The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Page 4 “Capital for China” [December 1994] and “Arms for Asia” [January 1995] are among Arrigo Cervetto’s last writings. They are part of a series of articles on the social, political, and military consequences of Asia’s irruption into the multipolar world. A 1992 article, “Rearmament in Asia” , had already observed how the end of the Cold War translated into China’s rise in Asia, including in the military sphere. Consequently, in the process of China’s imperialistic maturation, its power relations with Japan, India, and the United States were changing. The rapid development in the region, supported by a very high rate of proletarianisation , attracted massive amount of capital, fuelling tensions. The old imperialist metropolises intervened with huge flows of credit and arms. The supposed end of history , celebrated in the West through the benign myth of globalisation, was met in the East ...

From the series News from the Silk Road The international tensions which China will face on the seas in the next fifteen years could find a buffer in the expansion of China’s influence on land in Central, Southern and Western Asia. Wang Jisi is the dean of the School of International Studies at the University of Beijing and a major figure of the American party in China. His unexpected foray into ‘geopolitics’ has reignited the old clash between different American currents — a phenomenon we analysed more than twenty years ago. At the time, Robert Manning, the author of The Asian Energy Factor and adviser to the State Department in 1991, viewed Asia’s growing dependence on the Persian Gulf for its energy requirements in the light of geoeconomics and geostrategy and foresaw a possible convergence between the USA and China. From a geoeconomic standpoint, both trade and the funding and development of the infrastructure necessary for Asia’s energy needs were more important than terri...