Imperialism in Chinese Style

Published by N+1 Quinterna to the #44 N+1 magazine in December

Translated by Balance y Avante from Italian to English

" It may seem a strange and even paradoxical statement that the next uprising of the European people, and their next movement for freedom and a republican system of government, is more likely to depend on what is happening in the Celestial Empire than on any other current political cause. But it is not a paradox, as everyone can understand by examining the various aspects of the question " (Marx, Revolution in China and Europe, 14 June 1853).

From the Gadget to the Universal Milling Machine

Growing Trade Surpluses

Export of Capital Goods

Export of Intermediate and Consumer Goods

Overtaking

Aircraft Carrier Imperialism

Adam Smith and the "housewife of Voghera"

How the Matter was in Marx's Time

Hands on Africa

The Relative Decline of the USA

From the Gadget to the Universal Milling Machine

China is spoken of as a large producer and exporter of consumer goods, but rapid development is changing the structure of its exports: in addition to consumer products, China is exporting machines, i.e. means of production or in any case durable goods. The great diversification of the types of goods exported means that the variations in the different production spheres are balanced in the final result, so, for example, Beijing seems not to be affected by the "duty war" started by Trump's United States. The 25% increase in duties on steel and aluminum did not significantly slow down trade between the two countries and there was no feared effect on international prices. On the other hand, sensational consequences were foreseeable in a world that produces 1.66 billion tons of steel, of which a billion in China alone. Even more so since the quantity of steel imported from the United States, if it is significant in relation to their internal needs (around 30 million tonnes out of 115 million), is almost insignificant in relation to Chinese production. In short, the impact on China was almost zero, it was more of an internal American political need than an economic "war" against Beijing.

Currently, the U.S. tariff structure on Chinese goods entails tariffs ranging from 10 to 25 percent on $250 billion in imported goods. On the remaining 267 billion, again of imported goods, Trump's threat to raise tariffs to 25% looms if China does not abandon its wild behavior in competition, starting with indifference towards patents and intellectual property in general, for end up with monetary maneuvers aimed at keeping the Yuan undervalued and therefore competitive. Manipulation of the nominal exchange rate has considerable importance for countries that have a large volume of imports/exports. The peg to the dollar, operating in the period from the "Asian tiger" crisis of 1997 to 2005, was pursued and officially declared. The aim was to prevent the purchase of Chinese goods from putting pressure on the Yuan and thus leading to its appreciation. Furthermore, the "fixed" exchange rate allowed stability and gave continuity to incoming capital flows.

It was the period in which the outsourcing of production to China and the systematic imitation by the latter of the patents that were supposed to protect imported technologies flourished. This while the outflow concerned the massive purchase of Western financial securities, especially American treasury bonds. Since around 2000 the Chinese currency has been pegged to a basket of currencies and has slowly appreciated against the dollar, so much so that the real appreciation is even greater than the nominal one. Despite this, trade surpluses continue to be recorded compared to the United States. Walmart, the largest American importer of Chinese goods, warns against restrictive policies such as protectionist ones. The American request to develop China's internal consumption to lower the level of competition on the international level is counterproductive: the increase in wages in the industrial districts would have already caused an increase in prices at the source, an increase that cannot be transferred to the American consumer without a stimulus to inflation.

Faced with Washington's initiative, Beijing responded by increasing duties to 25% on 60 billion in imports, especially on soybeans and cereals, coincidentally the products whose cultivation is concentrated in the states that voted for Trump.

Despite these skirmishes, there is no danger that mutual interests will collapse and, if we must speak of "war", it consists if anything in the radical change in the structure of Chinese exports; it is therefore a war that does not take place with tariffs but with goods and the markets in which they circulate. China is no longer just the "world's factory" subordinated to clients who used it to relocate their companies and diversify their investments, but has become an imperialist country that fights with the same weapons as its competitors.

Between 2007 and 2016, China saw a 20% growth in exports of machinery and durable goods: locomotives, oil tankers, boilers, generators, air conditioning systems, photovoltaic panels, liquid crystal or LED monitors. This was while its overall exports grew 5% versus 2% for the rest of the world. In absolute terms, China holds 32% of world exports of medium-tech goods and 20% of those of means of production. And, while Chinese competition once took place entirely on the ground of prices, today we are beginning to challenge the Western machinery on the ground of quality. Capital is too impatient to wait for men to prepare their plans, perhaps long-term ones. Therefore, as always since capitalism has existed, it forces the bourgeoisie to continuously revolutionize its mode of production (Manifesto).

