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/can-you-smell-what-the-year-of-the-rabbit-is-cooking\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You Smell What the Year of the Rabbit Is Cooking?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Silk Roads, or BRI, as well as the integration efforts of BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU will be on the forefront of Chinese policy.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

24 Jan 2023 – <\/em>Liu He studied economics at Renmin University in China and got a Master\u2019s from Harvard. Since 2018, he\u2019s one of China\u2019s Vice Premiers \u2013 along with Han Zheng, Sun Chunlan, and Hu Chunhua. He\u2019s a Director of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission and heads the China Financial Stability and Development Committee. Anyone around the world who wants to know what will drive China\u2019s economy in the Year of the Rabbit must pay attention to Liu He.<\/p>\n

Davos 2023 has come and gone: an extended exercise in Demented Dystopia with peaks of paroxysm. At least a measure of reality was offered by Liu He\u2019s address. A limited but competent<\/a> analysis of what he said is infinitely more useful than torrents of barely disguised Sinophobic \u201cresearch\u201d vomited by U.S. Think Tankland.<\/p>\n

Liu He pointed to some key numbers for the Chinese economy in 2022. Overall 3% growth may not be groundbreaking; but what matters is value-added for high-tech manufacturing and equipment manufacturing going up by 7.4% and 5.6% respectively. What this means is that Chinese industrial capacity continues to move up the value chain.<\/p>\n

Trade, predictably, reigns supreme: the total value of imports and exports reached the equivalent of $6,215 trillion in 2022; that\u2019s an increase of 7.7% over 2021.<\/p>\n

Liu He also made it clear that improving the wealth of Chinese citizens remains a key priority, as enounced in the 2022 Party Congress: the number of middle class Chinese, by 2035, should jump from the current 400 million to an astonishing 900 million.<\/p>\n

Liu He pointedly explained that everything about Chinese reforms revolves around the notion of establishing \u201ca socialist market economy\u201d. This translates as \u201clet the market play a decisive role in resources allocation, let the government play a better role.\u201d That has absolutely nothing to do with Beijing privileging a planned economy. As Liu He detailed, \u201cwe will deepen SOE [State-Owned Enterprises] reform, support the private sector, and promote fair competition, anti-monopoly and entrepreneurship.\u201d<\/p>\n

China is reaching the next level, economically: that translates as building, as fast as possible, an innovation-driven commercial base. Specific targets include finance, tech, and greater productivity in industry, as in applying more robotics.<\/p>\n

On the fin-tech front, a resurgent Hong Kong is bound to play an extremely important role starting by 2024 \u2013 most of it in consequence of several Wealth Management Connect mechanisms.<\/p>\n

Enter, or re-enter the key role of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area \u2013 one the key development nodes of 21st<\/sup> century China.<\/p>\n

What is known as the Greater Bay Area\u2019s Wealth Management Connect is a set up that allows wealthy investors from the nine mainland cities that compose the area to invest in yuan-denominated financial products issued by banks in Hong Kong and Macao \u2013 and vice-versa. What this means in practice is opening up mainland China\u2019s financial markets even further.<\/p>\n

So expect a new Hong Kong boom by 2025. All those dejected by the collective West\u2019s morass, start making plans.<\/p>\n

Dual circulation hits Eurasia<\/strong><\/p>\n

As expected, Liu He also referred to the key Beijing strategy for this decade: \u201cA new development paradigm with domestic circulation as the mainstay and domestic and international circulations reinforcing each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dual-circulation strategy reflects the Beijing leadership\u2019s emphasis on simultaneously boosting China\u2019s self-reliance and its vast export market footprint. Virtually every government policy is about dual circulation. When Liu He talks about \u201cspurring of China\u2019s domestic demand\u201d he\u2019s sending a direct message to global exporters \u2013 Eastern and Western \u2013 focusing on this ever-growing, gigantic mass of Chinese middle class consumers.<\/p>\n

