The Post-Partisan Emporium

  China Has Achieved Escape Velocity: It Is Now Unstoppable PEPE ESCOBAR The 21 st  century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century. The four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China that took place last week in Beijing,  designing an economic road map all the way to 2029,  was a stunning affair in more ways than one. Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive. And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations. Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric,  multi-nodal  world (italics mine). The pro...

  Russia, SCO, BRICS: The Normalization of Afghanistan PEPE ESCOBAR   The whole Russia-Taliban affair involves a humongous package – encompassing oil, gas, minerals and loads of rail connectivity. This past Sunday in Doha, I had a meeting with three high-level representatives of the Taliban Political Office in Qatar, including a founding member of the body (in 2012) and a key official of the previous Taliban government of 1996-2001. By mutual consent, their names should not be made public. The cordial meeting was brokered by Professor Sultan Barakat, who teaches at the College of Public Policy at Hamad bin Khalifa University – set in an outstanding, immaculate campus outside of Doha which attracts students from across the Global South. Prof. Barakat is one of those very few – discreet – players who knows everything that matters in West Asia, and in his case, also in the intersection of Central and South Asia. With my three Taliban interlocutors, we talked extensively about the...

  What The Hell is Happening in Africa? THE CORBETT REPORT by James Corbett Six years ago, I wrote " The Secret Battle for Africa ." In that editorial, I noted the extent of US Special Forces penetration into Africa and examined the geopolitical reality underlying this covert invasion: Even a cursory review of the evidence shows that one important reason the US is deploying so many commandos to Africa in the first place is precisely to counter Chinese interests on the continent. And, as I pointed out at the time, China was playing its own part in this neo-colonial struggle for influence in Africa. Rather than seeking a military footprint on the continent, however, China has been engaged in "checkbook diplomacy," reinvesting its capital from the economic boom of recent decades in infrastructure projects and other  Belt and Road  initiatives in Africa. Well, here we are six years later. How has this new scramble for influence on the African continent played out so far...