Analysis
BEIJING – China’s “inevitable collapse” repeatedly projected by Western media never comes and thwarting China’s rise is like “throwing toothpicks at a mountain,” said an article published on the website of the Australian journal Pearls and Irritations.
In the article titled “China: learning from Canute,” its author John Queripel argues that Western media regularly claim that China’s run is near an end and that collapse is just around the corner. “So constant has this become, it is like a broken gramophone record. But the ‘inevitable collapse’, however, never comes.”
According to the article, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) using inflation-adjusted real GDP puts the US growth rate at 1.6 percent (2023) and 1.0 percent (2024) with the Australian economy’s projected growth rates respectively standing at 1.8 percent and 1.4 percent.
The article also points out that in Australia, due to whipped-up Sinophobia by politicians and media, many fear China’s rise and wish to thwart it. However, thinking that Australia could do anything to stop that rise is farcical. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating sarcastically responded to such claims that anything Australia could do was “like throwing toothpicks at a mountain.”
To employ another image used by Keating, trying to stop China’s rise is like King Canute* attempting to stop the rising tide, said the article.
– Xinhua
* In modern journalistic parlance, Canute is a byword for a delusional attempt to avert the inevitable. Canute (c.990-1035) was king of Denmark, England and Norway. Source: Birkbeck Institutional Research Online
