The ‘Beijing Consensus’ Displaces Washington: NRC Handelsblad, The Netherlands

According to this sobering editorial from the NRC Handelsblad of The Netherlands, recent tension between China and the United States is the opening tremor of a tectonic shift in the relative influence of the world’s two top two powers – and that shift strongly favors Beijing.

The NRC Handelsblad editorial says in part:

According to conservative estimates, it will be less than fifteen years before China surpasses the United States as a superpower. It was just 2003 when this was predicted to occur in about 2040.

This rate of acceleration has important political implications. Since the early eighties, the so-called Washington Consensus (deregulation, liberalization, and privatization) dominated the world. Because of the credit crisis, a “Beijing Consensus” has become popular. The key words are: state capitalism, centralized market regulation and authoritarian central government. That is a fundamentally different world and humanity about which, for the moment, America has precious little to say.

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