[Figure 1]

[Figure 2]

Growing Trade Surpluses

How, through what paths, was this efficiency achieved in the case of China? Paradoxically, the explanations given by bourgeois economists, who derive them from their classical economists, are all the more valid the more banal their statements are. Some examples: if the monetary mass increases without a corresponding production of "added value" from scratch, there is a danger of inflation. Or: lowering the cost of money stimulates the economy. Or again: if a country's currency is devalued, that country will become competitive on the foreign market. This type of statement, however, stops at the surface of the phenomenon, which should instead be addressed from the point of view of the Chinese production structure in historical evolution, i.e. taking into account that:

1) competition on the internal market has made it possible to achieve large economies of scale, so much so that in a short time we have gone from mass production obtained with a growing mass of workers to mass production produced with a decreasing mass of workers;

2) the increased use of advanced technologies imported from abroad has led to the generalization of the technologies themselves achieved by systematically copying patents;

3) a gigantic production of means of production has triggered a virtuous circle characterized by increased productivity in the capital goods sector. In the industrial districts this translated into an increase in wages but in the face of an increased mass of surplus value, which made it possible to increase internal consumption without negatively affecting the rate of profit.

China can no longer be analyzed with the same criteria used until the recent past. It is no longer a "developing country".

According to some Chinese analysts, this trend will strengthen because it is expected that as a result of competition, companies will update their production lines in technological terms, specializing further. The type of approach of the Western world towards China also changes completely: half of the Chinese means of production exported are directed towards emerging countries, not part of the OECD and are manufactured in China by 43% of companies with foreign participation . It is a paradox that has unpredictable consequences: OECD countries produce in China a large part of the means of production that compete with them on the world market.

From 1992 to 2016, China recorded growing trade surpluses, except in 1993. From 1992 to 2003, two significant phenomena are observed. As regards exports, the component in consumer goods drops from 60% to below 40%. That in capital goods increases and goes from representing 10% to almost 50%. The export of raw materials is below 10%. However, the component in intermediate goods is stable (figure 1). Let's leave aside the absolute values in monetary terms of exports and its components and try to understand, by looking at the differential values, how this overtaking occurred. If we consider the annual growth rates (figure 2) we see that the rise of capital goods in total exports has been "so fast" by virtue of greater annual growth. This dizzying growth occurred until 2008, the year in which the growth rate of this component began to roughly follow the trend of consumer goods and total exports. Looking at imports (figure 3), the reduction in the intermediate goods component is striking, while the import of raw materials and semi-finished products grows.

[Figure 3]

[Figure 4]

Export of Capital Goods

The share of imported capital goods compared to overall imports remains, roughly, at the level of that of exported capital goods; but this does not mean that as many capital goods are exported as they are imported, because the mass of exports is greater than that of imports. The country has, in fact, been a net exporter of capital goods since 2005 (figure 4).

Export of Intermediate and Consumer Goods

The highest net exports are in the consumer goods sector, which has been in surplus for the last 25 years (figure 5). The situation is different for raw materials of which China is a net importer (figure 6).

[Figure 5]

[Figure 6]

The trend of exports of intermediate goods is more sensitive to changes (figure 7), probably due to the Yuan-Dollar monetary relations. Despite the lower weight of intermediate goods on imports, China remains the world's transforming factory.

[Figure 7]

[Figure 8]

We update the historical series of foreign direct investments to 2017 and add some considerations (Figure 8). The graph shows the net inflow of direct investment (value of inward direct investment made by non-resident investors) and the net outflow of foreign direct investment (value of outward direct investment made by residents). The graph had an exponential trend which crushed the broken lines and did not allow us to understand the orders of magnitude of the two quantities, it was represented in a logarithmic scale on the ordinates. It is enough to highlight the trend of the quantities. Notice how they are equivalent in 2015.

