China’s dragon is tightening its grip on America’s eagle. IMAGE/ X Screengrab
Superpower contest no longer about who dominates but who can endure and China has the edge in most strategic sectors
There is an image that likely increasingly haunts the minds of US
strategists: a Chinese dragon, no longer just coiled in defense but
elegantly entwined around the neck of the American bald eagle. Not to
suffocate but rather to regulate the bird’s breath.
The symbolism
is not hyperbole. It captures a world where China, long caricatured as
the imitator, has now morphed into a systemic rival, outrunning and
outgunning the United States in critical business and security sectors.
From technology to trade, currency to cyber power, the Chinese state has mastered the long game.
As
Graham Allison warned in “Destined for War”, the Thucydides Trap is not
only about the inevitability of conflict between rising and ruling
powers. It’s also about the erosion of assumptions that the West has
long taken for granted—namely, that liberal democracies will always
innovate faster and govern better.
That assumption is collapsing
under China’s weight. Let us now turn to the strategic sectors where
China has not just caught up, but, in many instances, sprinted ahead.
1. Semiconductors: from dependency to near parity
Semiconductors,
once China’s key vulnerability, are now the arena of its most dramatic
gains. Despite Washington’s embargoes on Huawei and export bans on
advanced lithography equipment, Beijing has poured over 1.5 trillion
yuan into its domestic chip ecosystem.
China’s 14nm chips are now
being produced domestically at scale, and according to Dr Dan Wang of
Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic consultancy, “China is only a node or
two behind global leaders, and catching up fast.”
This
acceleration is powered by “dual circulation”—a policy that embeds state
subsidies across the entire supply chain, from rare earth mining to
chip design.
In contrast, the US remains fragmented. The CHIPS
and Science Act is slow-moving and could be scrapped while American fabs
are still dangerously dependent on geopolitical choke points like
Taiwan.
And it’s not clear that forcing Taiwan to build fabs in
the US will even remotely work due to a lack of skilled labor and
relevant supply chains.
2. Electric vehicles: Tesla in the rearview mirror
China’s
BYD, not Tesla, is now the world’s top EV manufacturer. In 2023, it
overtook Tesla in global sales and its footprint now spans Latin
America, Europe and Southeast Asia.
When country music legend Glen Campbell took the stage during his
final tour, his memory was fading fast due to Alzheimer’s disease.
Yet
somehow, despite not recognizing his closest loved ones or remembering
what day it was, he could still play his guitar and sing every lyric of
his greatest hits thanks to the science behind the connection of music
and the brain.
The power of music
Rhonda
Winegar is a nurse practitioner in neurology and assistant professor at
the University of Texas at Arlington. She found Campbell’s uncanny
ability to be more than just touching – it sparked her scientific
curiosity.
“He kept wandering off, and they’d have to push him
back on stage,” noted Winegar. “Yet he could still play all those
difficult chords and remember the lyrics to his songs.”
This
striking example of music’s resilience in the face of neurodegeneration
became the foundation for Winegar’s research into the profound therapeutic power of music.
Her findings, recently published with co-author Dustin Hixenbaugh in The Journal for Nurse Practitioners, reinforce what many have intuitively known for centuries: music isn’t just entertainment – it’s medicine.
Chemistry of the musical experience
“Music delays neurodegeneration in conditions such as Alzheimer’s,”
Winegar explained. “Sometimes, patients with memory issues get anxious
and upset, which can start affecting their speech and ability to
communicate. But if they’re able to sing, they can express their
feelings, which helps reduce anxiety, stress, and depression.”
While
Winegar’s work highlights music’s ability to soothe and strengthen
neurological function, a recent imaging study from the Turku PET Center
in Finland delves even deeper. The study dives into the molecular
chemistry of the musical experience.
Published in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine,
the research has found that listening to favorite music activates the
brain’s opioid system, the same reward system that governs pleasure from
food, social bonding, and even pain relief.
Pleasure pathways in the brain
“These
results show for the first time directly that listening to music
activates the brain’s opioid system,” said Vesa Putkinen from the University of Turku.
“The
release of opioids explains why music can produce such strong feelings
of pleasure, even though it is not a primary reward necessary for
survival or reproduction, like food or sexual pleasure.”
Commission
President von der Leyen has embarked on a radical deregulation
campaign, with the clear intention to dismantle rules that business
lobbies dislike, including social and environmental standards. The EU
has seen deregulation waves before, but it’s very different this time:
it’s not only far more comprehensive and ruthless, there’s unprecedented
levels of support for it among governments and in the European
Parliament. As a consequence, we risk a disastrous half-decade of
deregulation, while climate change, the environment, equality, and
social rights are put on the backburner – all in the name of
‘competitiveness’.
