What was once called “imperialism” is now “globalization”, and China taking a lead is no reason for celebration by opponents of the US's Empire.

In estimating the significance of geopolitical maneuvering by the USA, EU, China, and Russia, more can be discerned by looking at the organ grinders rather than their monkeys. One might expect this to be axiomatic, but apparently not, and it can be readily dismissed as “conspiracy theory” by journalists, academics and other intellectually banal types; unless it is a Clintonesque conspiracy theory that is of a Russophobic character. I would still contend that when looking at Russia under Putin, it is usually that “what one sees is what one gets,” but not so the other major geopolitical world players. One must look beyond the public figures of the USA, China and EU, to get a fuller picture of what is transpiring on the world stage among these players. For example, while President Trump and the Pentagon brass might take the decades of shadow-boxing between the USA and China seriously, there is another power structure in the USA whose outlook might be at variance with a president and his military chiefs.

For several decades, one has been increasingly hearing the name Goldman Sachs, where one had long heard the names Rothschild and Rockefeller as the apex of international finance. While the Rockefeller banking and oil dynasty played a significant pioneering role in opening up China for global investment, working through think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations the Asia Society, and Trilateral Commission, the latter two being largely founded for the purpose.[1] Goldman Sachs has assumed a pivotal position in promoting China not merely as a player but as a – and perhaps the – leader of the globalization process.

Character of Globalization

Ironically, there are anti-globalists who see China, in its rivalry with the USA for geopolitical dominance, as a bulwark against globalization, to the extent of welcoming a “new Chinese century” as distinct from the “new American century” of the oddly named “neoconservatives”.[2] Some might also see China’s geopolitical expansion as a drawback for Zionism insofar as China aligns itself with Middle Eastern states antagonistic towards Israel, Syria being the primary target of Zionist anathema. Yet again, how seriously should one take China’s shadow-boxing with Israel, while conveniently insinuating itself into the Middle East, when Israel remains a primary supplier of weapons to China, including the latest U.S. technology, and have from the founding of both Israel and the People’s Republic maintained cordial relations regardless of China’s posturing in the Middle East?[3]

Globalization remains what it is whether its primary center is The City of London, New York, or Beijing. The investment bankers Goldman Sachs, Rothschild, Merrill Lynch, Chase, Citigroup, etc., do not owe prime loyalty to any super-power, nation or coalition of nations. Their forefathers were bankers to empires for centuries, then just as conscientiously helped to scuttle the very notion of “empire” when it became economically redundant.[4] If a China-led world economy offers better prospects for international investments than one led by the USA, rivalry over geopolitical interests in the South China Sea, or anywhere else, are not going to play anything other than a nuisance factor for global capital.

China: Leader of Globalization

China sees itself as the leader of globalization, displacing the USA. So does George Soros, and the strategists at Goldman Sachs, et al. It makes no difference to Soros or the Goldman Sachs people where they happen to reside. Their balance sheets are not nationalistic, and nor are they. They have no attachments beyond capital, and that transcendent loyalty forms a new ethnos; what the zoologist Konrad Lorenz called pseudospeciation.[5] Financial correspondent G. Pascal Zachary approvingly observed the emergence of a global elite that can move about the world, as rootless and cosmopolitan as the global corporations they serve.[6]

Anna Bruce-Lockhart, editor for the World Economic Forum (WEF), wrote that President Xi went to the WEF at Davos in January 2017 and “told the Davos meeting that China was ready to assume nothing less than leadership of the world: In his opening address, Xi told a packed conference hall that the Chinese were ‘leaders of our times’. He said his country was ready to make globalization work for everyone, and not just the few. ‘The people of all countries expect nothing less from us, and this is our unshirkable responsibility as leaders of our times.’“[7]

While certain factions influential in U.S. policy, such as the “neocon” lobbyists, and for contrary reasons, the recently galvanized populists, see China as a threat, geopolitically in the case of the former and economically in the case of the latter, there are other interests that, despite being headquartered in Wall Street, do not see China’s incursions in the South China Sea, or the dumping of Chinese goods on the U.S. home market, as threatening their investments. They are excited to proceed with a symbiotic relationship with China, circumventing interference by Pentagon brass or populist politicians, while China is as willing to enter such a relationship with the architects of globalization.

China has taken its cue from Goldman Sachs. Again, there are those who both acclaim or condemn BRICS as rivalling U.S. hegemony and globalization.[8] BRICS is seen as the nucleus for a bloc that can challenge the USA. Be that as it may, it does not present an alternative to globalization. BRICS was conceived by Goldman Sachs. The concept of BRIC was floated within Goldman Sachs in 2001 by Jim O’Neil, in his Global Economics Paper, “Building Better Global Economic BRICs”. He called it the “BRICs dream,” in a 2003 paper, “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050.”[9] BRICS goes well beyond other regional groupings established by international capital, such as the EU, “Pacific Rim,” and “Trilateralism.”

