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Sometimes coincidence is enlightened history.
Last week the news that self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had won the Democratic Mayoral Primary in New York City, the capital of Global Finance, just when Prime Minister Li Qiang of the Chinese Communist Party was in the middle of his speech during the World Economic Forum’s Summer Convention. Delegates shared their disbelief, not about what they heard of the stage, but from the other side of the world.
Although she avoided every mention of America, Li’s speechwriters had framed his text against both the background of the worldwide unrest of today and the memory of the 2008 financial crisis. When Summer Davos first gathered in Beijing’s invitation, dramatic news from New York was shaking the world. Wall Street molts down. While the crisis unfolded, China suddenly played a new role as a point of global stability.
In the aftermath in the years 2010, the world irrevocably tilted to the east. Nowadays it is difficult to prevent the impression that it tilts the way of China.
The contrast between the unrest in the America of Donald Trump and the mood of calm progress that is exuded by Beijing is both style and in the content.
Both the CCP and the American political establishment usually talk in high edits about the fate of their nations. But while Li urged the logic of history and the inexorable process of globalization, quoting growth figures to a decimal point and interrupt his current to clarify the currency units in which he quoted China’s export, American politics is in a state of delirium.
While Trump denounced Mamdani as a “100% communist madman”, the Guardians or Centrist Common Sense went better, with one democratic Panjandrum in which it was stated that a policy of freezing rental prices for a year on about a million regulated apartments in New York was slightly better than bombing.
One cannot help to wonder how residents of Tehran or Gaza or Tel-Aviv would feel about that comparison. In the meantime, the congress debate on Trump’s characteristic “big, beautiful bill” is made in tones that are even more bathroom. For Stephen Miller, Trump’s henchman and nationalist adviser, extra billions for ICE are a matter of the survival of Western civilization.
As far as China is concerned, it is undoubtedly standing for considerable macro -economic challenges. The growth is delayed and the unemployment of youth is double digits. In 2020-21, Beijing deliberately stopped the most dramatic process of urbanization and private accumulation in history, so that the most inflated private developers were saved further credit. It is not surprising that the subsequent malaise of real estate has produced a permanent hangover.
But the remarkable thing is that, unlike in Europe and the US in 2008, this has not changed into a systemic crisis. If China’s annual growth rate stabilizes at around 5 percent, it will have to be counted as the most successful soft landing in the history of economic policy. If further stimulus is required, it would be expected that the policy process in Beijing will be difficult, but to lead to an understandable result.
On the other hand, referring to policy -making in Washington is a process to enjoy euphemism. When they are confronted with the macro -economic consequences of the “large, beautiful bill”, spokespersons of the White House are not bothered to interfere with the statistical record or play with the models. Their answer is Baath-style denial: the growth will go up and shortages will come down when Trump says that.
Similarly, where the global threat of the climate crisis is, we wait to see in which direction China’s climate policy will go. There is some hope that the emissions have reached a peak and that China and Europe will both make ambitious “nationally established contributions” about emissions on time for the general meeting of the UN in September. At the same time, in Trump’s America, there is any reference to global warming Hors the discussion And the Republicans do their best to put the transition of the green energy into its mark.
The White House is in favor of the disintegration of an effective regulation of artificial intelligence, even because more and more experiments confirm that existing large language models are not safely tailored to acceptable political and social norms. China’s platform giants also plow enormous resources in AI. The results are no longer predictable. But if there is a prospect that AI development is a threat to the social and political order that Beijing considers acceptable, can someone doubt that it would be put in his tracks? That is what the humiliation of the Oligarchs platform in 2020 betoken. What analog warranty is there in the West?
The contrast is grim. On the Chinese side technocratic, top-down management to please every central pining for the nineties. In the US, policy as a post-truth reality TV.
Only telling these contrasts may seem like an exercise in caricature. But, as Li noted, history sometimes rhymes in strange ways. And when his tone is Schil and Dissonant and “Alligator Alcatraz” passes for immigration policy, we must be honest enough to face the facts.
