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US-China relations
OpinionLetters

Letters | How China is beating the US in geopolitical board game

  • China has been slowly but surely manoeuvring its pieces into position like on a weiqi board, using trade, infrastructure, key resources and the Belt and Road Initiative to quietly eat into what the Western world considered its playground

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A maglev game of Go (weiqi) at the 5th Exhibition of International Works of Arts and Sciences in Beijing in November 2019. Weiqi, a Chinese game of territorial possession, surely informs Beijing’s geopolitical strategy. Photo: Xinhua
Letters
With Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit topping the charts, perhaps it is time to watch The Rise of Phoenixes, which showcases weiqi. It is often said that the great strategy game in the West is chess, while in China it is weiqi (or Go). This is also seen in the games political leaders play, as the world gets a front-row view of these two games in play: the United States prefers the modus operandi of changing foreign rulers, and China is more focused, like a weiqi player, on gaining more territory by surrounding it.
In past decades, the US has targeted nations in Africa, eastern Europe and the Middle East with a range of military actions, sanctions and interference in elections. But in the last 10 years, China has been manoeuvring its pieces into position like on a weiqi board, slowly but surely using trade, infrastructure, key resources and the Belt and Road Initiative to quietly eat into what the Western world considered its playground.
Donald Trump’s trade war with China and his mercurial personality played right into Xi Jinping’s steady hands. Chinese leaders also collected a windfall when free speech, as practised in the unregulated world of social media in Western democracies, caused a mess, and the mixed messages sent by populist leaders meant more social and economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Victory in this round goes to Xi. China’s economy recovered from the pandemic first in 2020, with all its pieces in place, and a record trade surplus.

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China’s freight trains to Europe hit all-time high amid coronavirus crisis in 2020

China’s freight trains to Europe hit all-time high amid coronavirus crisis in 2020

For the rest of this decade, the West is waking up and realising that it is completely surrounded by China’s pieces in all aspects with regard to the new drivers of future growth – think Huawei.

Technology, supply chains, trade routes and new markets will be the new arenas of the new war.

The Joe Biden administration will doubtless continue to lead the pushback against China, and his advisers would do well to adopt some weiqi moves. Frankly, if this means more investment in Africa, new manufacturing capacity in the US and a higher standard of living all round, why not?

This form of competition may bring the whole world into a better cycle of growth with opportunities all round. Or could they succeed in decoupling the US from China, with the world dividing into two blocs, the US and its allies, including India, versus China leading the emerging markets of Asia, Africa and Russia?

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