Overtaking

The two indicators in 2017 tell us that China does not yet fully fulfill the role of a rentier country . The quantities represented in the graph express two distinct historical trends. The constant surplus of foreign direct investments of the last thirty years reflected the attractiveness, for international capital, of a competitive manufacturing sector, of a large market with a billion consumers, of a developing country with annual growth rates two digits. The Chinese economy was the destination of all those capitals that could not find adequate valorisation at home, due to a low rate of profit. But the surplus has rapidly narrowed over the past eight years as Chinese capital abroad seeking better returns has increased faster than Western capital in China. All observers note the slowdown in Chinese growth in this period, which went from a maximum of 13% to 6-7% per year. Under the pressure of a lower return on domestic investments, the Chinese authorities have relaxed the draconian controls on capital movements, while continuing to monitor them closely. The overtaking between the two sizes was accelerated by the collapse of the Shanghai stock market in August 2015, which saw the stock market index fall by 30% in three weeks. Such a destruction of fictitious capital, with the consequent disinvestment by foreign operators, has led outgoing foreign direct investments to temporarily exceed incoming ones. The difference is not such as to suggest that the Chinese economy can now divert income from international markets as the United States does. In this regard, we make a comparison: in 2017 the balance between incoming and outgoing foreign direct investments for China returned to positive (66 billion dollars), the extent of the flows of foreign direct investments that the two economies divert and move is by 1 to 3 for the United States. Furthermore, having as a reference the fifth hallmark of imperialism (the prevalence of capital exports over the exports of goods) identified by Lenin, we see that the relationship between outgoing foreign direct investments and exports, in 2016, for China is equal to half that of the USA.

In fig. 9 the histogram shows the acquisition of equity investments and the net increase in liabilities. Positive values represent incoming flows, negative values represent outgoing flows. The solid dark line is the difference that affects the balance of payments. Since 2015, China has invested more abroad than has been invested in China from abroad (145 billion dollars versus 135.6). This is certainly a turning point, and one that has been announced. In Italy, apart from the football teams that make the most news, Chinese investors have acquired industrial shares of strategic importance, for example in Pirelli (from tires to communications), in Snam (gas exploration and distribution), in Terna (primary electricity grid ). The data is important not so much for the absolute figure but for the increase over time. Between 2010 and 2015, Chinese investments abroad tripled and Beijing has already released an estimate for the next five years: 1,000 billion dollars.

[Figure 9]

The history of Chinese investments abroad and of the overtaking of those from abroad in China, with the corollary of exports changing in structure, moving from mass consumption goods to durable goods and means of production, is essential to understand the future of this anomalous relationship. The data demonstrate a mass transfer of capital on a preferential axis that originates in the United States and reaches Africa via Asia and Europe. Simply put, Americans purchase Chinese goods in large quantities without a corresponding Chinese purchase of American goods; the American trade deficit, i.e. the Chinese surplus, therefore expands, which allows China to purchase part of Washington's public debt and trigger the same mechanism towards other countries. As we have already demonstrated (see n. 25 of the magazine), imperialism at the last stage (and imperialism is already in itself the last stage of capitalism) does not allow the "normal" historical continuation of the imperialistic series ( Holland, England, United States, China...): the leading imperialist country typically has an exuberance of capital that invests in the controlled countries, that is, it is a net creditor country, and the debtor countries are controlled in part also due to this fact. The United States is no longer a country rentier but an indebted country, while the aspiring successor, China, is indeed the country that buys the debt, but does so by producing and exporting goods. In short, it is not in the conditions of the candidate for succession, it is not that country which, at the height of wealth and power, can afford to live on income in the sense of exploitation of other people's work. On the contrary, it is the Chinese workers who work for the dominant imperialist country.

>Aircraft Carrier Imperialism

The situation seems very confusing but in reality it is quite simple if we refer to value flows rather than traditional accounting based on monetary statements. The United States at the height of its power (the 50s and 60s of the last century) produced and exported, it was by far the greatest world power with more than half of the monetary value produced by the rest of the countries considered globally (the GDP is the accounting figure of a year of activity, not the value produced in the capital turnover time) and they had the military power suited to their role. From the graphs (figs. 9 to 12) it is clear first of all that the US economy today remains unmatched in terms of size. There is a reduction, however not as pronounced as the theorists of the decline of hegemony would like us to believe. The United States represents a quarter of the world economy in absolute terms, but directly or indirectly controls an enormous amount of other people's capital.

There are various considerations that can be made for China and the Eurozone countries. The latter, instead of obtaining an increase in GDP produced as a dividend deriving from their greater economic and monetary integration, experience a modest but continuous decline. China went from representing just over 1% of world output in 1987 to producing 12% in 2017 (in current dollars). The Chinese economy has grown continuously at an annual rate above the world rate since 1977, the "disunited states" of Europe have been running at a pace below the annual world growth rate for 43 out of 57 years.

Speaking of the United States, our current had already identified a peculiarity of the superpower: it was at the same time colonialist but was fighting colonialism, in short we were faced with a new type of imperialism, that of aircraft carriers (see precisely "Old and new imperialism " and "Aircraft carrier imperialism" on our site).

