The afternoon light enters through the window of one of the dining rooms of the Principal, a business restaurant in Barcelona, while the host shows the whole table a pin he wears on his lapel that accredits him as a "friend of China ". The diners feign interest and two of them get up to look at him closely. The pin entrepreneur explains that to achieve it he had to adapt the production of the Chinese subsidiary at the request of the authorities. On the other hand, in times of electricity shortages, the factory he owns near Shenzen has suffered fewer energy restrictions than the rest of the companies in the estate.
"The Chinese are people of their word..." says the pin guy already in the second coffee. They all nod. They are owners or investors in traveled companies. They are Democrats and people who have read. The end of freedoms in Hong Kong displeased them. It touched their souls. But they are also pragmatic people and do not believe that this should affect the business.
This ambiguity towards China is not a local particularity. It is shared by all businessmen in the world who have done, are doing or want to do business with the Asian giant. In the United States today, two ways of seeing the problem coexist. There is a political class concerned about the jobs that were lost in the relocations to Asia, that has national security as a priority and that has chosen Beijing as the ultimate adversary against whom they seek to build a new steel curtain. And there is also a financial capitalism that says the exact opposite and that fears the consequences of this confrontation.
A representative of this sector, usually silent, Hank Paulson, ex-Secretary of the Treasury and unofficial voice of Wall Street, explained to the Financial Times that Washington has underestimated the weight of Beijing and its ability to make friends. "If we go too far in reducing trade and investment and go beyond what our allies and partners want to do, we will be isolated," warns Paulson, who does not hide his sympathies towards Beijing.
The current secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, has darkened the expectations of the hawks who seek the fragmentation of the global market (decoupling). "A complete separation of our economies [from China and the United States] would be disastrous for both countries and would destabilize the rest of the world," he said.
The reality is that this second cold war bears little resemblance to the first. That war was an ideological war. This war, on the other hand, is a pragmatic confrontation between two great powers. The first was a struggle between worlds that lived apart. This occurs in the midst of a sticky interdependence between countries.
Joe Biden said in Warsaw that the war in Ukraine pits democracies against authoritarian powers. The problem with this approach (correct to begin with) is that there is a very large portion of the world that does not buy it. If Putin's Russia has survived the sanctions applied by the West since the beginning of the war, it is precisely because there are a good number of countries that continue to do business there.
Brazil, a democracy, does not sell weapons to Ukraine, but needs fertilizers from Russia. India, another democracy, buys its oil. Turkey too. The list of countries that maintain commercial relations with Moscow is long: Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Mexico... to a long dozen increasingly active middle-sized powers.
There is no label that defines such different countries. Some call them the Global South as opposed to the North. Others mention the Brics, an acronym for a club that brings together only five countries. There is also the precedent of the Non-Aligned in the sixties. But then they were poorer, weighed less and ended up in anti-Americanism.
What unites them all is that they do not accept the Russian invasion of Ukraine or its nuclear threats. But they do not share the policy of sanctions towards Moscow. All (apart from India, due to proximity and competition) let themselves be seduced by China's facile and "pacifist" speech. And they are irritated by the paternalism, in some cases threatening, of the United States and its allies in the war. What they want is to grow, they are looking for investments and they want to eradicate poverty in their societies. They think that the United States and Europe have mismanaged the first thirty years of globalization and frustrated some of the promises made to them. They have become very pragmatic. That's why they appreciate China's ways, which they see as more egalitarian in their treatment than the old post-colonial powers.
Who has best reflected the disinterest of this group of countries towards the West (not only towards the United States) has been precisely an American from Harvard, an economist well connected with finance. At the IMF's spring meeting in Washington, Lawrence Summers told Bloomberg TV cameras that “someone from a developing country told me, 'what we're getting from China is an airport; what we get from America is a sermon'”.
In recent days, Xi Jinping has not stopped receiving foreign representatives, he has facilitated an agreement between the two antagonistic powers of the Middle East (Arabia and Iran) and he talks about infrastructure and globalization. The West urgently needs a manual to navigate this complex world. To make friends and convince. Otherwise, there will come a day when all Principal customers will wear the pin.