Related article: BRICS Development Bank an Instrument for Globalization

The “new silk road,” not a single transit but a series of development projects linking Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South East Asia, with China as the hub, is being promoted as the hope of the future. One enthusiast, the Australasian lawyer, James O’Neil wrote of the “new silk road” that it will “seriously affect the dollar’s previous dominance and with it the ability of the United States to exercise economic and political influence throughout the world.”[10] Be that as it may, it remains globalization whether under U.S. or Chinese auspices.

One of the primary aspects of U.S. directed globalization is what neocon ideologues such as Ralph Peters[11] and Michael Ledeen[12] laud as being the “toxic” character of America’s corporate culture with its ability to subvert and destroy nations and traditions that are a hindrance.[13] China has succumbed to this corporate monoculture, which is concomitant with a global economy. The culture that is inherent in globalization is not going to be changed by China. The character of globalization needs “culture” to be a marketing strategy. China has not transcended this, and will not. Globalization under Chinese auspices rather than American, will still convey the cultural contaminants of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and MTV. We will not be reaching for new heights of culture motivated by Confucius. Corporate global culture proceeds under economic globalization, regardless of the nation nominally at the head. New generations of Chinese are adopting the styles, mannerisms and consumer trends of their American and European counterparts.

Oligarchy remains

Moreover, the oligarchic interests will remain the same. Chinese leadership of globalization is not going to dislodge the present oligarchy, but expand its scope. The “One Belt, One Road” vision is being directed by oligarchs in conjunction with Chinese interests. Again, the relationship is symbiotic. The Silk Road Finance Corporation states of its purpose:

We believe that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is an opportunity for greater cooperation between Chinese and international companies and markets. SRFC was created specifically to access investment opportunities opened up by the Belt and Road Initiative. … We are global in outlook, international in culture, and rooted in China. Our senior team is made up of leading financial industry veterans and international advisors with significant banking and investing experience.[14]

The whole business is an axis between the Chinese state and international finance. Of added interest is that it subverts the Eurasian Economic Union by encompassing Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and encircles Russia. The EEU is anathema to the globalists.[15] From a geopolitical perspective the real victim seems to be Russia, not the USA. However, Putin has expressed interest in being part of the “New Silk Road,” and in 2015 Russia and China talked of integrating the EEU with the “New Silk Road.”[16] Yet, so far Russia has drawn the short straw continually in its relations with China as part of the “Eurasian” vision,[17] with China using Russia’s “Eurasian” initiatives to displace or rival Russian influence in Central Asia and Mongolia. Russia should strive to expand the EEU as the nucleus of a real alternative geopolitical bloc independent of both Washington and Beijing. The question arises however as to whether Putin really does see great potential opportunities for Russia in the “New Silk Road.”[18] Oligarchy sees the possibility of Russia being subsumed by the new vision, but there is a dichotomy that has yet to be resolved; eliminating what is called Russia’s “reactionary” economic policies. In an informative article, journalist Wade Shepard writes from Asia:

Russia has always maintained a rather inconsistent position when it comes to the development of the New Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road initiative. On the one hand, Russia participates, profiting from customs duties and the additional stimulus of new economic horizons—two of the three operational overland corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt pass through Russian terrain, often utilizing Russian-run or invested dry ports and logistics zones. On the other hand, Russia maintains policies that run counter to the “win-win” nature of Silk Road development, and have partially resisted China’s plan to lay a network of new economic corridors through Central Asia and Eastern Europe—regions they still perceive as their backyard.[19]

The oligarchs see a prize that they have sought since the earliest days of Bolshevism: the Russian Far East.[20] China is the means by which the region can be opened up, occupied and incorporated into the “One Belt, One Road.” Obviously, Americans are no use for the purpose; Chinese are. So far from Sino-Russian accord being seen as a threat to “the West” or the USA, by which is meant the financial interests in control, under Chinese leadership it is seen as the means by which Russia can be brought into the globalist fold, regardless of “American” interests, which are not intrinsic to the investment opportunities of Gold Sachs, et al. The Russian Far East, like Tibet, has vast resources that China covets:

As for the Far East of Russia, this region is well provided not only with many types of ‘basic’ minerals, but also by a number of those that provide the scientific and technological revolution. The Far East of Russia has a high resource potential of rare, including rare-earth elements, which must be studied to create favorable investment conditions for the extraction and processing of their ores.[21]

As in Tibet, one can expect Chinese migration—“labor resources”—in the name of mutual economic development:

If earlier China went to mineral-rich countries and regions exclusively for raw materials, now it brings its technology and equipment (and, if possible, labor resources) to resource projects.[22]

Certainly, China’s occupation of Tibet has proven very profitable for the international corporations.[23] International oligarchy can use China like the Sassoons and Oppenheimers used Britain to secure their opium profits and their mining profits in China and Transvaal respectively. What was once called “imperialism” is now called “globalization” and is heralded as something uniquely utopian.

