It seems so clear, so clearly obvious: we are living in times of crisis: global health crisis (Covid- 19), environmental crisis (the fires), socio-economic crisis (intensifying inequalities), political crisis (the autocrats). These layers of crisis, protracted crisis - this is what we name 'times of crisis'. Amin Samman takes up this condition of our times. His focus is on what he calls "financial times" and his main concern is to illustrate how "we imagine and produce history in financial times" (Samman, 2019: ix).
El artículo aborda la relación entre la crisis civilizatoria y las crisis urbanas que las ciudades han experimentado en las últimas décadas. En Occidente se pasó de la crisis urbana, ubicada en el sistema económico social y la legitimidad política, a la "desaparición de las ciudades", en la cual la comunidad ha dejado de estar fundada en la proximidad o la densidad demográfica local. En América Latina, la crisis urbana del siglo XX en Europa y Estados Unidos resulta más bien la situación normal de sus ciudades, y la crisis civilizatoria ha empeorado esta situación, caracterizada por la informalidad y la carencia de viviendas adecuadas.
The year 2020 was marked by a series of rolling crises. The Australian wildfires at the start of the year were a catastrophic sign of the global climate crisis. Xi Jinping's announcement in September that the People's Republic of China would become carbon neutral by 2060 could help alleviate the crisis, but China has to fix its coal problem first. The big story was, of course, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Appearing to originate in a Wuhan wet market, by year's end the pandemic had claimed nearly 2 million lives worldwide, put whole countries into lockdown, and sent economies around the world tumbling into recession. China itself successfully suppressed the disease at home and recorded positive economic growth for the year — proving, at least according to the Chinese Communist Party, the 'superiority of the socialist system'. Not everyone was convinced, with persistent questions about the CCP's initial cover up of the outbreak, and how the lack of transparency helped it become a pandemic in the first place. The China Story Yearbook 2020: Crisis surveys the multiple crises of the year of the Metal Rat, including the catastrophic mid-year floods that sparked fears about the stability of the Three Gorges Dam. It looks at how Chinese women fared through the pandemic, from the rise in domestic violence to portraits of female sacrifice on the medical front line to the trolling of a famous dancer for being childless. It also examines the downward-spiralling Sino-Australian relationship, the difficult 'co-morbidities' of China's relations with the US, the end of 'One Country, Two Systems' in Hong Kong, the simmering border conflict with India, and the rise of pandemic-related anti-Chinese racism. The Yearbook also explores the responses to crisis of, among others, Daoists, Buddhists, and humourists — because when all else fails, there's always philosophy, prayer, and laughter.
