BREAKDOWN: Is this China’s Century or the US’s? Maybe It’s Both
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Long Reads Sunday is a reading of Adam Tooze’ recent review of four books on the growing conflict between the U.S. and China.
This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Crypto.com.
This week on Long Reads Sunday, our selection is “Whose Century?” by Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books.
Nominally a review of four recent scholarly works on the conflict between the U.S. and China, Tooze main argument is that the central problem with viewing this as a new Cold War is the idea that it is new.
Instead, we need to understand that, contra Fukuyama’s famous essay, history didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall – at least not for the Chinese. What’s more, the narrative of having “won” the Cold War fails to take into account the West’s spectacular failures in Asia.
Only by reframing our understanding can we make sense of the most important geopolitical conflict of the coming century.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. |
| 0:13.0 | This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com. |
| 0:18.0 | The breakdown is produced and distributed by Coindesk. |
| 0:22.5 | And now here's your host, NLW. |
| 0:27.8 | What's going on, guys? |
| 0:29.0 | It is Sunday, July 26, and this is Longread Sunday. |
| 0:34.3 | Today's selection is by economist and historian Adam Too's, who wrote a piece for the London |
| 0:40.0 | review of books called Who's Century? It is in some ways a book review of four books that all |
| 0:47.7 | have a similar topic. Those books are Schism, China, America, and the fracturing of the global |
| 0:53.2 | trading system by Paul Blustine, |
| 0:55.5 | Superpower Showdown, How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War by Bob |
| 1:00.5 | Davis and Ling Ling Wei, Trade Wars are Class Wars, how rising inequality distorts the global |
| 1:05.8 | economy and threatens international peace, by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettus, and The New Class |
| 1:11.6 | War, Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind. |
| 1:15.6 | Adam is an extremely interesting thinker, and as I mentioned, he brings to his economic analysis |
| 1:20.6 | a historical perspective, which I find incredibly relevant. |
| 1:24.6 | So let's dive into this piece by Adam 2's in the London Review of Books, |
| 1:29.4 | Who's Century? What Eric Hobbsbom called the short 20th century is supposed to have ended in |
| 1:35.6 | 1989, with the United States winning the Cold War. Yet today America faces a powerful and assertive |
| 1:41.6 | China, a one-party state with an official ideology it calls |
| 1:45.1 | 21st century Marxism, which is busy building a powerful military on the back of an economy |
| 1:50.1 | set to become the world's biggest in the foreseeable future. This development has shaken the |
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