February | 2015 | CHINA AND HER HISTORY

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.

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Published time: February 20, 2015 11:01

Reuters/Bobby Yip

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China, Economy, Europe, Finance, History, Infrastructure, Investment, Manufacturing, Middle East, Russia, Trade, USA

The world’s leading economy is on a roll as it enters a new year in the Chinese zodiac. Welcome to the Year of the Sheep. Or Goat. Or Ram. Or, technically, the Green Wooden Sheep (or Goat).

Even the best Chinese linguists can’t agree on how to translate it into English. Who cares?

The hyper-connected average Chinese – juggling among his five smart devices (smartphones, tablets, e-readers) – is bravely advancing a real commercial revolution. In China (and the rest of Asia) online transactions are now worth twice the combined value of transactions in the US and Europe.

As for the Middle Kingdom as a whole, it has ventured much further than the initial proposition of producing cheap goods and selling them to the rest of the planet, virtually dictating the global supply chain.

Now Made in China is going global. No less than 87 Chinese enterprises are among the Fortune Global 500 – their global business booming as they take stakes in an array of overseas assets.

Transatlantic trade? That’s the past. The wave of the future is Trans-Pacific trade as Asia boasts 15 of the world’s top twenty container ports (with China in pride of place with Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou).

Sorry, Britannia, but it’s Asia – and particularly China – who now rule the waves. What a graphic contrast with the past 500 years since the first European trading ships arrived in eastern shores in the early 16th century.

Then there’s the spectacular rise of inland China. These provinces have a huge population of at least 720 million people and a GDP worth at least $3.6 trillion. As Ben Simpferdorfer detailed in his delightful The Rise of the New East (Palgrave MacMillan), “over 200 major Chinese cities with populations greater than 750,000 lay some 150 miles inland from the coast. In effect, we are observing the rise of the world’s largest landlocked economy, and that will change the way China looks at the world. From Guangzhou’s factories to Shanghai’s bankers, all are starting to look inward, not outward.”

via China pivots everywhere — RT Op-Edge.

China’s frantic construction activity on a series of disputed reefs in the South China Sea has set off alarm bells across the Pacific and in Washington, raising fears that Beijing is putting steel in the ground to back up its contentious claims to a big swath of one of the world’s key waterways.

Since last summer, China has been busy transforming underwater reefs hundreds of miles from its coastline into artificial islands. Dredging vessels have been sucking out sand to create land where none was found before, and China is building new installations on the islands, including possibly airstrips, barracks, and radar sites.

In recent months, Chinese work has accelerated on about half a dozen disputed bits of coral in the South China Sea, according to new surveillance photos published by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, an arm of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The construction activity is just the latest chapter in a long-running conflict over the South China Sea that has pitted China against most of its maritime neighbors and has brought it into conflict with the United States and Japan. China’s push into the area seems designed to bolster Beijing’s claim to the resource-rich waters — which teem with fish and may hold plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas — and to increase China’s ability to project military force in an area traditionally dominated by the United States and its allies.

China has nominally claimed the South China Sea since the end of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s — based on a map drawn by the communists’ Nationalist opponents — but Beijing has intensified its bid for outright control in the last few years under President Xi Jinping. Aggressive actions, such as the dispatch of an oil-drilling rig and scores of escort vessels to Vietnamese waters last year, sparked months of cat-and-mouse skirmishing. Chinese ships regularly spar with fishing vessels from other countries.

And now the reef-building frenzy is getting China’s neighbors nervous, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. A Philippine foreign affairs spokesman this week said his country is “seriously concerned” about Chinese activities.

At issue is whether China is entitled, as it claims, to nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, and whether the frenetic construction on the disputed features will end up trumping international law and changing the geopolitical face of a volatile region. Manila has sued China before an international tribunal over some of the disputed reefs, but Beijing has refused to litigate, attempting instead to browbeat neighbors with cranes and dredgers. China refused to allow the South China Sea disputes on the agenda of an upcoming meeting at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

via Reefer Madness: Why Is China on a Building Spree in the South China Sea? | Foreign Policy.