In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was sudden and continuous.
This year, more than 80 million people were infected with the epidemic, and the lives of more than 1.77 million people were frozen forever.
This year, the Australian fires, the Locust Plague in East Africa, the Assassination in the Middle East, natural and man-made disasters are heart-wrenching;
This year, Trump "dreamed of the White House", Boris finally "left the EU", Macron was burdened by "terrorist attacks"...
People seem to witness history every day.
"The world today is in a major change unprecedented in a century" is China's official strategic judgment on global development trends.
With the acceleration of the evolution of the world pattern caused by the century-old pandemic, what profound and complex adjustments and changes will occur in the international order?
How is China responding? Where is the world going? Where is the confidence and dawn in 2021?
The year-end special edition of Straight News invites several scholars and experts to share their insights, reflections and insights with readers from their own perspectives.
We waved goodbye to 2020.
Written on the last night of 2020
The world we know is fading away as early as 2016, and unfortunately it took us four years until 2020 when we were reluctantly forced to confirm it.
Four years ago, in June, the British People's Referendum voted to leave the European Union, officially kicking off the first long and failed democratic experiment of the century. At about the same time, Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on the other side of the Atlantic, shouting at the panicked and stunned American voters in his speech, "No one knows the system better than I do, which is why only I can save it!" ”
Four years is enough to achieve one reincarnation. In the last month before the end of 2020, the UK and the EU struggled to reach a trade agreement, once again returning to the old days before the birth of the EU single market in 1993. At about the same time, Biden was waiting across the Atlantic for a hard-won victory, denying that his administration was "Obama 3.0." However, there are indications that Biden is destined to bring the United States back to 1988, when the New Democratic Party was first formed, and his campaign slogan may be "Boring America Again."
I still remember that at the beginning of the year, in his New Year's speech, Abe looked forward to the Olympic event with hope, and he quoted the testimonial of Yoshinobu Miyake, the weightlifting champion of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, "People, because they have dreams, they will continue to grow." At all times, we must have a heart to chase dreams. Three months later, Abe proposed to the IOC to postpone the Olympic Games; six months later, Abe announced his resignation as prime minister for health reasons.
I still remember at the beginning of the year, stimulated by the postponement of the production cut agreement and the assassination of Sulaimani, the WTI oil price rushed straight to $65, and 3 months later, this figure plummeted to a historic -35 US dollars, a gap of 100 US dollars up and down, and the North American oil and gas company responded to the large-scale bankruptcy. This year's international financial market confidence was overdrawn, Fira was overwhelmed, the dollar steadily depreciated, and the US stock market was melted down one after another, once plummeting to the stock price on the day of Trump's victory in 2016, wiping out the index miracle of his entire tenure. At a time when the U.S. financial market is in turmoil, the ratio of treasuries to GDP has soared to the peak of World War II, and the U.S. stock market is likely to be on the eve of the 1929-level crash, the Biden administration can burst the bubble during Trump's presidency with a random tax increase or regulatory decision.
No one knows if all this will happen in 2021.
In 2020, the United States completed a crucial election, and the righteous forces whitewashed by Democrats finally ended the "Trump chaos" in a promising way. However, the indignant Trump voters are still there, the Republican right wing wrapped up for "Trumpism" is still there, and the divisions and scars of American society that have been punctured by Trump are still there. Biden's problem is that he is too weak, too traditional, too old, his policy ideas can be traced back to the Clinton era, the spiritual beliefs are likely to remain in the Humphrey era, his victory in this smooth election is not enough, the power base gained in Congress and local politics is not enough, the blue wave of hopes for by the Democratic Party has not come in the past decade, but its own problems of governing the party have been exposed in this fragile victory.
The party establishment suppressed two Vermont opinion leaders, Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders, three times in the post-Clinton era, and seeing that the two major factions are nearing their prime, the young and strong factions in the party are still slow to pick up the youth. Ocasio Cortez, who boasted in the party primaries earlier this year, "Joe Biden and I cannot appear in the same party in any other country," a progressive "squad" that describes itself as the next decade's left-wing Tea Party, with big slogans on their donation sites — "Let's change the Democratic Party!" ”
In 2021, Biden is about to face a completely unfamiliar era and crowd, an increasingly divided party and society. While Republicans embrace populism downwards with unprecedented intensity, democratic progressives are elevating their own political philosophies in the exact opposite direction, and Biden's historical mission is to straddle himself at the ends of this growing tear, trying to carefully cover the scars of American society with traditional values and centrism. Biden's greatest strength is that he always has the generosity and tolerance of old-school moderate lawmakers, which allows him to dare to be courteous from the very beginning, to create a cabinet that is almost entirely run by professionals, and the stability of White House politics in 2021 will be greatly enhanced.
However, a government of "exceptional" people is not necessarily a government of "excellence". If the president himself is unable to serve as an opinion leader, the arrogance of the clerical staff, bureaucratic cumbersomeness, and the struggle for factional interests could eventually disorient the White House, as David Halberstein's 1973 novel (Editor's Note: The Exceptional) has perfectly revealed. It's hard to call the Democratic Party an ideal party anymore, and it's been a long time since we've seen the political passion that shone through Stevenson, Kennedy, and McGovern. A decent, well-established government is not what the restless American electorate needs at this moment. If Biden doesn't end up becoming a New Age Democrat, he's likely to end up with the unclaimed Carter of the old days.
This year, the world experienced a far-reaching catastrophe. Due to the existence of the epidemic, the whole world seems cold, lonely and strange in 2020. This catastrophe changed the way people interacted with each other, changed globalization and open societies, and changed the historicist beliefs we had built up since childhood that "tomorrow will be better." By the end of the year, we still don't dare to be optimistic about the next year getting warmer. We often force ourselves to wonder if this is just the first year we wait at home and look out the window.
As 2020 draws to a close, we panic and then remain silent in an era of peace that we were familiar with. We are fortunate enough to live in the safest country on the planet at this moment. In the first half of the year, we were criticized and suppressed by the outside world; in the second half of the year, we provided feedback for the epidemic prevention and recovery of the whole world. How the global economy chooses its direction in 2021 depends largely on China's new journey and how the 14th Five-Year Plan is written.
In the coming year, the politics of the pandemic will remain the world's most decisive variable. This is a new political landscape that we must become familiar with as soon as possible and that needs to be taken seriously, and it directly impacts the atmosphere of globalization born of infancy in the post-Cold War era and seriously challenges the liberal ideology on which Western societies depend. What the 9/11 events of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 could not have done, this universal collective catastrophe can be done. Only when the plague comes, can we find that the old warmth given to us by the era of peace is nothing more than a fragile shell, and once broken, international politics will immediately break free from the warmth of rationalism and fall back into the cold abyss of classical realism. The difference is that this time it is Morgenthau's human realism that stands at the finish line, not the structural realism of Waltz that we know. In the second twenty years of the 21st century, due to the emergence of epidemic politics, the game logic of international politics is undergoing some far-profound attribute changes, 2021 is an absolute moment to witness this change, if by the end of next year everything has not improved significantly, the future we will face the world will be very different.
In a few years, we may miss 2020 immensely. It has ushered the world into an obscure era while irretrievably ending a reassuring one.
The author, Wang Yiming, is a specially invited researcher of the Globalization Think Tank