New Silk Road, Duisburg and value-based politics
A friend of mine who is a bit Sinophile Asia expert sent me an article from Nikkei Asia about the stagnation of the New Silk Road in relation to the China-Duisburg route and said that this was the result of western value-based politics.
“China Belt and Road dreams fade in Germany’s industrial heartland
Geopolitical tensions derail Duisburg’s hopes of trade bonanza”
But you can see it differently. No geopolitical cancer cell that then proliferates and colonizes geopolitically and grabs the critical infrastructure. And according to parts of the article that claims that was more a win for the Chinese than the Germans either. he said: „Yes, but Duisburg has hardly any alternatives. The coal mines will no longer be opened.” Necessity is sometimes the mother of invention. Perhaps it would also make sense to consider India and other countries as partners than always just China and Chinese investors as a habitual, automatic reflex. It is a bit inflationary to contrast any challenge to neoliberal greed, which only wants to get cheap goods from China and gas from Russia, with value liberalism without considering the security and geopolitical dimensions. As North Stream is not just a economic, but a geopolitical project the same is the case with the New Silkroad BRI. Many Western people except extremists consider this liberal democracy to be worth protecting and defending against such systemic enemies as China and Russia, ad therefore it is logic to call the problem by the name , although one shouldn’t make it absolute, but see it as a triad constellation like the EU, whereby one can discuss the weighting. In addition, it simply has to do with realpolitik and security policy if you don’t hand over your critical infrastructure to China without questioning it. By the way, not even Biden and the USA want to decouple in the narrow sense. The focus is on diversification and not making oneself even more dependent on China. Modi’s new economic program will also be interesting, since many Western companies have not invested in India but in China because of Indian bureaucracy and protectionism. And it has nothing to do with value liberalism if you simply demand – completely independently of human rights and democracy issues – that the Chinese should open up their critical infrastructures and their markets to the West like the West has done up to now and refrain from threatening its Asian neighbors and the international sea lanes – reciprocity, plain and simple. Period. And it is also somewhat biased always only to criticize Western value-liberalism and not the neototalitarian, authoritarian „value-conservatism“ and its expansive ambitions, which ultimately led to the Ukraine war as well, since Xi and Putin are striving for a multipolar world order under their aegis and Xi used Putin as a battering ram in the Ukraine, hoping for the deathblow of the supposedly rotten western liberal democracy, even though he miscalculated for the time being. Or the critics of the system are right and authoritarian systems by their very nature tend towards expansion and aggression and a regime change is needed. But even below this threshold, deterrence through a policy of strength can be simple realpolitik. And Duisburg’s stagnation can be explained above all by the Ukraine war, which is primarily due to the fact that neo-totalitarian Xi-China probably gave Putin a free hand for his war of aggression at the Winter Games in Beijing, just as Stalin gave Mao and Kim Il-Sung green light for their Korean war . Therefore, instead of always criticizing the alleged western crusader ideology and value liberalism, one could also criticize the neo-totalitarian value policy of Russia and China and their crusade for a multipolar world order under their hegemony.