Does China Own the Future?

How much are China’s odes to the future worth? The Global South has few options but to find out.

By Cobus van Staden, The China-Global South Project

The FT columnist Gillian Tett argued this week that global markets are revealing an interesting paradox: on the one, hand, rising stock prices show that investors are feeling somewhat more optimistic about the future. On the other, gold and bitcoin (both seen as hedges against losses and volatility) are rallying too.

Tett explains this contradiction — that the market seems both bullish and bearish on risk — as a sign of our time. We’re balancing short-to-medium term upturns against numerous medium-to-long term risks, including climate, geopolitics, and yawning structural inequalities.

Against this background it’s very interesting how discussions of the future differ. Steve Fraser recently argued in Jacobin that the current U.S. political climate is defined by “the end of the future.” In the U.S.’s current Election 2024: Grampa Smackdown, both sides are looking to the past. While the left wing of the Democratic Party hearkens to the New Deal, their MAGA counterparts seem to pursue a fantasy version of the 1950s.