On the geopolitical and geoeconomic Big Picture, Liu He was diplomatically circumspect. He just let it filter that \u201cwe believe that an equitable international economic order must be preserved by all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Translation: the New Silk Roads, or BRI, as well as the integration efforts of BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU will be on the forefront of Chinese policy.<\/p>\n

And that brings us to what should become one of the key stories of the Year of the Rabbit: the renewed drive along the New Silk Roads.<\/p>\n

Few better than the Chinese, historically, understand that from Samarkand to Venice, from Bukhara to Guangzhou, from Palmyra to Alexandria, from the Karakoram to the Hindu Kush, from deserts that used to engulf caravans to gardens of secluded harems, a formidable pull of economic, political, cultural and religious factors not only linked the extremities of Eurasia \u2013 from the Mediterranean to China \u2013 but determine and will continue to determine its centuries-old history.<\/p>\n

The Ancient Silk Roads were not only about silk but also spices, porcelain, precious tones, fur, gold, tea, glass, slaves, concubines, war, knowledge, plagues \u2013 and that\u2019s how they turned into the symbol of Eurasia-wide \u201cpeople to people exchanges\u201d, as Xi Jinping and the Beijing leadership extol it today.<\/p>\n

These processes involve archeology, economics, history, musicology, compared mythology; so, keeping up with the past, the New Silk Roads also mean all manner of exchanges between East and West. The perpetual history of non-stop trade, in this case, is only the material base, a pretext.<\/p>\n

Before silk there was lapis lazuli, copper, incense. Even if China may have only opened itself to the outside world on the 2nd<\/sup> century B.C. \u2013 because of silk \u2013 Chinese tradition, in the oldest Chinese novel, The Chronicle of the Son of Heaven Mu, tells the tale of Emperor Mu visiting the Queen of Sheba already in the 10th<\/sup> century B.C.<\/p>\n

The exchanges between Europe and China may have started only in the 1st<\/sup> century B.C. The men who actually traversed the Eurasian immensities were actually few. It\u2019s only in the year 98 that the Chinese ambassadorship of Gan Ying departs for Da Qin \u2013 that is, Rome. He never arrived.<\/p>\n

In the year 166, the Antoninus Pius ambassadorship, allegedly sent by the Emperor himself, finally hits China; but in fact that\u2019s just an adventurous merchant. For 13 centuries there was a huge exploratory void.<\/p>\n

Despite the prodigious advances of Islam and the omnipresence of Muslim merchants since the 7th<\/sup> century, it\u2019s only in the 13th<\/sup> century \u2013 at the time of the last Crusades and the Mongol conquest \u2013 that Europeans picked up again the road towards the East. And then, on the 15th<\/sup> century, the Ming emperors succeeding the Mongols totally closed China to the outside world.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only due to a certain extent to the Jesuits in the 16th<\/sup> century that a meeting finally happened \u2013 17 centuries too late: Europe finally started to acquire some knowledge of China, even as it dreamed about it over and over again, since chic Roman patricians were enveloped in transparent silk robes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only around 1600 that Europeans seem to have become aware that Northern China and Southern China are on the same continent. So we may conclude that China really became known in the West only after the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of the Americas.<\/p>\n

Two worlds ignored each other for so long \u2013 and still, all along the watchtowers in the middle of the steppes, trade kept moving from one side of Eurasia to another.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s time for another historical push \u2013 even as a discombobulated Europe is kept hostage by a cabal of imperial Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons. Duisburg, in the Rhur valley, the world\u2019s largest inland port, after all remains the key Iron Silk Road <\/a>hub across BRI, linked by endless railways to Chongqing in China. Wake up, Young German: your future is in the East.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at <\/em>Asia Times and<\/em> columnist for<\/em> Consortium News and<\/em> Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he\u2019s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. He is the author of <\/em>Globalistan<\/a> (2007),<\/em> Red Zone Blues<\/a> (2007), <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> (2009), <\/em>Empire of Chaos<\/a> (2014) and <\/em>2030<\/a> (2015), all by Nimble Books. Pepe was contributing editor to <\/em>The Empire and The Crescent and<\/em> Tutto in Vendita in Italy and is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 strategic-culture.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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