China is blessed with one of the most potent weapons known to modern man. It has invested itself with trillions of dollars in the fiat US bill. With this bill it is able to wield significant global power. If it unleashed all of it, at one instant, into the global economy, it will wreck the US economy. But it will not do so. China has trillions of dollars invested in the US; and it exports trillions to this bastion of global power. It cannot afford to ganderise its own egg.
But China has a problem. All fiat currencies, such as the US dollar, have a lifespan. And the US dollar is coming shudderingly close to the end of its lifespan. The US economy is weakening, against the Brazilian, Russian, Indian, Chinese, South African, and other economies in Western Europe.
The US government is finding it difficult to service its public debts. Life in hitherto economically bustling cities, like Detroit, is becoming Third World. The health service is in crisis. Youth is becoming underemployed and frustrated. Financial and banking fraud threatens to bleed the nation and its citizens; and the citizens have to devote more and more of their labour, the net labour of the family and community and city, to earn less and less: inflation. If China continues to hold on to its cartload of US bills, it will yoke itself, break its neck.
China must shed its US dollars. It is doing so in a most audacious way. Just as it is exporting its cuisine-missionaries globally, what we call Chinese Fast Food, so it is deploying its banks and industrialists far afield. In the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean. China, a nation which conserves, "eats its own locusts", rather than commit itself to imperialist, expansionist war, is unleashing its US bills overseas, peacefully, but aggressively. Greenback imperialism!
It is in this context that we must interpret the fondness which has arisen between the Kamla Persad-Bissessar-led government and the Chinese. The Chinese have greenbacks to shed. They must invest, or cripple themselves. On our side, the Trinidad Atlantic, we have failed to invest.
We have failed to invest congruently in our own human resources, our agrarian, health, security, transit, education, horticultural, sports, research, and manufacturing sectors. Having thus failed, failed to invest and develop, we are going to ask, plead with China for blighs, plead with China to develop us.
How pathetic! What a pathetic response from a national government. China cannot develop us. We have to develop ourselves. It is as if a single parent, mother or father, having failed to cope with her, or his, errant household, cannot even wash the wares in the sink, goes out to pick up a partner, to bring her or him, into the household. Western children's literature is filled with motifs of the wicked stepmother; and the modern industrial world with images of the fingering non-biological child father.
To put it in the economic jargon, China, if allowed, will come here to monetise our natural resources: our pitch, our tar sands, our facility for brokering our natural gas and electricity cheap. That is, to convert our natural resources, soil, water, biotic mass, communities into dollars, so as to more conveniently take away; after sharing a bit for our Treasury, a bit for our contractocracy, if any. And token help will be gifted to our undeveloped sectors named above; like that already offered, or begged for, in our security sector.
China possesses a lot of assets that it has developed over centuries, valuable home-grown assets. These assets are in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals, transit (rail) construction, arts and culture, the manufactory and the farm. This is where China could help.
But is this the help being sought by us? It offers a population of 1.4 billion, with an increase of 10 million each year, to offer goods and services to. Are we prepared for this, for China? No. But China is prepared for us. We represent just one other colony around the globe that China is unleashing its quiet greenback imperialism upon. We are being taken into the mouth of the tiger by, to quote Joseph Conrad in his novelette, Heart of Darkness, "a papier mache Mephistopheles."
(Wayne Kublalsingh)