how do you write an informative essay about the effects of globalization in china

A changing nation: the effects of globalisation on China

Finding opportunity in change.

China is rapidly becoming the new champion of economic cooperation, trade and globalisation. As others retreat from the forefront, Chinese businesses are looking to expand and grow into all corners of the world.

China and globalisation are no strangers. The process has been happening for a long time, and it is essential that any business looking to break into China combines a global strategy combined with a market specific approach.

As the global economy shifts its focus towards China, new opportunities for businesses to enter the Chinese market are emerging. In other words, the impact of globalisation on China’s economic growth is already being felt. China is rapidly becoming the new champion of economic cooperation, trade and globalisation. As others retreat from the forefront, Chinese businesses are looking to expand and grow into all corners of the world.

A Chinese globalisation case study worth following is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), devised by China’s premier Xi Jinping, which focuses on connecting the vast array of countries that sit within the region. It’s one of the reasons for the growth of globalisation in China, and this Chinese led trade network enables large, medium and small enterprises to realise their potential and trade more simply and expansively around Asia.

While businesses are eager to take to the world stage and reap the benefits of globalisation in China, they remain cautious of outsiders. Ensuring you are culturally sensitive will offset some of this reticence and businesses of any size must appreciate that Chinese business culture does not follow western norms.

Businesses that wish to be successful in China need to not only consider the business culture , but also how regulations and political policies are shaped by that culture.

The shift towards protectionist attitudes that we have seen in some key markets are examples of western politics negatively affecting the global ambitions of Chinese businesses. It is actually in spite of this that the outlook is still positive and demonstrates the resilience of Chinese businesses. (Another good globalisation case study for China is Huawei, which shows this resilience and continues to expand its global market share).   

Businesses that wish to be successful in China need to not only consider the business culture, but also how regulations and political policies are shaped by that culture. Building trust is key, as is working with local partners who understand the local landscape. It is imperative in Chinese business to show you are trying to work towards a mutually beneficial outcome.

Many influencers are starting to question whether if in China globalisation is causing business culture to separate from tradition – and if so, the impact this would have on established business practice. When considering the Chinese way of thinking, illustrated by the value of “people-oriented” methods, some may argue that business is detaching itself from people. However, the current issue businesses must confront, in the face of deglobalisation, is how to maintain a balance when dealing with global development on one hand, and a global populous that is becoming increasingly sceptical of international business. The prosperity of a country and the businesses within it can, in itself, be seen as people-oriented, but only if Chinese society believes the spoils of globalisation are shared. 

Protectionism may bring short term benefits but the global economy would suffer if the flow of capital and business were less dynamic. One should not react by shutting out outsiders. As the ideas of reciprocity and benevolence indicate, cooperation is a better way to succeed. As businesses large and small continue to look abroad for growth, it has become more important than ever to realise the power of diversity.

So, with all these considerations in mind, how has globalisation affected China? The answer might be that while globalisation has boosted expansion and interaction within political, economic and cultural terms, it has also brought friction and conflict – which foreign businesses can help to assuage through understanding working practices in China.

Crucially, businesses must keep in mind that China is seeing a divergence between its generations. The young are more aware of the outside world and often more tolerant of different people and values. On the other hand, the older generations in China do not have much experience of the rest of the world, but they appreciate people who try to become more informed and understand Chinese culture. At the same time, as the younger Chinese look outwards, so does the Government, and it is this shift in perceptions that presents the greatest opportunity for businesses to work in partnership with the Chinese. To become a global business player, one needs to be a global thinker first.

With this in mind, the Chinese way of conducting business is likely to become even more relevant, particularly as the previous instigators of global cooperation opt to retreat from the forefront of an increasingly connected world. Thus, while it is still not clear what direction China and globalisation are taking in respect of each other, and it remains unclear what shape plans such as the BRI will take, we are in a position where understanding the Chinese way of doing business is crucial not only for being successful in China, but also the wider world.

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China Is Globalization's Greatest Success Story. Can the Good Times Last?

This photo taken on April 17, 2018 shows a worker checking steel pipes at a factory in Zouping in China's eastern Shandong province. (AFP/Getty Images)

On May 10, Ian Bremmer will discuss his new book with Asia Society Policy Institute President Kevin Rudd at Asia Society in New York. The event will be available via live webcast at 8:30 a.m. New York time. Learn more

During Donald Trump 's successful campaign for the U.S. presidency in 2016, he regularly disparaged "globalists" who, he argued, had robbed the United States of its national wealth and sovereignty. Though Trump's victory is often seen as a sui generis event, one only possible in a celebrity-saturated culture like America's, his attacks on globalization are hardly unique worldwide: Britain's exit from the European Union and rising authoritarianism in once-stalwart democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary have each derived, to a certain degree, from anger about globalization and economic elitism.

One country which has so far resisted this trend is China, which should probably come as little surprise — arguably no major economy in the world has benefited more from globalization. But Ian Bremmer , one of America's most trenchant geopolitical analysts, says that the rest of the world cannot afford to rely on Beijing to sustain the global economy forever. In this excerpt from his new book Us Vs. Them: The Failures of Globalism , Bremmer explains why China's remarkable success story may soon encounter serious roadblocks.

