News from the silk road

Twenty years ago, China joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the euro about-turn in Europe, and the wars of American decline were the political facts which inaugurated a new strategic phase. China, a power emerging from the backward areas that were shared out and developed by imperialism, went so far as to challenge the post-war order and to demand a new partition of the world. This transition, taking place in the twilight - but not yet the fi nal breakdown - of the old order, together with the classic silent accumulation of contradictions which paves the way for every great chemical reaction in history, had to be accurately studied. We needed to pay special attention to the variants and nuances of Chinese foreign policy, the pluralism of its schools of thought, and the way that their orientations adapted and changed over time. In the absence of any serious systematic effort among Western sources, we decided to review some of the main threads of China's vast number of publications on current affairs.
No dominant political current in China has declared the breakdown of the old order as one of its immediate goals. However, on the whole, even those most reluctant to let go of the old dosages of peaceful rise and liberism are, in the end, aligning themselves with the relentless trend of Asian rearmament. It is only a matter of time, they think - counting aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads, and latest generation fighters - before the rearmament race leads to an Asian regional war, like those in Ukraine and Gaza that attest to the crisis in the world order.
Marx and Engels had predicted China's capitalist development and Lenin's analysis advanced the analytic tools necessary to predict its imperialist development in the 20th century. In the post-WWII period, by re-establishing the link between these threads of analysis on the uneven development of capitalism in the imperialist phase, it was possible to situate the Dragon's industrialisation - and, prospectively, its establishment as a power - in the strategic approach of our Leninist party. With China having reached imperialist maturity and a huge Asian proletariat having formed, these strategic factors, destined to disrupt the post-WWII imperialist order, have appeared as predicted.
For the first time, a worldwide upheaval of huge proportions is arising from the Chinese power's imperialist collision. Marxism alone was able to foresee, far in advance, such a dialectic of the "historic collision" and, for two centuries, to maintain a clear focus on the "curious spectacle [...] of China sending disorder into the Western World".This will result in a collision like none ever seen before in the world order of the ruling classes.