The New Great Game Between China and the US
Will chess, not battleship, be the game of the future in Eurasia?
China’s road map is illustrated in their ambitious, recently unveiled 13th Five-Year-Plan, translated into a pop-video version, the Shisanwu. (Image: Screenshot/Shisanwu)
The U.S. is transfixed by its multibillion-dollar electoral circus. The European Union is paralyzed by austerity, fear of refugees, and now all-out jihad in the streets of Paris. So the West might be excused if it’s barely caught the echoes of a Chinese version of Roy Orbison’s “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” And that new Chinese dream even comes with a road map.
The crooner is President Xi Jinping and that road map is the ambitious, recently unveiled 13th Five-Year-Plan, or in the pop-video version, the Shisanwu. After years of explosive economic expansion, it sanctifies the country’s lower “new normal” gross domestic product growth rate of 6.5% a year through at least 2020.
