The economic rise of Asia and especially of the People's Republic of China is the most dramatic event in world economic history. While the peace movement counts aircraft carriers and the United States is the empire of the empires, history has overtaken them long ago.
600 million people have lifted the long Chinese economic recovery out of extreme poverty. This created a gigantic internal market. At the same time, China is exporting and investing all over the world.
Just a few decades ago, after the "century of humiliation" by colonialism, this China was an agrarian structured Third World country with no significant industry. Twenty years ago, the US economy was ten times bigger than the Chinese one. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping came to power and began economic opening, China's economy reached only one-twentieth of the US.
Subsequently, the economy in China has grown on average by 10 percent per year, the US has stagnated on the bottom line. In the US, industry shut down 60,000 factories, and tens of thousands of factories were opened in China. Numerous cities are forfeiting in the US - new cities are being built on a large scale in China.
Ghost towns? Do not believe the media reports that give us the impression that most centrally planned projects in the Middle Kingdom would fail due to corruption and incompetence. You miss the biggest event in world history, which takes place before our eyes: the rise of China to the leading power. It is the most monstrous economic political event in world history - and the consequences will not be purely economic.
Yes, it may be that six city projects in the vastness of this gigantic empire have failed. But 200 newly built cities are booming and expanding. Some now have more than 10 million inhabitants. We do not know their name.
Count aircraft carriers?
But the USA, the USA, the USA? Yes, yes, yes: the USA.
Daniele Ganser tells us that you just have to count on aircraft carriers to find out who the Empire is. "We historians" always do it that way, he says - I do not know anybody else who does it - and come to the conclusion that the US is the undisputed world hegemon.
They are not. It was you. After all, Donald Trump's slogan "Make America great again" represents an election-wary treatment of this fact: The US position in the world of power has long been history. Incidentally, history is also the time when aircraft carriers have been the latest craze in military technology. These days, they are dumb, floating fortresses, as once the heavy galleons of Spain, and light, fat loot for newer missile systems.
That does not mean that NATO is no longer dangerous. On the contrary. Falling giants are highly dangerous and can drag many into the depths. The transatlantic power structure is working desperately for a war with Russia. And she gets mad at a Vladimir Putin, who denies her this war despite ongoing provocations.
But we must realize why the transatlantic power elite so desperately needs this war: because it is about to lose - as it has already lost in Syria.
Infrastructure and state
The worldview of many people, especially in the peace movement, suffers from Western centrism and a fixation on the military. That we do not misunderstand: It is relevant that the US spends about $ 600 billion a year on its military. But this relevance has several, quite contradictory aspects.
If China, with a four times larger population and a newly equal economy, spends only a quarter of the US budget on military spending, the Chinese will have far more money left for gigantic infrastructure projects, research and development. This, in turn, has consequences for China's military potential.
"Infrastructure is a metaphor for thinking about the future," says Martin Jacques, author of the world bestseller "When China rules the world." Measured by this, the US lives in the past. They are intoxicated with the military, while the infrastructure of the country expires in places and urgently needs to be renewed nationwide. But how, with this totally indebted American state?
China is building infrastructure. And China has something that we are less and less able to imagine in Germany: a functioning state. The Chinese state, supported by the Chinese Communist Party with its 90 million members, can act strategically. He can plan ahead and implement these plans.
While the American state now has to concentrate its military resources on six, seven, eight war theaters simultaneously, China is not only building infrastructure projects across its own vast, gigantic country, but also in Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and many, many African countries. The number of countries whose main trading partner is China is growing continuously and globally.
Those who have such dynamism in economics and research as China can generate much more clout from 280 billion direct military expenditures than the US from the quadruple issue in a mad corruption sump around the Pentagon.
It's Asia, stupid!
But it's not just about China. Vietnam is booming. Ho Chi Minh City is one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Singapore has risen to become the Switzerland of Asia, building a new airport within three years that is science fiction in New York compared to the JFK, while Germany is failing to build its dull capital airport.
"Germany, Germany over everything," some AFDler sings secretly in the cellar. But apart from the fact that the author of these famous lines, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, meant them differently and was a pretty good, progressive guy at the time, the question arises: how? How should that go, Germany over everything?
Germany has 80 million inhabitants. According to the definition of the commercial racist, 12 million of them are not included. But let's stick to 80 million. This compares to 1.4 billion Chinese, 1.3 billion Indians, 93 million Vietnamese, 32 million Malaysians, 262 million Indonesians ...
In other words, 5 percent of the world's population lives in the USA. 7 percent in Europe. Already the population of Africa surpasses that of the "West" by far: 17 percent. But two-thirds of the world's population lives in Asia. 15 percent of humanity are white. 85 percent are not. That's the reality.
Now, this majority ratio has been basically similar over the last two hundred years. The whites were at no time in history the majority of humanity. But if some have machine guns and the others only stones, bows and arrows, it does not matter if you're numerically in the majority or not.
These times are over, finally. The dictatorship of the white man has come to an end. And that means a huge boost in the direction of more democratic world conditions - even if not all countries are full of enthusiasm to adopt our definition of a parliamentary democracy.
It will be the highest railroad that we globalize the discourse of the peace movement in this sense and make the descent of the US and Europe and the rise of Asia the basis of our geopolitical analysis. World history happens before our eyes. The weights have long since moved far to the east.
"The financial system collapses," say the economists of alternative media? Yes, the West's financial system is under pressure - because the renminbi is putting the dollar in distress on the way to the world currency. And was the "world financial crisis" in 2007/2008 a global financial crisis? Martin Jacques argues convincingly that it has been a crisis of the Western financial system. China did not have to borrow to save dilapidated banks. China's banks are not ailing.
Renminbi? Never heard? The RMB is the currency of the largest economy in the world. It is the currency of China. The RMB has long been replacing the dollar as the reserve currency. And we global strategists from Germany have never heard the word ...
This again shows the problem: It's about Asia, damn it!