Dear Director, come, I saw it and missed it. Having hastily shelved the global failure of Rome’s bid for Expo 2030, “In Search of the Lost Dragon” is now being broadcast in the corridors of power: the protagonists are King Sergius and Super Giorgia, who compete to go to China to pay homage supreme leader Xi Jinping. After the «Contiano» period of great passion for Beijing, in recent times the frost has in fact descended between Italy and China and, among our institutions, the discussion has begun about who should communicate Italy’s withdrawal from the economic partnership agreement ” the Silk Road”. Now, however, the race for the Chinese giant has resumed with great vigor. But what triggered this? The customs clearance of American President Joe Biden who met with Xi Jinping in San Francisco. If he did that, we can find him too, it was the recovery in Italy. Claudio Pagliara explains this very well in his intriguing volume «The Perfect Storm» published by Piemme. The author has an intimate knowledge of China and the US, having worked as a Rai correspondent, first in Beijing and then in Washington. The book initially offers a collection of the author’s anecdotes and encounters and then turns into a careful and documented analysis of the current panorama of Chinese society and politics. We thus went from the brothels of Dongguan – once intended for clients and party officials who stopped by to inspect factories or participate in fairs, but closed in the moralizing era of Xi and which have now become luxury suites – to the Chinese education system with directors who expel “not “compatible” students and other interesting details, such as a girl’s diary with a padlock, found at school and considered by the teacher as a threat to authority and the established order.
But it is about the delicate relations with Taiwan that the author makes his specialized analysis: «The Third World War has never been so close. Putin’s Russia dealt the first blow to the world order by invading sovereign Ukraine. Xi Jinping’s China threatens to open the second front, perhaps even more important, trying to annex Taiwan through the use of force.” It would be the perfect storm, but: “It can still be avoided. As long as the West does not divide itself, in its statements to press, the North American Head of State did not hesitate to once again define Xi as a “dictator”, and it is still unknown whether it was another gaffe or not. And to think that in unsuspecting times, several years ago, they even played basketball together. This last meeting sealed a truce that both wanted. Biden already has two wars going on and does not want new tensions. Xi, the new Mao, must focus on his economy and does not want the presidential elections in Taiwan, in January 2024, get out of control. For Francesco Scisci, a renowned sinologist, the truce between the two world powers should last until the end of the war in Gaza, so it is assumed that it will be around March 2024, after the New Year Chinese Lunar: At that moment, it will be known whether relations will improve, worsen or remain frozen in a kind of new rivalry that neither country wants to call a “cold war”.
For the United States, among other things, the Californian summit offered the opportunity to highlight, from an entirely internal perspective, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, who is just awaiting the green light to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate for the 2024 presidential elections. Furthermore, the summit also managed to temporarily clean up the image of the host city, which had degraded under the left-wing government with immigrants, homeless people and drug addicts. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that San Francisco was the Chinese president’s first visit to the United States since 2017. Other results obtained: the agreement to contain the flow of Fentanyl, the synthetic drug that is devastating the United States from Chinese exports of chemical precursors, and the invitation of two distinguished guests to Beijing in 2024, such as Janet Yellen and Lloyd Austin, respectively the American Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Defense. But at the end of 2024, when we vote in the USA, who will our Giorgia be with? Will she support the outgoing Democratic president or will her former role as chair of European conservatives make her bet on conservative White House candidate Donald Trump? Precisely absurd, it could only be a President Trump again who could stop the wars. And with it, perhaps, the perfect storm, World War III, can still be avoided. As long as the West keeps the bar straight. And given that Taiwan is to China what Ukraine is to Russia, the race to meet the emperor of Beijing between King Sergius and Super Giorgia, already divided by too many dossiers, from the prime minister to the judiciary, the What are you proud of?
Source: IL Tempo
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