A Wednesday at the end of February was the moment when it became
clear beyond doubt that it’s different this time. On this day the
European Commission presented a so-called Omnibus package to overhaul
three major corporate sustainability laws. These three laws had been
approved by the European Parliament and governments just a year or two
earlier. But now the Commission was insisting on radically rolling back
the ambitions of the legislation. The civil society coalition ECCJ
described the Commission’s proposal as “full-scale deregulation
designed to dismantle corporate accountability and abandon the EU’s
Green Deal commitments”. In particular, the Corporate Sustainability Due
Diligence Directive (CSDDD) would be radically scaled back, in the
words of the ECCJ “giving reckless corporations a free pass to operate
without consequences”. While the European Parliament and Council still
need to discuss the Omnibus package and could save EU corporate
sustainability laws from full-scale deregulation, the odds for this to
happen don’t look good.
When presenting the Omnibus package during a press conference,
Commission Vice-President Dombrovskis argued that this was a response to
the “bigger picture” of the changed EU-US relationship, and referred to
the Trump administration voting against a UN resolution condemning
Russian aggression against Ukraine as “a call to action”. Others have
described the Omnibus package as Trump-inspired, but the reality is that
this is just the first very visible chapter of an entirely homegrown EU
deregulation agenda that has been under preparation for several years.
And there’s a whole lot more to come.
The deregulation agenda is a central part of the Commission’s plans
for the next five years, during which ‘competitiveness’ will be the
uncontested yardstick for the EU. This new direction was already clear
when Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the political
guidelines for her second term in July 2024. More details emerged in von
der Leyen’s priorities for each of the candidate-commissioners a few
months later. These ‘Mission Letters’ included over 15 different tools for systemic deregulation
and slashing standards; most new, others harsher versions of existing
ones. In the Commission’s main economic policy document for the next
five years – the Competitiveness Compass,
presented in January 2025 – corporate competitiveness was confirmed as
the Commission’s overarching goal, with deregulation positioned as the
key method to achieve it. More details of the deregulation agenda were
revealed in the 14-page document ‘A simpler and faster Europe’ a month later.
Imagine a grim
underground cavern. Here, prisoners have been chained since childhood.
Their necks and legs are fixed in place, forcing them to stare
perpetually at a blank wall before them. Behind these wretched souls
burns a great fire, and between this fire and the prisoners runs a
raised walkway where hidden figures carry various objects that cast
shadows on the wall. These dancing shadows, these pale imitations of
reality, make up the prisoners’ entire world—their truth, their reality,
their everything. For instance, when they speak of a tree or a mountain
or justice, they refer merely to these flickering phantoms, never
suspecting the authentic forms that exist beyond their shadowy theatre.
I
am not talking about the next psycho-horror. This is an ancient
allegory: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. In this cave, humanity exists
in a state of stage-managed deception. A kind of Matrix. But what
makes this allegory interesting today is how perfectly it describes the
relationship between state and citizens through history. We are the
prisoners, with governments and those who control governments our puppet
masters, and official narratives the shadows we mistake for reality.
The true genius lies not just in the elaborate deception—but in our willing participation in our own imprisonment.
The relationship between states and citizens might be the
longest-running con game in human history. Before we had social media
influencers selling us diet teas, we had emperors, kings, and various
government officials convincing ordinary people that getting exploited
was actually in their best interest.
Ancient Rome had the “bread
and circuses” approach—keep the masses fed (barely) and entertained
(violently) so they will not notice that you are systematically looting
the empire. China’s dynastic rulers claimed the “Mandate of Heaven”
(much like many of their counterparts elsewhere, including in India or,
closer home to me, Kerala’s Travancore), essentially saying, God wants
us to be super rich while you lesser mortals can farm rice until you
die.
Medieval Europe took this creative storytelling to new
heights. Feudal lords convinced peasants that backbreaking labour in
exchange for “protection” was a fair trade. As G.K. Chesterton so
brilliantly put it: “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed
badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.” This
quote lives rent-free in my head, which is ironic since rent is
precisely what the landed gentry was collecting while contributing
exactly nothing to society.
European powers didn’t just take land,
resources, and freedom from indigenous peoples worldwide. They had the
audacity to frame it as doing them a favour. “We’re civilising you!”
they announced, while simultaneously destroying civilisations that had
thrived for thousands of years. The British wasn’t plundering India; it
was “improving” it by extracting, according to researchers such as Utsa
Patnaik, $45 trillion in wealth. That’s not a typo. That’s what I call
an aggressive improvement plan!
