In its expanding war on multipolarism, the US tries to subordinate healthcare and pharmaceuticals worldwide to shareholder profit, while China builds up partners through local production — showing that US hegemony is not unstoppable.
The answer in short is multipolarism. More specifically, it consists of examining the components of US power and creating alternatives that can compete with and ultimately displace them.
This includes the more obvious aspects of US power which include military capabilities — but also a wide spectrum of economic capabilities — from industry and energy to finance and information, and the means to facilitate their transfer between nations and regions of the planet independent of US control.
The massive industrial power of China and even of smaller industrial powers like Russia have demonstrated the ability of nations among the multipolar world to not only match — but by far surpass the many capabilities that have hitherto enabled US primacy for decades.
Russia’s building of massive state-owned enterprises overseeing the efficient research, development, and mass production of weapons and ammunition capable of overwhelming what had previously been uncontested American military industrial capacity in the context of the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine is perhaps the most obvious example of this in practice.
China’s ability to outproduce the US in terms of ships 200 to 1 is another example.
There are also the many and multiplying financial and trade networks being used to circumvent US economic coercion through sanctions in the form of CIPS, BRICS Pay, and mBridge.
Understanding how multipolarism serves as a means of contesting and overcoming the unwarranted power the US abuses globally is best served by examining a specific industry the US dominates and uses as a means of subordinating entire populations to its purpose of expanding power and profit.
Pharmaceuticals: Profit Versus Purpose
Pharmaceuticals is a critical industry virtually every human being on Earth depends on for health and thus all other aspects of their life. Accessible and affordable medication is considered a fundamental right by millions of people as well as governments around the world including the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — while — unsurprisingly — the United States government and the corporations that have captured and control it do not.
For the United States, healthcare in general and pharmaceuticals specifically, are just more products enabling shareholder primacy — the maximizing of wealth for company shareholders above all other interests including human life itself.
This has created for even American citizens themselves the daily dilemma of choosing between paying bills, feeding their family, filling their vehicle’s fuel tank, or seeing a doctor to address potentially life-threatening health conditions — and then whether to address those conditions or not.
Even in Western nations with “universal healthcare,” governments are still captured and controlled by healthcare corporations including pharmaceutical giants, overcharging for their goods and services, creating artificial shortages, rationing, and delays in accessing healthcare.
Elsewhere, around the world — governments have created state-owned enterprises or enforce government intervention within the healthcare sector, ensuring research and development as well as manufacturing and distribution for the explicit purpose of ensuring access to the best possible healthcare for the general public.
These state-owned enterprises as well as healthcare sectors in nations like China where government intervention is extensive — are still profitable — they simply prioritize human health over profit maximization.
This fundamental difference between these two approaches — profit versus purpose — has a direct impact on how the US and nations like China interact with other nations and regions of the world — including specifically in the realm of healthcare and pharmaceuticals.
Subordination and Plundering versus Building Up Partners
While the United States poses as “helping” other nations around the world in the realm of human healthcare and specifically in terms of pharmaceuticals — in actuality its activities constitute building up healthcare systems across the world that are designed specifically to enable and expand US monopolies into “markets” around the globe.
In Africa specifically, the US and its European proxies have spent decades “donating” money to nations across a continent that still suffers from chronically low standards in healthcare — often by investing in legal structures meant to prioritize US patents and “intellectual property,” or build up “local” pharmaceutical companies that simply license and sell US pharmaceuticals.
The end goal of US “assistance” to targeted nations is the creation of “free market capitalism” where US corporations are “free” to monopolize and control all aspects of economic activity in any particular country, upholding shareholder primacy above all other interests — including the interests of the human beings living in these countries themselves.
China’s alternative proposal of a multipolar world where no one single nation dominates all others demonstrably seeks not to dominate markets and populations — but to build up partners with which to trade more extensively with.
Instead of subordinating another nation and stripping its resources as the US openly does around the globe — China seeks to build up relatively underdeveloped nations so they can produce more, more efficiently, and thus trade to a greater extent with China itself — serving the interests of all involved — not just corporate shareholders.