[Figure 10] US trade balance as a precentage of GDP. Source: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=270

Not that the economic structure had changed, but something had certainly happened in the superstructure: the United States was sweeping away colonialism, that is, the old imperialistic form linked to the presence on the territory, to replace it with control from... a mobile territory, that is, the fleet equipped with floating airports. Therefore a new type of control, based on global finance, on assisted production and export (Marshall Plan and related), on military superiority due to the undisputed presence on the oceans. What would have been the prospect of this new imperialistic structure? The usual. The law of increasing relative poverty would have remained valid with all its premises, starting from the theory of value: the condition of the proletariat (and of humanity) would not have manifested itself with the absolute increase in poverty but with the relative increase, with the increasingly clear gap between the social extremes of a super-polarized world, in which very few individuals are powerful not only because they own capital, but because they control it. This group of super-capitalists would have distanced themselves further and further from the mass of the population to the point of becoming independent even from the national state, effectively becoming the service personnel of international capital, finally free from any type of constraint, assuming that the men in The current mode of production have ever managed to avoid being gods symbionts towards capital.

Theorists of the handover from Washington to Beijing enthusiastically welcomed the 2014 overtaking, depicted in the graph in fig. 11. Data in hand, the American GDP measured on the basis of Purchasing Power Parity was overtaken by that of China. But be careful, evaluating GDP in PPP dollars means making the values of goods comparable on the basis of purchasing power, which leads to overestimating the weight of those economies in which the general price level is lower than that of the others . It is as if two economies were compared based not on current dollars but on the quantity of goods those dollars purchase in different areas. It is clear that at the official exchange rate, one dollar buys less goods in the center of Milan than on the outskirts of Bari. The context in which the "added value" produced in a year is calculated must therefore be kept in mind.

The table shows the list of major countries in order of GDP in trillions of dollars-purchasing power parity. The number in brackets indicates the position they would have had twenty years ago in the same list.

China is a country with great resources, nothing would seem to prevent it from inheriting the position of leading country of imperialism. Even the simple projection of graphs relating to parameters of all types over a few years tells us that the candidacy would be realistic and that China would have the economic requirements to succeed the United States. But this type of projection has a flaw: it does not take into account the fact that the proposition "leading country of imperialism" contains two related concepts: leading country and imperialism. The statement would only have meaning if they coincided, that is, given that China is very active and skilled in the race to become a leading country, if imperialism stood up to the test. But can the planet support a country with a billion and a half inhabitants that takes the place of the United States? With the international gendarmerie duties of the latter? Would it be conceivable for such a country to coexist with populous giants like India or economically powerful ones like Japan? Let us remember that China ranks first in the world for Gross Domestic Product, but drops to 105th place for GDP per capita. We must also ask ourselves: what would China do without the complementary country that the United States has become? Who buy more Chinese goods than the rest of the world and pay a heavy tribute so that China continues to buy American public debt. They continue to be the country rentier because they still extract coupons from past investments but in the meantime they get into debt instead of granting credits, and force friendly and pseudo-enemy countries to pay a bribe so that their debt remains infinite. The United States has not guaranteed itself a rich pension: it is selling its future in installments, paying for it with bills that are under protest before they are even discounted. And it is clear that this cannot really last forever.

Adam Smith and the "housewife of Voghera"

When we say that China and the United States are complementary countries , we mean that term literally: that they complement each other and that if they were separated they would be in trouble. Many think that China is still a backward country, that the state is still able to control capital, as in Russia during Stalin's time. This is not the case: in China the enormous "leap forward" was made when the state stopped piloting industrialization and moved on to what some have called "neo-Smithian economy" (see Giovanni Arrighi). This economy would not be a new edition of the original one but an unprecedented attempt to apply it entirely. In practice, the enormous success of the Chinese economy would not be due to a mixture of liberalism and economic dirigisme but to a literal application of Smith's book, in which the functions of the state and the market are completely separated through a clear division of work: everything that concerns the economy goes to the market, what remains to the state, that is, war, justice and public works.

It is a suggestive but wrong thesis. Two economic giants like China and the United States cannot afford theoretical flourishes. Smith is a liberal economist of the 18th century, China is the result of geohistorical alchemy of the third millennium. And the empirical data around which the Washington-Beijing relationship revolves is: 8.4% of American exports go to China; 21.6% of imports come from China. This relationship has nothing to do with war, not with justice, not with public works, but its management cannot be left to private initiative. A growing debt of that scale will have to be managed by the state. This is nothing new, starting from the 1920s, when fascisms had to take over the reins of capitalism on behalf of capital. And the problem has spread to the entire planet (fig. 14).