Aged 69 at the time, he was, among other things, asked about his
views on Hamas and whether Israel’s actions on the Gaza Strip amount to
genocide (he said yes). He was then asked to provide phone numbers of
his contacts in the Arab–American and Muslim–American communities.
In December, months after his interrogation by Homeland Security in the US, Pappe was removed without explanation from the BBC podcast, The Conflict, about the Middle East on the day he was supposed to record his contribution.
Pappe is one of Israel’s “New Historians”, who look for the truth about the 1948 Israeli “war of independence”.
The war began
when Israel declared its independence following the partition of
Palestine. Though it was quickly recognised by the US, the Soviet Union
and other countries, it was immediately attacked by Egypt, Iraq,
Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. When the war ended in July 1949, the new
state controlled one-fifth more territory than the original partition
plan, to which it refused to return.
Palestinians mourn the 1948 war as the Nakba: their violent mass displacement and dispossession. (It created about 750,000 Palestinian refugees.)
One of the world’s most prominent scholars of the entwined histories
of Israel and Palestine, Pappe is an urgent advocate of Palestinian
rights and author of a groundbreaking 2007 book on the formation of the
state of Israel, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
His latest book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic,
seeks to understand how a pro-Israel lobby has formed, both in his
country of residence, the United Kingdom, and in Israel’s most powerful
and ardent supporter, the US.
Pappe’s book is worth heeding: he is both a scholar of the Israel
lobby and a recent victim of its attempt to deplatform pro-Palestinian
perspectives.
An ‘aggressive’, anxious lobby
This is the story of an “aggressive” lobby that eagerly seeks to
stamp out narratives of Palestinian dispossession and suffering – in
case they legitimise Palestinian claims for statehood, or attract
sympathy for Palestinians’ lack of political and civil rights in the
Occupied Territories.
Once a vehicle for Egyptian soft power, Cairo is struggling to exert its influence through its shows
The 2025 Ramadan TV season continues to dominate cultural discourse
in the Arab World even after the end of the Muslim holy month, which
doubles as the premiere season for blockbuster shows in the region.
An unusual mix of grit and escapism has given Arabs a respite from a
dire political climate blighted by Gaza, ever-looming economic
recession and Trump 2.0’s shenanigans.
The sometimes conflated and sometimes conflicting relationship between Egypt and Saudi Arabia informed the conversation this year.
Egypt had an atypically solid roster and Saudi Arabia benefitted from ubiquitousness and supremacy of its channels.
The rise of Syrian drama from the ashes of the Assad regime could indicate a potential renewal of the rivalry between Syria and
Egypt, but the stagnancy and stuttering condition of the rest of the
region’s TV indicates that Egypt will remain the unrivalled king of
Ramadan TV for the time being.
It’s Saudi Arabia, however, and not Egypt that now shapes the Arab TV
landscape, a volatile landscape oscillating between the pull of
commerce and the insatiable determination of Arab autocrats in
controlling the narratives accessible to their people.
Egypt continues to possess the brightest talents in the region, but
it’s the Saudi money that will dictate what Arabs watch on their TV
screens in the near future.
Sisi picks a battle with Saudi Arabia he can’t win
A characteristically ominous statement by Egypt’s President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi during an iftar dinner regarding Egyptian TV drama sent
shockwaves through the entertainment industry.
Sisi has made a habit of publicly commenting on the role of TV drama
in instilling a spirit of patriotism in the hearts of the nation and
promoting a new Egypt, or, rather, his new vision of Egypt.
The policies governing Egypt’s entertainment industry usually change after such speeches.
After taking power in 2013, lavish TV productions endorsing the military and the police bombarded the airwaves.
On screen, the nation’s social reality has been reduced to nothing but vacuous stories of gated suburban life.
The consolidation of numerous media channels, TV, print and web, gave
birth to the United Media Services (UMS), the giant government-owned
conglomerate that now controls every facet of news and storytelling in
the country.
“Who was the “last universal common ancestor” of all life on Earth? LUCA may have already had the core components of modern cells some 4.2 billion years ago.” IMAGE/DESCRIPTION/Quanta
LUCA may have been the beginning of all creatures
then, from various family trees emerged different varieties of life
Canidae family produced coyotes, wolves, jackals, dogs, foxes, etc.
Felidae family has cats, tigers, cougars, fishing cats, etc.
…
Ape family has bonobos, orangutans, humans, chimpanzees, etc.
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South
Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist
apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and
neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian,
to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as
that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing
billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. “Musk lived what can
only be described as a neocolonial life,” said McGreal. “If you were a
white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you
lived with servants at your beck and call.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show with Part 2 of my recent interview with the
reporter Chris McGreal, who was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian
during the last years of apartheid through 2002. He’s been closely
following the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in
1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised under the country’s
racist apartheid laws. Some of McGreal’s pieces include “What does Elon Musk believe?” and “How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa.” I began by asking Chris McGreal to discuss Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman.