Across Africa, China has been involved in extensive technology transfer to local governments enabling the building of production facilities and the large-scale production of cheap, accessible medication for local populations. While these facilities currently depend heavily on imported active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) – including/especially from China, China is also working on enabling the local production of APIs as well.
In West Africa, China implemented one of its most complete examples of direct factory relocation through Humanwell Healthcare. In Mali, Humanwell constructed the most modern pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in the region. Instead of offering loans to local firms, Humanwell built a wholly owned subsidiary facility, importing Chinese automated machinery, packaging lines, and chemical processing standards.
The facility successfully ended Mali’s absolute reliance on foreign finished-dose imports for several essential medicines, supplying the local population with cheap, immediate, and abundant medication directly from a domestic factory floor.
In Côte d’Ivoire, China seeks to scale this model regionally, with Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical finalizing the first phase of a massive manufacturing plant near Abidjan.
The facility focuses on transferring industrial-scale capacity to West Africa, designed to produce up to 5 billion tablets annually, focusing heavily on high-demand generics like antimalarials and antibacterial treatments.
In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous market, China through the state-backed China-Africa Development Fund (CADFund), entered into a joint-venture with local giants like Fidson Healthcare to actively build specialized pharmaceutical industrial zones designed with the waste-treatment and high-capacity electrical grids required to manufacture APIs locally, beginning with high-volume needs like human insulin.
The final outcome of China’s approach is the creation of a localized, independent healthcare system, including pharmaceutical production and even the production of pharmaceutical inputs, producing a healthier population, and thus a more productive population with which China can trade and partner across a much wider — and ultimately more beneficial — spectrum of economic activity.
China’s approach is not only fundamentally different than the US — its approach is creating the reality on the ground across the continent allowing African nations to eliminate generations of subordination to and dependence on the West, and build themselves up along with the rise of China. The benefits for Africa are obvious — as is the benefit to China — a continent with a massive and growing population, rising in industrial capacity and creating for China larger and more diverse trading partners with which China can trade.
It should be pointed out that in each and every nation China is attempting to build up across Africa, the United States is involved militarily either directly or indirectly, employing US-sponsored terrorist organizations to divide and destabilize these nations and thus undermining China’s efforts in aiding their development — a microcosm of how the US is attempting to use war and the threat of war to undermine and impede the rise of multipolarism worldwide.
US Hegemony is Not Unstoppable …
For people living in nations in which both the US and China are shaping their healthcare systems — an opportunity exists to place time, attention, and energy into promoting and paying into one over the other — ensuring long-term development, independence, and partnership with China prevails over becoming subordinated to profiteering US corporations.
For people living in the West itself — understanding the root of the problem lies with these corporations and their capture and control over Western politics — rather than the Western political system itself — is the first step in formulating steps to divest from these corporations and spending the time, attention, energy, and money required for alternatives. And if no alternatives exist or are accessible — time, attention, energy, and money can be spent on creating alternatives.
US information dominance deliberately creates a false perception of what drives the many and multiplying problems those living in the West are suffering from — using political theater to distract the public from the corporate profiteering that is undermining sustainable, rational, and humane policies and instead promoting the very multi-billion dollar multinational corporations driving growing crisis across the West.
This political theater is also used to sell the US’ interference, coercion, and outright military aggression abroad — including the subordination of nations to US corporate shareholder primacy — and the demonization of alternatives that threaten to displace unwarranted US power around the globe. The US specifically attacks Chinese efforts to develop the economies of partners around the globe through accusations of “debt-trap diplomacy” and the spending of millions annually on propaganda targeting and undermining Chinese projects.
In reality — US hegemony is not unstoppable. It is being exposed, undermined, and displaced around the globe by better, more sustainable, and more humane policies, people, and political systems. Chief among them are those driven by specific purposes other than shareholder primacy — maximizing wealth above all else.
US information dominance seeks to distract as many people from realizing this as possible — to deny this transition as much support and participation as possible, to slow it down as much as possible — if not stop and entirely undo it.
Only time will tell whether or not more people see past US narratives and place people and purpose above profits, or continuously fall into the political traps the US uses to divide and distract entire populations, shift blame onto both victims and US proxies, buying as much time and space as possible to cling to global primacy for as long as possible — and compounding all of the death, destruction, and instability that primacy has and continues to cause.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
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