5 Stages of Grief: How America Is Handling China’s Rise

Whenever people face a huge loss in life — like a sudden divorce or death of a family member — they go through five stages of grief. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. The U.S. is about to lose its top spot as the biggest economy and is, in a textbook manner, going through the same stages.

Denial: Some people like Kishore Mahbubani predicted twenty years ago that China will eventually be the leading economic powerhouse. But Americans chose denial and laughed at the concept. The popular beliefs behind the denials were:

  • China’s economy will collapse any moment now!
  • China will eventually become just like the West and then we will have nothing to worry about.
  • China is a totalitarian, communist country. They don’t understand capitalism or free market, and thus will never be rich.
  • China can never innovate. Chinese workers are just slaves and bots.
  • China makes only crappy products and thus can never compete with western brands.
  • As soon as Chinese people travel to the West and see how glorious the West is, they will go back to China and overthrow the tyrannical and corrupt communist government.
  • China’s GDP numbers and other stats are fake!
  • China’s patents and scientific publications are of low quality.
  • Chinese products will never succeed outside China.
  • We can always nuke China and maintain our hegemony.
  • COVID19 will surely bring China down. And all the countries will start decoupling from China.

Alas, none of those happened. China miraculously kept advancing. Without a single recession in forty years, the engine of China kept roaring. China’s communist party grew the GDP 50x in forty years, lifted 800 million people out of poverty, created the world’s largest middle class, fostered innovative companies, and built a vibrant and all-around successful society. (See my blog on China’s global leadership).

Anger: After denying reality for a while, people become angry. They feel like victims and start blaming others. That’s exactly what’s been happening, especially since Trump came to office. The anger is reflected in following ways:

  • China stole America’s jobs.
  • China stole intellectual property from the U.S. (after all, Chinese can’t innovate, remember?)
  • Chinese are spies and hackers.
  • China doesn’t buy anything from us.
  • China doesn’t treat U.S. corporations fairly. China is too protectionist.
  • China subsidizes its corporations. Not fair!
  • China made the coronavirus in the Wuhan lab. China tricked us into a lock down.
  • China bad, China bad, China bad!

Bargaining: This is the hopeful phase. It’s like saying after the divorce, “Maybe I can get my wife back.” This phase is not always benign; it can involve a lot of ruthless scheming as seen in the last four years:

  • If we can just force China to buy more from us, we can close the trade deficit and make America great again.
  • Tariffs will cripple China and also force American companies to bring manufacturing jobs back.
  • If we just arrest Huawei’s CFO and kill the company with sanctions, China will bend its knee.
  • Let’s go on an all-out attack on every successful Chinese company. That should do the trick!
  • Let’s use Hong Kong and Uyghur separatists to disrupt China. How about using India and Taiwan to start a war?

None of these seem to be working, although military conflicts are possible (with devastating impact on global economy). America’s tech war will only spur more Chinese innovation and self-reliance.

Depression and Acceptance: We are not here yet. The U.S. is still trying hard to stop China, rather than planning for an inevitable post-American era, which will start within five years. The geopolitically smart strategy will be to skip the stage of depression and go to acceptance. That will translate to embracing multilateralism and partnering with China, EU and Russia to forge a multi-polar world order for the 21st century. However, with so much Sinophoba and hubris in the U.S., no politician or think tank will dare propose such a solution. So … get ready for American depression.

Source: World Affairs

13 Comments
  1. Séamus Ó Néill says

    “The geopolitically smart strategy will be to skip the stage of depression and go to acceptance. That will translate to embracing multilateralism and partnering with China, EU and Russia to forge a multi-polar world order for the 21st century.” By this you imply that MIC, and the top !% , the one’s that are bleeding America dry, care about America , they don’t….. nobody could name me 10 honest American politicians with enough intelligence, honesty and integrity that could stop America in it’s inevitable collapse into insignificance. America has nothing going for it, it’s a marauding parasitical bully, it’s definitely not agreement friendly and its conceited arrogance sealed its fate a long time ago. Just let it die and get it over with !

    1. David says

      Bernie Sanders is one but I’d be hard pressed to come up with another nine.

      1. Ron says

        Ron Paul, Rand Paul however their libertarian economic views would be a disaster.

        1. Ron says

          Well…3 years later and we can conclude there is NO Honest politician in the USA period. They are ALL for genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and chanting Go Isra-hell.

  2. yuri says

    this kubler ross paradigm has been found to be empirically false…USA has become a lunatic asylum masquerading as a country—the population childish, narcissistic shallow
    “amerikans are the living refutation of the cartesian cogito ergo sum. amerikans are yet they do not think. the amerikan mind puerile primitive lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to any standardization”. Julius Evola

  3. mijj says

    just for fun, i’m hoping China will “accidentally” sink a USA rust bucket.

  4. Bruce Wee says

    World Affairs site is no longer accessible.

    Anyone knows if there is a mirror or backup site?

  5. ken says

    Exactly how can China ‘steal’ US jobs? How can they be accused of ‘stealing’ when the American corporations and a complicit US government voluntarily gave them Americas manufacturing. They willingly built brand new state of the art factories, hired and trained millions of Chinese peasants that now are skilled workers.

    Why do Americans give these traitorous corporations a pass? If anyone ‘stole’ the jobs it was them. They now are reaping large profits and even larger bonuses while Americans are homeless and out of work. Yet, Americans do nothing,,, say nothing while blaming the Chinese.

    Then Americans buy the Chinese manufactured goods at the same prices had these goods been manufactured in the USA! Most all of the stimulus monies are going into the pockets of these corporations as people continue to buy foreign made goods. Yet,,, they blame the Chinese.

    I remember trying to get people to stop buying the imported stuff when it started to appear on the shelves. Americans would not pay $5 more to keep the manufacturing in America,,, Nope,,, they now blame China.

    I remember when the TV manufacturer Emerson made a deal with the Union and within a few months moved their production to Mexico. Today Americans buy $50,000 trucks made in Mexico at Mexican wages… can you imagine the profits!,,, the bonuses!

    Yet,,, Americans blame the Mexicans for stealing their jobs.

    Anyone notice a trend here?

    1. Ron says

      This notion the USA built Chinese manufacturing up is another lie. The USA was sanctioning China because of the Tiananmen Square failed CIA/MI6 regime change fiasco in 1989 right up to 2001 when the USA agreed to allow China into the WTO because it wanted in on the profits. Now, the USA isn’t gonna tell the World how it’s sanctioning China because of “democracy” on the one hand while building up it’s manufacturing on the other hand is it. Truth is, China got investment and expertise from Chinese diaspora (Hong Kong, Taiwan etc..), South East Asia, Korea and Japan beginning in the 1980’s. The Europeans (i.e. Germans, French), still Sovereign at the time, got in on the wage arbitrage in the early 1990’s and the USA was last major economy to enter the game. To say America built up China is another one of those propaganda lies repeated as truth which only work for the uninformed and propagandized (most USA citizens).

  6. Joe_Below says

    America is handling it by building their industry from the ground up.

  7. Real news says

    All media is pushing one world government .. wake up everyone all the obig countries are in on it … whatever you read is BS… one world government is what this whole Covid is all about .. COVID 19 meaning: CO = Corona (crown), V = virus, ID = Identification, 19 = AI (Artificial Intelligence) 1 is A the first letter of the alphabet, and 9 is I the 9th letter of the alphabet..

    1. Ron says

      International Finance Capital is the NWO. All Central Banks are controlled by this group. International Bank of Settlements, Financial Stability Board, World Economic Forum, City of London etc…are just tentacles of IFC. It’s the creators of this “unbacked” toilet paper money that controls everything.

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