US president Joe Biden rushed for ‘nap’ after Vietnam press conference, ‘I’m going to bed’ (Photo: Reuters)
By Nirmal P. Acharya
This week, G-20 leaders met in New Delhi for a two-day summit hosted by India, supposedly renamed Bharat. While, President Biden attended the two-day summit, Chinese President Xi decided to stay away from the Group of 20 summit.
Is China’s top leader not sufficiently motivated and interested in taking this opportunity to meet with his American counterpart?
The whole world is watching with wide eyes the all-out confrontation between China and the US. This great game of the century has the following points: hot war, cognitive war, financial war, and science and technology war.
A hot war is the least likely since it would result in nothing more than mutual destruction, and thus is hardly an option for either side.
In cognitive warfare, the US has an advantage on this front, having cultivated a number of “spiritual Americans” in China in recent decades. These people have been trying to persuade China to adopt the “medicine” from the US, just as the Soviet Union adopted “shock therapy”. But China saw the real effects of American medicine in the Soviet Union, and both its political core and its people are wary of it. The US has little chance of bringing down China by waging a cognitive war and setting off a color revolution.
In the financial war, the US has exclusive currency hegemony and can reap the world by kicking off the dollar tide. However, it is difficult for the US to wage an effective financial war against China because China does not implement the “free convertibility of the renminbi” and has a firewall between the renminbi and the dollar.
In the end, we’re left with the tech fight. Waging a technological war against China may be the only thing that President Trump and President Biden, two longtime rivals, have done in a coordinated, back-to-back manner. At the heart of the tech war is the chip war. However, on August 29, during the visit of US Secretary of Commerce Raimondo, China’s Huawei quietly launched the Mate60 Pro 5G mobile phone to the market, including core components chip and completely independent production. This marks that China has broken through the US blockade in the semiconductor field and the science and technology war between China and the US is over.
I wonder where the game between China and the US will go next. President Biden, who is more than 80 years old, flew non-stop from New Delhi to Vietnam, still to talk about China. However, paradoxically in Vietnam, for the first time in history, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre abruptly ended the press conference by cutting the president off mid-sentence as he rambled about his conversation with Chinese Premier Li Qiang. Even so, the president managed to tell reporters in Hanoi, “I am just following my orders here”. President Biden was not allowed to hold a press conference during the G20 summit in India.
At this point, it is graspable as to why the China’s top leader lacked sufficient motivation and interest in traveling to India to meet his American counterpart.
Yet, I wonder why President Biden didn’t stop by Nepal to catch a sight of MCC. I thought the MCC was all about China, now it seems I may have been wrong. If, President Biden’s number one priority is to contain China and the MCC is oriented towards China, President Biden was bound to visit Nepal and perceive the truth. Except, the president didn’t, which means I might be wrong.
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