/Snip:
China may not have been at the G7 summit in person, but it was very much there in spirit. We will look back at this long weekend in Cornwall, England as the moment when there was more than just a tacit recognition that China has become our era’s agenda-setting country.In the eyes of many Western policymakers, China was supposed to become more like the West. The United States was to carry on ruling the waves, while simultaneously crafting the international rules. Yet, in many cases it is now China making the waves – if not the rules – with its ideas and others reacting to them.
Someone called Mark Logan, who seems to fancy himself on China, makes the argument that China is setting the world agenda. Though where the "still" in "... still setting the agenda" comes from is not clear.
Two items are offered: (1) that the west's push to set up an infrastructure fund for poorer countries emulates China's Belt and Road (BAR) initiative. And (2) promoting the virtues of western values is a reaction to China's Document 9.
I wrote about D9 in 2013, then not again till yesterday. And here it is again, twice in two days! Spoiler alert: Document 9 is a repulsive document, written by hardline communist functionaries, for their boss Xi Jinping early in his presidency. He's using it as his authoritarian guidebook.
It may be that some or all these moves by the west, as represented by the G7, are indeed a reaction to what China's been doing. Then again the west made it WW2 when they reacted to what the new Reich had done. And all that came out of the war -- United Nations, WTO, Marshall Plan, etc.... all were reactions.
For poorer nations it must be better to have more avenues to infrastructure development, whether or not in reaction to China being irrelevant.
As for western values vs Document 9: check it out and see which you'd rather was running your life, your country. What's set out in Document 9 has no allure for me. Long live Western Values!
PS: just thinking what's going on this week: the G7 meeting in Cornwall. Biden meets Putin in Geneva. NATO has a summit meeting and targets China as its main challenge. France reopens after Covid, while Boris bottles it again. Busy week.
ADDED: But what will Joe (or the west) do if Russia or China test their mettle? Nothing much say Shapiro in “Old Joe Meets the Bond Villain”. Shapiro is crazy in some stuff and plain wrong on other stuff, but I think this reading of the Biden-Putin summit is pretty much spot on. The battle of the autocracies vs the democracies goes in too at personal level, by people voting which their feet. One doesn’t see many clambering to enter Russia or China.