However, the USA and China cannot be complementary either in terms of the balance of payments or in terms of the internal economy. The balance of payments is the sum obtained as a settlement of capital movements between residents in a certain country and residents in another. Commercial movements (exchange of goods) and financial movements (direct and indirect investments) are counted. China may very well represent the "factory of the world", but to do so it must not only sell, it must also buy, otherwise the trade balance will record a perpetual surplus. In an extremely differentiated world, adjustments work even if there are net exporters and importers: it means that the former in some way exploit the latter, who balance the deficit either by offering cheap labor, or by allowing the exploitation of natural resources. In reality, the difference in the trade balance is compensated by the difference in the balance of payments, except that the direct and indirect investments of the country in surplus appear as the value realized by the indirect ones. How is it possible? Since 1971, dollars circulating outside the United States have been inconvertible. This monetary mass allows the issuing country which does not see the balance sheet presented, to purchase an enormous quantity of goods abroad (about 6% of its GDP, 1,200 billion dollars) without the obligation to compensate the own currency which, let us remember, is a promise of payment to the bearer.

[Figure 11] China's trade balance as a percentage of its GDP

[Figure 12] Exports: three countries, China, the United States and Germany, cover 30% of world trade (Japan, which is the fourth, exports three times less than China). This situation cannot last because a part of exports is not balanced by imports and increases the commercial debt. (Data in current US$, 2017, CIA factbook)

In a complex world, in which two giants like the USA and China exchange goods and capital, other countries act as a backdrop, but they can only contribute to strengthening this mutual "deal with the devil" signed by two countries which on the international scene are enemies and competitors. The United States is indebted to the major countries in the world, let's say the top thirty in the ranking based on GDP. An important conservative function that prevents the collapse of a one-way debt-credit system is that of the dollar, by far the most used currency both for international transactions and as a reserve currency. As long as the world needs dollars this imbalance can be tolerated; but certainly a world situation has been created in which the major imperialist country, super-indebted, depends on its creditors as they depend on the continuity of the relationship.

It seems like a test to see if the famous "housewife from Voghera" knows how to do the shopping! This is not the situation England found itself in at the time of its imperialistic heyday, when it lent capital in exchange for interest. The housewife, from Voghera or not, knows how to do the math very well and does not fall into the trap of considering debt as a weakness: the person most interested in financing a debtor is her creditor; if the debtor goes bankrupt the creditor loses everything. In this case the debtor also has the aircraft carriers.

Americans buy both Chinese goods produced by Chinese companies and Chinese goods produced in companies owned or controlled by Americans. To break even, the Chinese would have to produce and purchase in the same way and for an identical amount: buy completely American goods and American goods produced in companies owned or controlled by Chinese. Instead, they import 130 billion dollars worth of goods from the United States and export 506 billion dollars, with a trade surplus of 376. This is not a large figure compared to the quadrillions of dollars that are now the standard measurement in the field of finance and stock market raids. , but this is a fixed fact that China must manage. It does this by buying American treasury bonds with the trade surplus and thus becoming a creditor country. In dollars, because the Yuan is inconvertible. From the accumulation of American treasury bonds, China earns interest in dollars, thus supporting a Beijing-Washington bond.

Moreover, even the United States, despite the ideology they profess, are neo-Smithian, with a relative division of labor: the market on the altar and the state which deals, in a mystified and shadowy way, carrying out its peculiar functions, with war, justice and public works (the nation building of Italy, Germany and Japan in the post-war period). The task of the hegemonic country of the imperialist era is to safeguard its hegemony, and this is in conflict with a state that "lets do its thing" to capital within the borders of the homeland. If capital today had no convenience in state control over the men who manage the economy, in short, if we returned to direct management of wealth by its owners, a system gone mad would explode, finding the only solution in open war.

How the Matter was in Marx's Time

In the series of articles on British trade, Marx analyzes the situation in which England found itself due to its excessive power and observes:

"The small profit margin left to the English manufacturer, still reduced by the constant necessity - for a country whose very existence depends on the monopoly situation that has made it the workshop of the world - to constantly undersell compared to the rest of the world, is then compensated by the cutting of the wages of the working class and the creation at home of poverty on a rapidly increasing scale... England is forced, by granting large credits, to fuel speculation in other countries in order to find a field of use for its surplus of capital, and thus endanger its wealth acquired precisely in the attempt to increase and maintain it." (Marx, British Trade , unpublished, in n +1 of September 2000).

