Xinjiang's indelible footprint : reading the new imperialism of neoliberalism in English and Waiting for the Barbarians

A casual glance at the headlines in the first weeks of 2017 was enough to give anyone pause to think that the world of global politics had suddenly and unexpectedly slipped into a parallel universe. Three days before America inaugurated a president who had campaigned fiercely for protectionist economic policies, Chinese president Xi Jinping delivered a speech in which he positioned himself as a champion of globalization. The country most closely associated with the free world"”and, in more recent decades, with the free-market tenets of neoliberalism"”now signaled its desire to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Paris climate agreement, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The leader of one of the last remaining communist countries in the world, by contrast, declared that "[t]he problems of the world are not caused by globalisation. . . . They are not the inevitable outcome of globalisation" (qtd. in Anderlini, Feng, and Mitchell). If the economic positions of these two countries seemed to have been severed from their professed political allegiances, it was still possible to take heart from the fact that each continued to maintain a polarized stance against the other.