CHRIS McGREAL: We see
Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. He immigrates to South Africa in
1950. And that’s really when apartheid has just started to kick in. The
1950s are when the most — the first laws — South Africa had had
discriminatory laws before, but you see the specific apartheid laws,
which are much more aggressive, and in many ways reminiscent of the Nazi
Nuremberg laws against Jews in the 1930s. They have very similar echoes
in stripping Black people from the right to work in certain places,
their movements, controlling them, confining them to areas. You already
had a situation which has now, you know, come to the fore because of
recent events with Trump, but —
AMY GOODMAN: You mean with Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute?
CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, but
also with the sanctions over land, is that the 1913 Land Act had already
deprived most Black people of land in South Africa anyway. At that
point, the 7%, or 10%, as it was, of the population that was white owned
more than 85% of the land under the Land Act of 1913. So, the apartheid
laws kick in in the 1950s.
Musk was born — Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, and at
that point the prime minister was a guy called John Vorster. And John
Vorster’s background is very telling, really, because Vorster, in the
1930s, had been a member of a neo-Nazi militia called the OB, which was
openly sympathetic and linked to the Nazis in Germany. It was
responsible for all kinds of attacks, but including burning Jews out of
their businesses in Johannesburg.
AMY GOODMAN: And we’re talking about what years?
CHRIS McGREAL: In the
1930s, so the late 1930s. And then South Africa goes to war as an ally
of Britain against Hitler. The OB and the groups that support them, like
Vorster, people like Vorster, they actively oppose that. They actually
are in touch with — OB is in touch with German military intelligence,
and they plan to assassinate the prime minister of South Africa, Jan
Smuts, and overthrow the government and have it support Hitler. That
plan fails, because the Germans are unable to provide the necessary
weapons and back out.
But in 1942, John Vorster, later prime minister, stands up and gives a
speech, and he talks about the system that they — their kind of
ideological belief system, which was Christian nationalism. And he says
Christian nationalism in South Africa is the same as Nazism in Germany
and fascism in Italy. It’s all anti-democratic. It’s all the same thing.
By 1971, when Elon Musk is born, that man is the prime minister of
South Africa. And Christian nationalism is the basis of not only the
political philosophy, but the entire education system that Elon Musk is
brought up into.
AMY GOODMAN: So, take us from Elon Musk’s grandfather moving to South Africa in the ’50s to his father, how they gained their wealth.
CHRIS McGREAL: So, Musk
— Elon Musk’s grandfather moves there in 1950s. He’s not particularly
prosperous. He arrives without a lot of money. But it’s Elon Musk’s
father, Errol, who makes the real money, principally through investments
in emerald mines in Zambia. And, you know, mining conditions in
southern Africa in that period were really pretty dire in the 1960s and
’70s, very high death rate, very poor conditions. But the owners got
very rich.
And Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life. If
you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at
all, you lived with servants at your beck and call. You lived in
sprawling housing. And what you see with Errol Musk is that when we get a
glimpse into just how much money he had, when he and Elon’s mother get
divorced, she says at the time that, well, he owns a yacht, he owns a
jet, he owns several houses. So there was considerable wealth there.
AMY GOODMAN: Was the grandfather of Elon Musk on the record in his support for Vorster?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, he
was certainly on the record in his support for apartheid, very vividly
so, yes. And he said that that’s why he had moved to South Africa from
Canada in 1940, was in support of it. Now, the grandfather himself is
killed a few years later in a plane crash, but it’s not known what Elon
Musk’s grandmother’s personal views of Vorster particularly were, but
they were both avid supporters of the apartheid system, and the
grandmother lived for a number of years afterwards.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, you’ve been talking about Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents and how
they moved to South Africa, but talk about their roots in Canada.
CHRIS McGREAL: Originally,
the grandparents have no connection to South Africa. They’re born and
grew up in Canada. And in the 1930s, the grandfather, Joshua Haldeman,
he’s head of the Canadian branch of a U.S. movement called Technocracy
Incorporated. And Technocracy Incorporated is essentially a movement to
overthrow democratic governments in the United States and have
technocrats, but big businessmen, in many ways, come in and run the
country. That’s partly a reaction to FDR’s election and New Deal and
massive reforms that he’s introduced in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: So, from Canada, they would help to launch a coup against FDR?
Every city in the world has been designed and built by men. But what if the other half had a go? Barcelona might be able to give us that answer.
For the past four years the city has had a female mayor with a profoundly feminist agenda. We spoke to feminists working in urban planning in the city to find out what they think needs to change to make cities better for women.