England had found itself in this paradoxical situation due to the excess of capital that could not be used at home, capital that migrated abroad mainly in the form of loans, through which competing countries were able to finance their own industry. The same situation that was created with each passing of the baton between the historic exponents of imperialism: Venice, Portugal, Holland, Spain.

"Of the considerations made, the truly disturbing aspect for England is that it is evidently unable to find, at home, a sufficient field of employment for its plethoric capital; and that it must therefore lend it on an increasing scale and, similar in this to the imperialist countries that preceded it at the time of their retreat, it itself forges the weapons of its competitors. Being obliged to grant large credits to foreign manufacturing countries, such as the European continent, it itself anticipates its industrial rivals the means to compete with them on semi-finished products, and therefore contributes to the increase in the price of the raw materials used for their own fabrics. And, as we have seen, a country that imports more goods than it exports from another stronger country is conditioned by this, since it can only pay with cheap labor or raw materials." (Marx, British Trade cit.)

China interrupts this standard relationship: it does not export capital but imports it in the form of direct and indirect investments; it does not import goods but exports them to stronger countries with older capitalism; it does not sell securities of its public debt but buys securities of the American one. Above all, it has not undermined stock-capital, as Marx called it, that is, capital rooted in the country that represents imperialism, stock-capital with roots, from which the offspring are thrown. Therefore, despite its brilliant performance, it is not a strong imperialist country. It will be so if and when its economic structure makes it move from state control over capital to capital control over the state. That is, when the passing capital will put down deep roots, forcing that of other countries to compete. Consequently, Chinese capitalism still ranks among the old imperialist countries, also because it retains the need to feed itself with "land" traffic given that it does not control the seas, it must purchase land instead of colonizing it (as is happening in Africa) and it still needs to send men to partner countries instead of activating remote control.

Hands on Africa

In Africa there are officially 750,000 Chinese, but various sources speak of 1.2 million. These are Chinese people who do business in the name of Beijing, followed by the shopkeepers, restaurateurs and traffickers who make up all the Chinatowns of the world. The American presence in the world therefore differs from the Chinese one: there are no USAtowns on the outskirts of megacities, instead there are many people native to individual countries across the planet who take care of American affairs on behalf of Americans.

The title of this chapter is also that of a 1978 book. The author, Jean Ziegler, denounced the violent acquisition of work and raw materials by imperialist countries. The book caused a sensation and circulated as a best seller. Today there is perhaps less visible violence, but the imperialist penetration of then has been joined by that of China today. To tell the truth, Mao Zedong was still alive when the railway linking the capitals of Zambia and Tanzania was built by the Chinese. Even then, good diplomatic commercial relations were in China's program for Africa, so much so that 43 African countries had relations and contracts with Beijing.

China's relationship with Africa is ambiguous: on the one hand, it seems that the continent is the counterpart of the "investment park" that the imperialist countries have created in China; on the other hand the figures are still low (apart from the significant number of Chinese in Africa), and it seems that the "imperialist robbery" denounced by many must be scaled down. What is certain is that China's attention is real and manifests itself with all the typical paraphernalia of imperialism. Here too, however, something is not working: Chinese activism towards Africa manifests itself on the one hand with low-profile widespread penetration, on the other with large public works, infrastructures, entire cities built from scratch, works that the imperialist era previous one was not even dreamed of. Since it is unthinkable that an imperialist country intervenes with its investments out of altruism, all the theorizations and propaganda assurances about Beijing's "soft colonialism" sound like an admission of poor bargaining power towards individual states. There is no doubt, the works have been built, the resources are exploited and the military has also arrived, but the figures of Chinese commitment across the continent are still relatively low compared to China's GDP. In the 2013 study Chinese penetration in Africa (see literature) clearly shows the type of strategy behind Chinese investments: alongside the development poles there is a sea of investments on a large scale, with relatively small figures but which when added together give the idea of what the "African Silk Road" means to the Chinese. Looking at the map of settlements (investments) and the development guidelines, it is all too easy to see a network of flows that constitute a large and unique Path, whose segments go from the heart of Asia to Africa passing through Eurasia, the Caucasus and from the Middle East. It almost seems as if Beijing has unleashed a pack of "light" capitals which, applying themselves where they find elements of valorisation, constitute a map of investments among which sooner or later local flows will be established which will converge on the ancient ridges. We know that in Egypt the caravans that left from Mongolia found other caravans that reached Timbuktu branching out towards Black Africa and the Atlantic. Once upon a time the journey was dangerous due to raiders, today it is dangerous from a strategic point of view due to the difficulties encountered in crossing large areas where conflicts are underway and which states are unable to control.

