Is there any area, apart from the rates of obesity and debt, in which America’s politicians can lecture the world with confidence?

23 March 2021 • 1:30pm
Dominic Green

China is no longer accepting America’s trash. Not in Alaska last week, when China’s foreign minister Wang Yi gave Secretary of State Antony Blinken an epic finger-wagging for trash-talking China before the cameras. And not on China’s doorstep, either.

For years, America shipped mountains of paper and plastic waste to China. Manufactured on the cheap by outsourced factories, bought on credit with a dollar underpinned by China’s bond-buying, America’s waste was resold to China, where it was recycled into more tat for export.

This cycle was environmentally virtuous in the cosmetic way that Americans take their virtue. It was also economically symbolic, further gratifying them, for there can be no doubt who’s the boss when it’s the rich man in his castle or the binman at his gate. But America isn't as rich as it was, and China, no longer so poor, isn’t taking America’s rubbish.

In 2017, the World Bank recently announced, China’s GDP outstripped that of the United States, when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP). In the same year, China declined to take further deliveries of solid waste recycling from abroad. The Chinese government did not emphasise that its GDP had eclipsed that of America in PPP: in 2017 as now, it described China as a developing economy.

It certainly is. In 2020, the year that Covid-19 shut down the West while Asia stayed open for business, China was the only major economy to record positive growth. This means that China is closing the gap on America faster than expected in the other measure of relative wealth, GDP per capita.

Before the pandemic, most Western analysts expected China to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in 2030. The Centre for Economics and Business Research now brings that date forward to 2028. Nomura Holdings, using the IMF’s data, sees a “high likelihood that 2026 will be the milestone at which China re-emerges as the world’s largest economy”.

“The US does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” Wang Yi told Antony Blinken last week. Blinken’s jaw almost dropped at Wang Yi’s impertinence. But the world knows that time, money, geography, and military power are all on Wang’s side.

It was, of course, absurd of Wang Yi to equate American democracy with what he calls China’s “people’s democracy”, or Black Lives Matter with the repression of the Uighurs. But is there any area, apart from the rates of obesity and debt, in which America’s politicians can lecture the world with well-founded confidence, as opposed to late-imperial delusion?

Not in the Middle East, where arrogance and myopia have proven that the Americans, who learnt nothing in Vietnam, are determined to still learn nothing.

Not in western Europe, where a Germany that the State Department insists is its closest European ally has pursued energy deals with Russia and investment deals with China.

Not in Africa, which American strategists leave to special forces and aid workers while China has established an extractive infrastructure and a commanding position in the continent with the fastest-growing economy in the world.

Not in Asia, where China’s fleet of battle-force ships outnumbered that of the US around the time China refused to accept more of America’s rubbish. In 2020 GDP in the region overtook that of the rest of the world.

Certainly not on China’s doorstep in the South China Sea. In guaranteeing the defence of an indefensible Taiwan, the risks a sudden and disastrous unmasking of the kind that Britain and France suffered at Suez in 1956.

Meanwhile America’s trash backs up just like the paperwork in its inefficient ministries and the bills in the inefficient Congress. Many Americans would happily see their democratic representatives slide into a giant landfill along with their empty plastic bottles.

China has outsmarted, outworked and outsold an America whose people, once notorious for their energy, have grown steadily more ill-educated, indebted, idle, and unproductive. When Joe Biden says “America is back”, he’s talking rubbish.