France’s Le Monde published an editorial about last week’s summit between Chinese and U.S. leaders, translated by truthout:
First observation: while the People’s Republic of China prepares to celebrate its forty years, Beijing is at the center of the world. Once again, historians would remind us. China is the only country to figure in all three of these organizations: G-2, G-4 (Brazil, Russia, India, China), G-20 (the eight industrialized countries, plus the big emerging economies). Nothing can happen without China. The crisis can only accentuate that tendency. China and Brazil will emerge fortified from the current conjuncture, Goldman Sachs’s experts – who, moreover, no longer consider China an emerging country – deemed on the eve of the Sino-American meeting.
Endowed with its phenomenal foreign currency reserves, (over $2,000 billion), China has become the planet’s main creditor. Not only that of the United States. That confers certain rights. Thus, the Uighurs and the Tibetans got short shrift in the Washington communiqué, which in six lines dispatched the pursuit of dialogue on human rights on a basis of “equality and mutual respect.” China is less-than-ever inclined to receive lessons on that subject. But China’s weight imposes a certain number of duties. The communiqué indicates that the United States must increase its savings, and China the share of consumption in its GDP growth.