The type of expansion that China seems to have adopted is not compatible, on a geo-historical level, with modern imperialism. All great empires arose because they were able to expand from a center protected from attacks from the periphery; they all fell when they were no longer able to control the periphery which represented the limit of the conquered space. Aircraft carrier imperialism must ignore direct control of the territory. The Chinese strategy seems to intelligently adapt to current conditions, in which American power is clearly in quantitative decline but still capable of modifying existing conditions in its favor. However, territorial penetration, even with modern criteria and with the reinforcement of military bases, is not in the military conceptions of our era. Today, despite all the variations, the doctrine is summarized in the phrase: "remote control". And since Beijing knows this very well, we must deduce that its real strategy is another. Which?

It was the World Bank that christened the Afro-Chinese traffic flow Africa's Silk Road. The institute did not take into consideration absolute figures but rather growth percentages. Africa's exports to China had increased from 1999 to 2004 at a rate of 48% per year. And today 27% of African exports are directed towards China (29% towards Europe, 32% towards the United States). It's not just bananas and coffee; Africa exports iron and uranium, copper and diamonds, gold and oil (Angola became China's largest oil supplier with half a million barrels a day in 2006). "Ghost towns" are springing up in Africa just as they did in China. It may be blind, unsuccessful speculation, due to the Chinese surplus which is obviously shared among the large industrial-financial groups, but it may also be the extreme level reached by an invasion that has lasted for forty years.

A figure is circulating on the Internet, attributed to the BBC and taken up by many sources, regarding the "African invasion": Beijing is apparently studying a gigantic emigration plan that would involve the arrival of 300 million Chinese in Africa. The figure is such that it could certainly be said to be false, but the type of viral propagation (with Google over one million occurrences for the phrase "300 million Chinese in Africa" without quotation marks) demonstrates that the topic is felt and that it involves a dissemination of data that is not always innocent, data towards which people are divided as always between blacks and whites, for and against, Guelphs and Ghibellines. Alongside this "news" it is necessary to point out the African emigration to China. On Wikipedia there is a specific entry on the African population in Guangzhou (Canton), which seems to be the one that attracts the most among the industrial districts (300,000). Even in this case, for the conspiracy theorists, it would be a Chineseisation aimed at training cadres to be sent back home.

[Figure 13]

The Relative Decline of the USA

From the graph in fig. 13 shows first of all that the US economy today remains the first in terms of size and, consequently, ability to control. There is a reduction, but this is certainly not as pronounced as the theorists of the decline of hegemony would like us to believe. There are various considerations that can be made by comparing China's GDP with that of the Eurozone countries. The latter, instead of obtaining, as a dividend for their greater economic and monetary integration, an increase in GDP produced, suffer from a modest but continuous decline. China went from representing just over 1% of world output in 1987 to producing 12% in 2017.

[Figure 14]

According to Istat-Eurostat data, the degree of openness to international trade of each country has not shown significant variations in the last ten years. However, the outlets for the overproduction of goods are narrowing. We interrogate the data that the bourgeoisie's study centers make available and easily accessible via the internet. We select world trade from the World Bank database, and at first glance we notice that in the two-year period 2014-2016 exports recorded a much greater contraction than that which occurred in the now historic year of the "Great Recession" (2008-09 marked after decades of unstoppable growth and a pronounced fall in global GDP). Paying more attention we underline that these are exports in nominal value. Dissatisfied, we focus our interest on the data provided by the World Trade Organization. We realize that the reality of things is more nuanced.

This means that the volume of goods traffic remains more or less stable, its monetary expression changes. What causes this overestimation of the nominal value of exports? The fall in raw material prices (oil prices recorded a -47% between July and December 2014, a joint effect of the abundant American supply and the drop in demand from emerging countries) and the revaluation of the dollar, the currency with which measured the variable in question, compared to other currencies (on average by 14%), which occurred between 2014-15 (against the euro it strengthened by 20% in a few months).

