Felix Stalder on Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:14:39 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Is the US declining too fast? |
Over the summer, I read a fantastic book by Marc Leonard called "What does China think?" [1] which is a survey of the debates within and across Chinese think thanks. If you are interested in long-term political strategies (or at least, competing theories of such strategies) by the Chinese, read this book. It also contains the most surprising interpretation of the crack-down on the Tiananmen square I've ever read (basically, some Chinese scholars view it not just as a pro-democracy movement, but also, and crucially, as an anti-neoliberal reform protest. Thus, the crackdown was not the works of some backwards Stalinists, but of the dominant faction of the reformers bent on putting economic privatization above all else). Anyway, one of the questions that agitates many of the scholars is whether the US is declining too fast, meaning before China is powerful enough to take over the show. Looking at the US these days, one cannot but wonder if the answer might not be yes (even if you don't wish China to take over instead). On the one hand, there are very dramatic convulsions at the core of the economic system. It doesn't get any bigger than one of the major investment banks filing for bankruptcy. One the other hand, the current presidential campaigns seems to be on auto-pilot, entirely preoccupied with the most superficial of "culture wars". Felix [1] http://www.ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_mark_leonard_what_does_china_think/ --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org