The irresistible shift of power to the Asian continent

The visit in recent weeks of Qin Gang, Chancellor of the People's Republic of China to Norway, France, Germany and Sweden is the continuation of the quiet tremor that began in March. Two events are the visible signs of the accelerating shift of global power from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We will soon begin to notice this shift in cartography with the Pacific Ocean appearing at the center of the map, the American continent to the east and Asia to the west.

The Chancellor's tour raised hopes in Europe and pragmatic projections in the press in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Visits to China by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron secured several economic contracts, thus renewing agreements and trade relations between China and the European Union.

In the European press, hopes are still being expressed that China will be able to persuade Russia, i.e. that it will decide to side with NATO. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna considered that "China has an important role to play in convincing Russia to return to full respect for the United Nations Charter", as reported by the International Service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation.

The European press and power group remain in denial: they do not see or do not want to see that, in the Chinese perspective (silent but involved), it is the European Union that also and at the same time convinces NATO to return to full respect for the UN Charter. It should be noted that for Russia to agree to what the European Union is asking for, it must be sure that the organization will also respect this commitment.

Surely such a hope suggests either wishful thinking or a total misunderstanding of what Europe and NATO are doing to "contain" and dismantle Russia and China. Why would China agree to its own destruction? Apparently, it is hard in Europe to accept that there is no turning back from either China or Russia. The humiliation of the Opium War weighs on China's memory like the collapse of the Soviet Union weighs on Russia's memory.

Both states are willing to reconstitute futures interrupted by the destabilization that the West provoked in both cases. They are determined to reconstitute their praxis of life, thinking and living. The first is based on three thousand years of history and strong intellectual legacies (Confucius, Mencius, Laertius) and on the cosmology of "Everything under heaven" (Tianxia). The second, reconstituting the legacies and the current presence of the Orthodox Church, parallel to the relevance that the Catholic and Protestant Church has in Western cosmology.

The state of denial in the face of the irreversible and the inevitable (except for a nuclear conflagration) is such in the Western mentality that it prevents them from understanding that the union of China and Russia is indestructible as long as NATO, driven by the United States, continues the attempt to expand eastward, and Washington continues to negotiate the commercialization of military armaments with East and Southeast Asian states (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines).

For all these reasons, the growing relations between China and the neo-liberal states of the European Union, is manifested in the American press, since these contracts are related, at least in France, with Macron's position promoting the "strategic sovereignty" of the European Union and the possible consolidation of a Third Power between the United States and China. U.S. discomfort is not passive and is related to the growing support for Poland and Ukraine. Poland has in its history an imperial past, and in the present a certain antagonism with the neoliberalism sponsored by France and Germany.



Joe Biden visited Poland and made a "surprise" visit to Ukraine on February 20, two days before the anniversary of the beginning of the Russian operation on Ukrainian territory. The Barcelona journalist Rafael Posch reports, in an article entitled "Poland dangerously takes the initiative", that Dalibor Rohac, a neoconservative author of the American Enterprise Institute, evokes and invokes "the convenience of a new Intermarium, a Polish-Ukrainian union that can contain Russia and definitively disrupt the European competitor", that is to say, the role of Germany and France in the EU.

In such a way that "the largest country of the EU (second in population after Germany) and its first military power would be formed, offering a more than adequate counterweight to the Franco-German tandem". Such a possibility would be convenient for the United States in order to divide and at the same time contain the leadership of Germany and France in the European Union. In other words, the rift between "progressive" neo-liberalism and "conservative" nationalism would grow. Let us remember that Poland has an imperial memory, the former Prussia, like Hungary the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Two strongly nationalist states, the former anti-Russian and the latter pro-Russian.

Thus, the announced visit of Qin Gang to France, Germany and Norway could mark a polarization between European neo-liberalism in collusion with China (France) and right-wing European nationalism (Poland) in collusion with the United States.