2020: the year of China

I don’t think anyone in their right mind is going to miss this year 2020, which has brought us so many troubles. Few of us could suppose last Christmas that the pandemic that we then saw as something distant that it only affected China, like another ‘bird flu’, it was going to change our lives so much just a few months later. And it will not be because some scientists had not noticed it because there have always been pandemics and it was foreseeable that some would be very contagious and that with globalization it spread rapidly across the five continents. Of course, that’s easy to put it past bull.

Covid-19 has killed many people, sunk economies, disrupted supply chains, skyrocketed unemployment, ruined many businesses, and confined us to our homes, but It has not affected all countries equally, although we have all suffered. Here no one can claim victory and that is nevertheless what the Chinese do. Because if there is a country that can consider that 2020 has been good, it is China. The only. In the first place, because China has been able to dominate the Covid-19 pandemic with an iron fist, as only a dictatorship can, and today it is a country without restrictions on travel or meetings within its borders (another thing is! cross them!).

Beijing uses this success and the help it has been able to give to many countries to mount a huge propaganda program that offers an alternative formula of global governance aimed at extol the advantages of authoritarian systems on which it considers decaying liberal democracies. This propaganda finds good reception in many countries, confirming the fairness of the qualification of China as a “systemic risk” by the European Commission.

Second, because China has weathered the trade war waged by Donald Trump quite well over unorthodox trade practices that translate into a high deficit. The paradox is that a year later the US deficit is higher than when Washington imposed the first sanctions on China.

Third because China has taken over Hong Kong without the torn garments of the West having made a dent in their design. The draconian law of Internal Security ensures control of the territory and effectively puts an end to the old formula of “one country, two systems.” In view of what happened and the constant threats of forced reunification, one understands that a chill runs down the back of the Taiwanese because the risk of conflict grows with the prospect of the celebrations of the centenary of Mao’s communist revolution in 2049 and with Washington’s commitments to the island.

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