On Washington’s telling, Beijing is spreading authoritarianism through producing goods and building infrastructure around the world while the US is promoting freedom and democracy by bombing and selling weapons.

People nowadays say literally when they really mean metaphorically. I don’t know why; maybe a linguist can explain. But when I wrote literally in the headline, I meant literally.

Below is the first paragraph summing up a new study from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a pan-European independent research group.

“The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined,” wrote Richard Baldwin, the study’s main author and a professor of international economics at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined.”

His first factual statement about the United States is probably quite well-known. But he thinks the second one is not. “During ongoing work on global supply chain disruptions with my co-authors … I’ve noticed a stark fact that I don’t think is as widely known as it should be. China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower.”

Actually I did read something like that from a review by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, in Foreign Affairs magazine about a new book on how the US has weaponised the global economic and financial systems for its own foreign policy.

“China’s role as the workshop of the world … might be as hard to replace as the global role of the US dollar,” Krugman wrote.

So I gather........

© Pearls and Irritations