Janet Yellen’s visit to China underscores a lot of things, the desperate tactics as well as threats of a superpower caught by imperial overreach.
In this situation nevertheless, the United States still thinks it can get to do what it wants, that it can continue to use contradictory tactics to attain its desires.
That the United States can continue to talk and dictate to others about climate change and how it is important to use renewable energy while at the same time discouraging the People’s Republic of China from producing the materials needed to arrest climate change, like Solar panels and electric cars with claims of overcapacity.
The United States is indeed caught in a place it never anticipated. The country has fallen behind in manufacturing, way behind China at least. Their concentration has majorly been on militarization and the use of brute force, excelling mostly at the manufacture of weapons of death mainly used only by the western world and their offshoots.
While the country remains a source of major research and high value technologies, it doesn’t excel at their manufacturing.
Janet Yellen’s remarks of what she termed as Chinese over capacity in solar panels and electric cars is emblematic of how far China has come in the manufacturing sector. While China sells almost zero cars in the United States, it has still managed to become the biggest manufacturer of the technology overtaking all United States allies like Japan and Germany who once dominated these technologies after the US itself.
Therefore, while the United States is currently not a leader in the fields of automobile and renewable energy materials, it desires to protect its allies well as build its own capacity neglected for a long time then later compete with and out-compete China.
This hypocritical approach though is not based on reality, China is not going to stop producing for the world because the United States is behind and hopes to catch up, nor will China give a chance to US allies whom it can control like India to catch up with it.
Here comes a global challenge, the world is in extreme danger because imperialist colonial countries mostly Europeans in this case do not like competing on a leveled playing field, this is amidst loss of their manufacturing prowess to which the United States has been instrumental as it pursued blind economic policies, unlimited economic growth and profitability.
The world is in danger because, whenever the west has been in economic trouble, it has sought war as a means of harvesting other countries’ economies and resources, one can talk of Iraq, Libya and Syria where the US military has been caught stealing Syria’s oil. One can go as far back as the Chinese Opium wars which were as a result of no production in Europe while China was producing and did not need anything from Europe.
This then resulted in aggression against China in order for Europeans to plunder its economy later resulting in what the Chinese call the century of humiliation.
This humiliation is something China is bent on preventing from happening again hence its military build-up as it seeks to defend itself.
This is what has made today’s world extremely dangerous, the west’s desire to repeat this imperialist humiliation against China and the Chinese’ preparation to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and ofcourse working with Russia.
Behind the US’s naked aggression is desperation that their economy is on the brink of collapse as China make inroads withing the most coveted industries like Semi-Conductors and Aircraft Manufacturing. The next project, Washington envisions would be dethroning the dollar which would follow a catastrophic economic turmoil within the United States which might even break up the once dominant country.
The lesson is clear for Africa, that world which the United States seeks to maintain is not possible anymore, the world in which the imperialist countries dominate everyone and continue growing fat at the expense of the global south is not going to continue perpetually, yet making the imperialist countries abandon this approach is not without its dangers.
Africa must therefore take dome risk to break off these neocolonial chains, holding us back. In the spirit of Walter Rodney, it means building new systems, financial, political and economic which are independent from the west just as China has done.
This task is ofcourse that of the new generation of Africans who are unencumbered by the old thinking that Africa must perpetually be a beggar relying on the west in all manner of thought and policy.
This is the time for Africa to take risk and a stand.
Organisations such as the African Continental Unity Party represent such a direction.
Kwame Gonza
kwamegonza@africanacup.org
www.africanacup.org
