The Techtonic Plates Shift in Geo-politics

Things Have Changed and We Are Responsible

We have posted several articles on the emergence of China as a leading, if not increasingly dominant global political power.

China recently executed a British citizen convicted of drug trafficking. It is claimed that he suffered from a bi-polar mental disorder and so was an easy mark for recruitment as a drug mule. The British government has reacted angrily to the execution. China abrasively told the UK government to "pull its head in".

Chinese stridency--previously uncharacteristic--reflects how rapidly the balances of global political power have shifted. Consider the following report from Christopher Bodeen, published in the NZ Herald.

Beijing's insistence in carrying out the death sentence reflects both the communist government's traditional distrust of foreign interference and its newfound power to resist Western pressure.

"We express our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British accusation," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters at a regularly scheduled news conference. "We urge the British side to correct its wrongdoing to avoid causing damages to bilateral relations."

Note carefully the tone and frame of this response by the Chinese Foreign ministry. The implication is clear--if Britain does not shut up, it will be the worse for them. Not for China.

What is now dawning on the West (far too late, of course) is that they have little or no leverage any longer over China.

But with its rising global economic and political clout, China appears increasingly willing to ignore Western complaints over its justice system and human rights record. And as it relies more and more on China's cooperation to solve global problems - from the recession to climate change - the West has few ways to exert pressure on Beijing.

China's leaders "feel freer than their recent predecessors to disregard world pressures," said Jerome Cohen, an expert on China's legal system at New York University School of Law.

Whereas in the past, the West may have held out its approval as a carrot for China to improve its record on human rights, analyst Kerry Brown said now countries like Britain are now the ones eager to maintain good relations.

"There is a feeling that we have very limited leverage on China. We have to pick our territory where we can have an impact," said Brown, a China expert at the Chatham House think tank. "It's becoming more complicated by the day."

Clearly a new age has dawned--at least in a global geo-political sense. The Scriptures say that the borrower becomes the lender's slave. The twin debts racked up now for decades in the UK, the US, and Europe of balance of payments deficits and fiscal deficits are a direct outcome of the politics of consumption, of using other peoples' money to sustain an unsupported living standard. This has meant, in a nutshell, that China has funded the sybaritic self-indulgence of the West. With the "developed" world deeply in hock to China, the latter is now making it clear that the West must now learn to dance to China's tune, not the reverse.

Moreover, the West has manufactured a pseudo-global crisis: man caused global warming. The unintended consequence of this has been a self-imposed monastic-like restriction upon economic growth and energy exploitation in the West. The self-imposed nonsense of needing to reduce emissions of carbon-dioxide has resulted in the self-abnegation of the West before China. The West is now little more than a mendicant friar pleading for a little consideration.

The point is that there was nothing inevitable about this development: it has been entirely self-caused. When the electorates in the West decided that it was OK for their governments to borrow and steal to sustain a standard of living to which they were not entitled, the outcome was inevitable. It was all going to collapse. It was just a matter of time.

The once mighty West is well on its way to becoming little more than a whimpering lap dog. Unbelief has no-one to blame but itself. When a nation decides to break the Covenant of Grace, the fall of the curses of that Covenant becomes inevitable. The only real long-term hope is that men and women throughout the West turn back to the God of the fathers, humbling themselves before Him.