The China Spectre

Washington seems to be fixated about Beijing. The G-20 leaders’ summit in Hangzhou, China and the ASEAN and East Asia summits in Vientiane, Laos were just two more occasions to advance America’s anti-China “Pivot to Asia” strategy.

The G-20, which emerged as a major global economic forum in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008, was supposed to bring about a coordination of the economic policies of a group of countries whose economies together account for more than four-fifths of world gross domestic product, aimed at promoting global economic growth and guarding against the rise of protectionism. Distressfully, even after eight years, it has achieved neither of these two aims. The communiqué issued at the end of the Hangzhou G-20 summit tried to give the impression that the G-20 leaders had committed themselves to “usher(ing) in a new era of global growth,” but clearly, Washington, Brussels and Tokyo were more concerned about cutting China’s steel industry down to size. The communiqué however did not name China; it did nevertheless talk of global “excess capacity in steel” caused by “subsidies and other types of support from government or government-sponsored institutions” that “cause market distortions and contribute” to such problems. And, it announced the “formation of a Global Forum on steel excess capacity, to be facilitated by the OECD.”