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China is no longer an orthodox communist society: Voice of Russia

Some historians identify an earlier date as the start of the process: October 1967, when Richard Nixon, who at that time was running for the White House, wrote the following in the Foreign Affairs journal: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation."

What Nixon did not explicitly say in that article but what everyone with even an elementary knowledge of foreign affairs could read between the lines was that engaging China was a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, his often laughable and pathetic demeanor notwithstanding, apparently got the message and angrily accused Washington of ?trying to play the China card?.

Thus the balloon went up. The next 40-plus years witnessed various scheming attempts of two sides of the U.S.?China?Russia triangle to get the upper hand against the third one. It is interesting to note that ideology played only a minor part in these geopolitical games. Capitalist America and Communist China had no problems plotting against the Communist USSR.

After the Soviet Union?s collapse, the new Russia, free from the stigma of communism, was ready to join forces with the US to balance China?s might, but Russia?s approaches to the West were bluntly rejected. Now China and Russia are increasingly seen as working in concert to contain America?s global ambitions.

One of the most recent examples is China?s invitation to Moscow and South Korea to form a united anti-Japanese (anti-American by extension) front. According to the prominent Chinese expert Guo Syangan, vice-president of the Chinese Institute of International Affairs of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this front would be used to force Japan?s leaders to recognize once and for all the results of World War II and give up its territorial claims to neighboring states.

As would have been expected, Moscow?s reaction to that ?trial balloon? was cool. As Andrei Ivanov rightly pointed out on the Voice of Russia radio, Moscow ?does not advocate solving disputed issues by confrontation.? However, if the Kremlin feels that it is being continuously pushed around by Washington, with no regard for Russia?s geopolitical interests, then it may treat such Chinese advances in a more positive spirit.

China is no longer an orthodox communist society. It has been able to discredit the old Cold War paradigm, whose main tenet is that freedom, democracy and capitalism (FDC) go hand in hand so that it is impossible to have one without the other two.

It is a great irony of history that the United States, which is the world?s most powerful nation and has all three FDC elements, is up to its ears in debt to China, a nation that can claim only one FDC element. In fact, the point has been reached where not only the US economy but also that of the European Union and many other nations depends heavily on the world?s only remaining communist power (the economic weight of Cuba and North Korea is negligible).

Now, just how has this point been reached? Didn?t we all applaud Ronald Reagan, who promised us that Communism would be consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps Reagan had in mind only the Soviet version of this brutal system.We now see that it is America, which has moved a great many of its industries to China, is at least partly to blame for the present sad state of affairs.

However, it is now rather pointless to apportion the blame, to search for an answer to one of those two eternal Russian questions, ?Who is to blame?? Rather, it is more important to look for answers to the other eternal question, ?What is to be done??

The year 2012 is unique in that on all three sides of the U.S.-China-Russia triangle, new leaders have been elected. It is, therefore, the right time for them to start regular trilateral summits to discuss the world?s most pressing security issues. Whoever takes the initiative in this endeavor will certainly earn more than just a few PR points. What is preventing Putin from taking the initiative?

Source: http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_11_21/China-is-no-longer-an-orthodox-communist-society/

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