Included among the resources of the Russian Far East is gold. This year moves were initiated for China to start mining gold and other minerals in the Magadan Region, “as part of the one Belt, One Road strategy.”[24] The world’s largest gold miner, Barrick Gold, entered into an agreement with China’s largest gold miner, Shandong Gold.[25] How such corporate alliances will play out with the “One Belt, One Road” should soon become evident. As noted below, John L. Thornton, head of Barrick, is also head of the Silk Road Finance Corporation.

Barrick Gold has numerous allegations of unethical conduct against it, and has been convicted of chemical dumping, among other concerns.[26] Partnership with China in a belt of exploitation that spans much of the world would therefore seem an idyllic match, albeit one that renders China’s claims at Davos to be wanting to lead a more inclusive and “humane” form of globalization so much cynical rhetoric that competes in the ballyhoo stakes with the sales pitches that have been used by Wall Street “ethical corporations.”

Who’s Behind the Silk Road Finance Corporation?

The chairman of the board of the Silk Road Finance Corporation is John L. Thornton, executive chairman of the above-named Barrick Gold Corporation, a member of the board of Ford Motor Company, non-executive chairman of Pinebridge Investments, and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has also served on the boards of China Unicom, HSBC, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Intel and News Corporation. From 1980 to 2003, he was at Goldman Sachs, which included time as its Asia chairman and company president. “He was honored with the Friendship Award of China in 2008, the highest honor accorded to a non-Chinese citizen. In 2007, he was named by Institutional Investor as one of 40 individuals who had the greatest influence in shaping global financial markets over the previous 40 years.”[27]

“International advisor” Javier Solana is a former Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, Secretary General of NATO, and formerly Spain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He is presently head of ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics. This is a globalist think tank that is partnered with the Brookings Institute, among others.[28] Solana is a Distinguished Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a board member of the globalist think tanks, International Crisis Group (ICG) and the European Council on Foreign Relations. The trustees of the ICG include former NATO commander Wesley Clark, and George Soros and his son Alexander.[29]

Shan Li is a vice chairman of the Silk Road Planning Research Center and of the Chinese Financial Association of Hong Kong. He has been Chief International Business Advisor of the China Development Bank, Vice Chairman of UBS Investment Bank Asia, CEO of Bank of China International Holdings, Chief China Economist at Goldman Sachs, and is co-founder of SouFun, China’s leading real estate internet portal.[30]

Peter Wheeler, Silk Road corporation partner; from 1985 to 2001 he worked for Goldman Sachs, and became a partner in 1994, leading the establishment of the firm’s investment banking business in Asia. “He led the Goldman Sachs team on many of the first wave of cross-border capital markets transactions for Chinese SOEs.”[31]

Joe Xiang, partner, was head of China Global Special Opportunities Group for JPMorgan, head of Investment Banking China, and of Real Estate Finance China for the Royal Bank of Scotland, and vice president and director of GE Capital Structured Finance Group.[32]

Carman Wong, managing director of the New Silk Road Corporation, was the chief operating officer, Investment Banking, for Nomura Asia ex Japan/Lehman Brothers Asia, previously with Goldman Sachs in New York, and in Hong Kong, chief of staff for Asia Pacific Investment Banking.[33]

Jianyong Zhang, managing director, was with Morgan Stanley and Citibank.[34]

Given that the head of the Corporation, John Thornton, is also head of the Brookings Institute, it is difficult to see how the New Silk Road offers any real alternative to the type of globalization that has proceeded under U.S. auspices, other than to encircle Russia. Key funding for the institute is provided Thornton, by media mogul and ultra-Zionist Haim Saban; Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, AT & T, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Visa USA, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, American Express Foundation, Bank of America Foundation, Boeing, Lockheed, Microsoft, Citigroup foundation, Dow Chemical, Merrill Lynch, and many others.[35] In 2006 Thornton founded the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.[36]

Globalization proceeding under the auspices of China is no reason for celebration by opponents of the global oligarchy, on the assumption that it is a “defeat for the USA.” The same driving forces of globalization will not only remain, but under “One Road, One Belt,” but will be vastly expanded and consolidated. It is the culmination, not the repudiation, of a process that was initiated decades ago by the Rockefeller dynasty through the Asia Society and the Trilateral Commission, and is being brought to fruition by Goldman Sachs, Barrick, and many others.

References

[1] K. R. Bolton, Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific: Emerging Conflicts, New Alliances (London, 2013), pp. 21-61.

[2] The now defunct neocon think tank, The Project for a New Amercian Century, was brazen in its aims of Amercian global hegemony. See: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm.

