Although there is nothing written, it is possible that soon China be the most powerful and most influential country on Earth, which would confront all others with challenges that very few would be in a position to overcome. Although Argentina is among the least prepared to take advantage of what many foresee, Cristina Kirchner and his acolytes, including Alberto FernandezThey are betting that the United States will fail to prolong its reign as the preponderant superpower. It must have been for this reason that, during his brief stay in Moscow, the president assured Vladimir Putinnothing less, that Argentina is tired of depending so much on United States and the International Monetary Fund which, in his opinion, behaves like a branch of the US Treasury. And in Beijing, Alberto expressed his desire that Argentina fully participate in the ambitious Chinese project of the New Silk Road, that is, the web of trade agreements, gigantic infrastructure works and exchanges of all kinds that, if completed, it would cover a good part of the world to put it at the service of the Middle Kingdom.
The Kirchnerists have managed to convince themselves that the new international order that they see approaching will be much more hospitable to them than the one that still revolves around U.S. They trust that the Chinese will be generous, friendly to the poor, and therefore more than willing to lend them money without worrying about cumbersome fiscal details and without angering them by uttering ugly words like “adjustment”. They seem to aspire that the rest of the world, led by China, agree to subsidize Argentina until, by the art of birlibirloque since they do not intend to do anything specific, one fine day they have become rich enough to stop needing the charity of others.
It’s a fantasy, of course. When they talk to North Americans and Europeans, Alberto, Martin Guzman and other official representatives can move them by alluding to the desperate situation of the half of the population that is submerged in poverty and how inhumane it would be to deprive those who live on plans of what little they have become accustomed to receiving from the State, but the Chinese, who understand very well what mass misery is and know how to reduce it, are less maudlin. When it comes to them taking the lead in the IMF and related organizations, they will be decidedly more demanding, that is, more “neoliberal” than Westerners. doHow would a China-run IMF react? against countries that refuse on principle to honor their debts under the pretext that, in their opinion, they are “illegitimate”? Surely it would be less flexible than the body headed by Kristalina Georgiev.
In their own way, members of China’s political elite resemble those Victorians, caricatured by Dickens and other progressives of the time, who did not hesitate in “blaming the victims” for what happened to them. Although Chinese President Xi Jinping and those around him today might be inclined to take a benevolent attitude towards Alberto and even Christina, It would be for tactical reasons, since in all areas their mentality is meritocratic and they believe in hierarchies. Thus, a world dominated not only economically but also culturally by China would not be less severe and more egalitarian than the one ruled by U.S and their European allies. Rather, it would be one in which it is taken for granted that the fate of the various peoples, social sectors and individuals depends entirely on their own talents and, above all, on their efforts, as long as it does not occur to them to question the official truth prevailing.
Americans are concerned about New Silk Road. Although they cannot oppose the Chinese trying to stimulate trade and celebrate cultural agreements with other countries, they suspect that the project – like the space station they have built in Neuquén – has military connotations. For some, it is a colonialist enterprise that is destined to transform the weakest partners of the next planetary superpower into docile dependencies. They are not the only ones who think this way. In Africa, where China’s growing presence is stirring anger, many who had welcomed the incoming investment are protesting what they see as the systematic plundering of their country’s natural resources. They are also bothered by the fact that the Chinese only trust their own compatriots, from bosses to cleaning hands, so that they do not directly contribute to creating new jobs.
In a way, Chinese expansionism is a lot like that of the British Empire in that it is a matter of a country that needs to import much more than the United States, which is largely self-sufficient, to feed its population and supply the inputs it needs for its needs. factories. Here, the nationalists who contributed so much to the Peronist “story” vehemently criticized the railway network that was planned and built by the British with the purpose of transporting agricultural and livestock goods from the interior of the country to Buenos Aires, to then continue on to England. Although the scheme thus assumed was mutually beneficial, since it helped make Argentina a very prosperous country by the standards of the first decades of the last century, there was never any doubt as to the relative influence of the partners. Neither would there be if, as would be recommended by those convinced that the brief North American hour has already come to an end and that from now on everyone will have to pay homage to Beijing, Argentina chooses to tie its fate to that of the new hegemon.
Would the concrete results be advantageous for the country? of such an unbalanced relationship with an authoritarian power whose current rulers do not stand out for their respect for what is foreign to them and tend to see democracy as a symptom of decadence? For now, no one knows the answer to this key question, but it would not be surprising if the Chinese regime soon started treating its minor foreign partners as vassals. President Xi and other leaders of the all-powerful Communist Party make no effort to hide their nostalgia for the traditional Chinese worldview in which the Middle Kingdom sits at the apex of a universal pyramid and all other countries have to position themselves, with due humility, in very inferior places.
Good or bad, the Chinese hierarchs do not have much in common with the Kirchnerists who, for them, will be like those quarrelsome subjects who sporadically cause problems in urban centers; to cure them, they are often sent to “re-education camps” located in remote locations. It is therefore unlikely that Xi understood very well what Alberto had in mind when he stated that “if you were Argentine, you would be a Peronist”, since, although he does not believe in democracy, due to his training as a chemical engineer, his pragmatism and his economic ideas, which here would be considered very “right-wing”, the Chinese president is much more like the hawks of the hard wing of Pro than any member of the current governing cast. While some feel trepidation at the swift rise geopolitical of China, others celebrate it because in their opinion it would mean the definitive decline of the United States; he would agree that they ask themselves what would be necessary to do so that Argentina take a worthy place in a world in which it plays the central role, replacing the countries of Western traditions whose five centuries of dominance may be about to end. Will the Kirchnerists insist on poverty, knowing that their Chinese friends stigmatize the needy and, in time, could pressure them to adopt the methods they used to convert them into members of the middle class? Will they try to adapt the national education system to resemble the hyper-competitive Chinese model where teacher unions, if allowed to exist, would have to discipline their members to force students to study harder? To reverse what has happened in the so-called field, the current government or its successor could suggest to the Chinese that they send cohorts of teachers to teach in the country’s schools, as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento did with the famous North American teachers.
Ultimately culture, in the anthropological sense of the word, matters more than ideological preferences. Although the Chinese regime describes itself as communist, that is, leftist, the values it preaches have more in common with those held by the more rigid western conservatives than with those claimed by those who in United States, Europe and here they imagine progressives. They are aware that their own successes, such as the rescue of hundreds of millions of people from the most abysmal poverty, are due to the general will to do their best. They would not hesitate to ask the managers of other societies and their other inhabitants to do the same, beginning with state employees. do you understand Alberto, Cristina and other official militants? Judging by what they say and do, they have no idea what could be about to happen.
