Page 47 - AEI Insights Vol. 7 2021

AEI-Insights: An International Journal of Asia-Europe Relations
ISSN: 2289-800X, Vol. 7, Issue 1, January 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37353/aei-insights.vol7.issue1.4

Opinion
UNAVOIDABILITY OF SINO-AMERICAN RIFT: HISTORY OF

STRATEGIC DECOUPLING

Anis H Bajrektarevic

International Law & Global Political Studies, Vienna, Austria
anis@corpsdiplomatique.cd

Abstract
Does our history only appear overheated, while it is essentially calmly predetermined? Is it
directional or conceivable, dialectic and eclectic or cyclical, and therefore cynical? Surely, our
history warns (no matter if the Past is seen as a destination or resource). Does it also provide
for a hope? Hence, what is in front of us: destiny or future?

Theory loves to teach us that extensive debates on what kind of economic system is most
conductive to human wellbeing is what consumed most of our civilizational vertical. However,
our history has a different say: It seems that the manipulation of the global political economy
(and usage of fear as the currency of control) – far more than the introduction of ideologies –
is the dominant and arguably more durable way that human elites usually conspired to build or
break civilizations, as planned projects.
Keywords: US, China, decoupling, geopolitics, technology, money, freedoms, multilateralism

Introduction
Americans performed three very different policies on the People’s Republic: From a total
negation (and the Mao-time mutual annihilation assurances), to Nixon’s sudden cohabitation.
Finally, a Copernican-turn: the US spotted no real ideological differences between them and
the post-Deng China. This signalled a ‘new opening’: West imagined China’s coastal areas as
its own industrial suburbia. Soon after, both countries easily agreed on interdependence (in this
marriage of convenience): Americans pleased their corporate (machine and tech) sector and
unrestrained its greed, while Chinese in return offered a cheap labour, no environmental
considerations and submissiveness in imitation. Both spiced it by nearly religious approach to
trade.
However, for each of the two this was far more than economy, it was a policy – Washington
read it as interdependence for transformative containment and Beijing sow it as
interdependence for a (global) penetration. In the meantime, Chinese acquired more
sophisticated technology, and the American Big tech sophisticated itself in digital
authoritarianism – ‘technological monoculture’ met the political one.

But now with a tidal wave of Covid-19, the honeymoon is over.
(These days, many argue that our C-19 response is a planetary fiasco, whose size is yet to
surface with its mounting disproportionate and enduring secondary effects, causing tremendous

47