[3] Bolton, “Chinese TV series lauds Israel: The Alliance between China and Zionism,” Foreign Policy Journal, August 18, 2010, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/08/18/chinese-tv-series-lauds-israel-the-alliance-between-china-and-zionism/.

For recent developments see: “3rd Annual Israel-China Conference,” The Institute for National Security Studies, June 29, 2017; http://www.inss.org.il/event/3rd-annual-israel-china-conference/ .

[4] Bolton, Babel Inc. (London, 2013), pp. 41-77: “Decolonization as a prelude to globalization.”

[5] Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (New York, 1974), pp. 69-70.

[6] G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (Allen & Unwin, 2000).

[7] K. R. Bolton, “Will China Assume the Leadership of Globalization?”, Foreign Policy Journal, April 7, 2017; https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2017/04/07/will-china-assume-the-leadership-of-globalization/

[8] James O’Neil, “One Belt, One Road: The World’s Great infrastructure Project – Opportunities and Challenges for Australia, New Dawn, Melbourne, July-August 2017, pp. 19-24.

[9] K. R. Bolton, “BRICS Development Bank an Instrument for Globalization”, Foreign Policy Journal, July 14, 2015; https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2015/07/14/brics-development-bank-an-instrument-for-globalization/

[10] James O’Neil, op. cit., 21.

[11] R. Peters, “Constant Conflict,” Parameters, U.S. Army War College, Summer 1997.

[12] M. Ledeen, “Dishonorable congressman,” National Review, September 10, 2003.

[13] Bolton, The Decline and Fall of Civilisations (London 2017), 331-335, “Cultural Pathology as Geopolitical strategy.”

[14] “About Us,” Silk Road Finance Corporation, http://www.silkroad-finance.com/en/about/

[15] “Clinton calls Eurasian Integration an Effort to ‘Re-Sovietize’”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 7, 2012; https://www.rferl.org/a/clinton-calls-eurasian-integration-effort-to-resovietize/24791921.html

[16] “New Silk Road: What to Expect from Russia’s Involvement in China’s Megaproject,” Sputnik News, May 15, 2017; https://sputniknews.com/business/201705151053621553-china-russia-silk-road/

[17] Bolton, Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, op. cit., passim.

[18] Kenneth Rapoza, “China’s Silk Road Shows that Putin needs Xi Way more than Trump,” Forbes, May 16, 2017; https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/05/16/chinas-silk-road-project-shows-putin-needs-xi-way-more-than-trump/#7f2d736f7b79

[19] Wade Shepard, “Russia Is In A Unique Position To Either Make Or Break The New Silk Road,” Forbes, March 13, 2017; https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/03/13/russia-the-lynchpin-or-bottleneck-of-the-new-silk-road/#f79f67e763be

[20] “American Contract with Soviet Russia,” New York Times, October 26, 1920. See: Richard B. Spence, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905-1925 (Trine Day, 2017), p. 208.

[21] “Silk Road, New Incentives for the Mining Sector,” August 16, 2017; EastRussia, https://www.eastrussia.ru/en/material/shelkovyy-put-novye-stimuly-dlya-gornorudnogo-sektora/

[22] Ibid.

[23] Bolton, “The Tragedy of Tibet: A Saga of Betrayal, Colonization, and Exploitation,” Foreign Policy Journal, June 25, 2010; https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/06/25/the-tragedy-of-tibet-a-saga-of-betrayal-colonization-and-exploitation/

[24] “China Moves to Mine Gold in Russia’s Far East,” Sputnik International, July 7, 2017; https://sputniknews.com/business/201707071055331919-china-russia-gold-mining/

[25] “Barrick Announces Strategic Agreement with Shandong Gold,” Barrick, April 6, 2017; http://www.barrick.com/investors/news/news-details/2017/Barrick-Announces-Strategic-Cooperation-Agreement-with-Shandong-Gold/default.aspx

[26] “Barrick Gold Corporation Abuse,” https://silawatsongvasin.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/barrick-gold-corporation-abuse/

[27] “Our Team,” Silk Road Finance Corp., http://www.silkroad-finance.com/en/our-team/

[28] ESADE, “About,” http://www.esadegeo.com/about

[29] ICG, “Trustees,” https://www.crisisgroup.org/who-we-are/board

[30] “Our Team,” Silk Road Finance Corp., op. cit.

[31] “Our Team,” Silk Road Finance Corp., ibid.

[32] “Our Team,” Silk Road Finance Corp., ibid.

[33] “Our Team,” Silk Road Finance Corp., ibid.

[34] “Our Team,” Silk Road Finance Corp., ibid.

[35] Source Watch, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Brookings_Institution

[36] John L. Thornton China Center, https://www.brookings.edu/center/john-l-thornton-china-center/