President Xi Jinping’s Americas tour may seem like just another world leader making perfunctory rounds. But Friday will go down in history as the day China launched it’s full-fledged drive to colonize the West, a turn of events and a reversal on a more than 500-year-long paradigm so monumental that statues will be built and anthems written one day to commemorate the occasion.
No really, it’s true.
Xi’s first port of call: TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO. That’s right! Exactly 515 years after Christopher Columbus first spotted it, China will re-discover the two islands. Colonization will ostensibly start here and within a few hundred years there will be large Chinese populations on both the US’s west and east coasts. Unbelievable, but entirely possible.
Don’t think this expansion is limited to the Americas. China this week announced several other empire-building expeditions around the globe. Consider the plans to literally build a city in Belarus. Or even China’s contract to raise a financial district in London. When the country said this week that it was working to make the yuan directly convertible with the New Zealand dollar, it meant it was working to directly replace it.
Citizen of the US needn’t look further than the Chinese buyout of Smithfield Foods for proof that the end of Western hegemony is near. They may eavesdrop on US phone conversations, or steal Pentagon weaponry secrets. But when the US pork supply is compromised, you know to start singing Amazing Grace in Chinese.
So it’s the late 1400s all over again, except now we have laser beams and the internet. And for the foreseeable future, the only thing set to rival the significance of Xi’s Americas tour is Depeche Mode’s North American tour, which kicks off August 22 in Detroit.