[Figure 15]

[Figure 16] Index number of the international price of "commodities" composed of agricultural raw materials, food, energy, metals. Source: www.indexmundi.com

At this point, those who place their faith in the future of capitalism could breathe a sigh of relief. But this would be a trivial consolation, because the patient's medical record still reserves some nasty surprises. Let's carefully browse the FED document entitled "Causes of the global trade slowdown". If we turn our attention exclusively to the real volume of trade we can observe the following: a) the impetuous growth that world trade has experienced in the last forty years has almost stopped, slowing down considerably since 2011 (growth rates orbit around zero percent); b) as a percentage of world GDP, trade remains stationary, continuing to represent just under 30%. The unexpectedly unusual thing, for a bourgeois commentator, is that this phenomenon (the non-growth of the world trade/GDP ratio) was normally associated only with recessionary periods; c) whatever cause one wishes to identify at the origin of the weakness of world trade, the deceleration of China and the structural changes in its economy have changed the perception of the country's role: from that of a saving hope it has gone to that of a problematic sinking boulder the capitalist system (in 2016 it represented 16% of global exports and 12% of imports). The 2008-09 crisis, the last episode of capitalism's senile crisis, represented yet another hysteresis phenomenon for the parameters of capitalism, including world trade.

The two countries with the largest trade surpluses: Germany and China have silently reacted to this disturbing creak. For both, according to laconic declarations by the governments, a reversal of direction is expected to maintain growth: the latter will be based on internal demand rather than foreign demand. After many years of requests from the American side, it therefore seems that the two large exporters have finally given in. We will see if this will really be the case or if it will be a case of a lower absorption capacity on the part of the importing countries. The decisions of policy makers are always the result of a dynamic of the course of world capitalism, not the effect. This also applies to the tariff wars launched by Trump together with the revision of free trade agreements.

[Figure 17] Distribution of currencies used in international trade outside regulated stock exchange circuits. Note: Since two currencies are involved in each transaction, the percentage shares of the individual currencies add up to 200% instead of 100%. Source: Bank for International Settlements.

The growth of China's GDP was faster than that of exports and this led to the reorganization of the development model according to the new needs of capital. In fact, net foreign demand has gone from 8.67 percent of GDP (historic high in 2007) to the current 1.79. For an export-oriented country, such a trend is decidedly negative.

[Figure 18] Division of currencies set aside as reserves in the world. Ho-fung Hung, "The China Boom"

Barry Eichengreen, professor of international economics who became famous for a less than reassuring analysis of the crisis, characterized the centrality of the dollar in the circulation of goods and capital as "exorbitant privilege". We know that the dollar has assumed the role of "universal money" by virtue of the trajectory undertaken by capitalism since the 1930s. The dollar remains the first currency, by a very wide margin, to be used both for every type of international transaction (Fig. 17) and within the basket of countries' foreign exchange reserves (Fig. 18).

The theme of the decline of the United States had become widespread in the early 1970s. The defeat in Vietnam, the end of Bretton Woods, the economic challenge represented by the productive exuberance of West Germany and Japan, led many to consider the hegemony of the USA over.

Among the numerous analyses, those of the so-called Marxists of the "world system" (Wallerstein) stood out, who, starting from the passing of the baton between hegemonic powers, Spain, Holland, England, the United States, reasoned inductively envisaging the opening of a new transition , identifying a potential candidate in Japan, West Germany, the European Union, and for the twenty-first century, China. This opinion has proven so persistent that it has become one of the cornerstones of Trump's presidential campaign. This is, in many respects, a very subjective perception. The current situation in which China is the protagonist has some similarities with that of the Seventies, when the competitors destined for the passing of the baton seemed to be Japan and West Germany. Although a reduction in US power is true, the speed of its decline has been slowed down and delayed thanks to the support of its supposed challengers, first and foremost China. Over the last forty years, China has done nothing but work to perpetuate the centrality of the USA in the imperialist chain, and at the same time rebalance the balance of power in its favour.

[Figure 19] Ho-fung Hung, The China Boom.

The fact that all nations collaborate to ensure that the United States is still the policeman of capital is highlighted in the table in fig. 19. The top five countries holding US treasury bonds are compared in various years in the left column, and in the right column the place they occupy in the ranking of countries hosting large American military bases. In the last box it appears that China and Russia are financing the federal debt without expecting anything in return. Simple philanthropy? Obviously not. According to the thesis contained in Marx's article on British trade, the United States and China have reversed roles: it is not the old imperialist country that finances the growth of its adversary-heir, but it is the heir that finances the survival of the old country imperialist. Instead of a changing of the guard between imperialist countries we have a mechanism for maintaining the status quo. After all, it is capitalism as a system that works in this way.