Summer in China Number 3:
The Duality of NATO, the EU, and BRICS.
Another afternoon of “Summer in China.” Today, Summer gives us a virtual tour of her delicious dinner, a Cantonese opera performance at a park, and a stroll through a local market.
China has strong diplomatic relations with Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
All four countries are dangerously aggressive military and economic adversaries to American international domination and a threat to the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). China and Russia are founding members of BRICS, a group of countries that allied in 2006 to counteract the international financial and political dominance of North American and Western European countries.
The acronym “BRICS” originally meant “Brazil, Russia, India, and China.” The alliance has since grown to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In response to the challenge that BRICS has been proposing to the US, Canada, and the European Union (EU), financial analysts in the “Western world” created the derogatory term “the CRANKs” to describe the political and economic alignment amongst China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
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So, you can see here the financial foundations and political framework of the adversarial relationships between North America and Western Europe versus South America, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Public Health Policy Reviews posits that cultural exchange is one of the most influential and essential ways to help counteract this antagonistic relationship between international countries. Culture is the language, beliefs, values, behaviors, and material objects passed from generation to generation.
Culture clarifies a group’s shared experiences and behaviors based on the group’s principles, rules, and goals. Learned behavior and consciousness based on the common heritage and shared experiences of all human beings is the definition of international culture.
During the twentieth century, traditional media platforms like books, newspapers, television, radio, and the internet erased geographical restrictions to the spread of diverse international cultures across the planet. As we mentioned last week, social media increasingly allows governments, businesses, employers, workers, and individuals to communicate directly with people worldwide, facilitating cultural sharing.
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The “Yin-Yang” icon is associated with East Asian culture and often represents Zen Buddhism, the duality of natural scientific forces, and psychology.
The theme of this week’s “SUMMER IN CHINA” is duality.
Summer takes us on another virtual daily excursion around her home province. She enjoys an afternoon of Chinese tea, a chicken and vegetable dumpling dinner, a Cantonese opera performance at a park, and a stroll through a local market. Once again, we note how similar the scenes are to any high-end neighborhood in the United States.
Nonetheless, a noticeable difference in Chinese open space is the lack of a conspicuous human security presence, theft prevention measures, and asset protection devices increasingly prevalent in American public marketplaces. Still, the close diplomatic relationships between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea justify much of the economic and military wariness between the United States and the nations currently aligned in the BRICS collective.
As rising international powers, we should not expect the BRICS nations to be any less aggressive than the US when America established its dominance as the most powerful country on earth from the 1950s until now.