Here is globalization’s greatest success story.

China’s rise can be measured in many ways, but the most impressive number is the 700 million people that state-led reform has lifted from poverty over the past four decades. In 1986, China’s per capita GDP was $282. In 2016, it climbed above $8,100. The country’s middle class represented 4 percent of the population in 2002 and 31 percent in 2013.  For the future, the Communist Party leadership says it can educate enough people, create enough jobs, stoke enough growth, and provide enough health care to boost 50 million more from the lowest income brackets by 2020. Despite predictions from many people over many years that a crash of China’s economy is long overdue, the world’s biggest emerging market and its aspirations remain aloft.

Yet, for a variety of reasons — all of them inevitable — the country’s growth rates continue to slow, and its gains are under pressure. The 2008–2010 financial crisis in the West made clear to China’s leaders that they must move more urgently to relieve the country’s dependence for growth on the willingness of U.S. and European consumers to buy China’s cheaply made manufactured goods. To lock in long-term economic stability, China needs to build and bolster its own middle class, one that can afford to buy much more of those factory-made consumer products. Success has pushed Chinese wages higher. But as pay rises, China loses the advantage that brought so many foreign companies to the country in the first place. Even Chinese companies have begun to move production to poorer countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, where labor is cheaper. Higher wages can’t help you if you don’t have a job.

Further, the problem of inequality has been growing for years. Even as hundreds of millions have climbed the ladder, the wealth gap has grown larger between the low-income population still trapped in the countryside, the new middle class, and the now superrich. The Gini coefficient has risen dramatically (from 0.27 in 1984 to 0.42 in 2010), but even that large jump probably doesn’t capture the true scale of the problem. Statistical fraud at different levels of government undermines confidence in numbers we know are politically sensitive. We can be sure that the coastal regions of China are far richer than the interior and that, even by the standards of other developing countries, the gap between urban and rural wealth is large and growing.

Then there is the poisoned air and water, the bitter product of decades of surging economic growth. The statistics have become sadly familiar. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection has reported that two-thirds of China’s groundwater and one-third of its surface water are unfit for human contact of any kind. Toxins and garbage ensure that almost half the country’s rivers fall into this category. Estimates are that air pollution kills more than one million Chinese people per year.

In addition, the country’s social safety net remains a massive work in progress as China’s population gets old faster than anywhere else in the world, leaving fewer and fewer workers to produce the wealth needed to pay for care for the elderly. In 1980, the median age, the point that divides a population into two numerically equal halves, was 22.1 years in China and 30.1 years in the United States. A UN study has estimated that, by 2050, the median age will be 40.6 in the United States and 46.3 in China. In the 1990s, China introduced a program called the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme, or Dibao, to provide small amounts of money to the poorest people. More recent projects designed to boost incomes for people living in the countryside have reached hundreds of millions of people but with payouts too small to meet the most basic needs, particularly of the elderly. Automation will help China avoid a sharp fall in productivity as its population ages, but it will be years before we know what that means for China’s social safety net and the government’s ability to finance it.

China has important advantages, particularly over other developing countries. First, its system of higher education is improving quickly and in ways that may help make the transition to a world of sharply expanded automation and artificial intelligence. According to annual rankings published by U.S. News & World Report in 2017, China is now home to four of the world’s top 10 engineering schools. (The United States also has four.) Each year, China now graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs. 300,000) in the subjects of math, science, engineering, and technology.

In addition, while India is uniquely diverse, the dominance of the majority Han Chinese population, which represents more than 90 percent of China’s total population, creates social homogeneity in the country’s most prosperous and influential cities and provinces. The lack of any viable leadership alternative to the Chinese Communist Party reinforces stability. It’s also fortunate that China’s senior leaders understand many of the country’s challenges very well — and that the party’s long-term survival depends on meeting them. No government has been more effective since 1980 in advancing reforms that expand prosperity. A serious effort is being made to tackle corruption, pollution, lack of access to education and decent medical care, wealth inequality, product (particularly food) safety, and the need for a stronger safety net.

Though the Chinese leadership has said plenty about the positive impact that the large-scale introduction into the workplace of automation and artificial intelligence will have on China’s economy, it has said and done little to address the enormous economic, social, and (perhaps) political turmoil it’s bound to create. Remember that the World Bank has estimated that automation and innovations in machine learning threaten 77 percent of all existing jobs in China. That’s a major disruption in the lives of hundreds of millions of people, particularly in the country’s most crowded cities. As Chris Bryant and Elaine He wrote in January 2017, “It took 50 years for the world to install the first million industrial robots. The next million will take only eight, according to Macquarie. Importantly, much of the recent growth happened outside the U.S., in particular in China, which has an aging population and where wages have risen.” China, they note, is installing a much bigger absolute number of industrial robots than any other country on earth.

It’s all the more remarkable, then, that China’s political leaders say they’re determined to embrace the tech revolution with both arms and as quickly as possible, with little public discussion of, or preparation for, massive job losses that can’t be avoided. Instead, the government has focused almost exclusively on building China’s competitive edge in robot manufacturing. In China’s carefully controlled political system, there are no civil society organizations warning of this oncoming wave.

Xi Jinping’s government will push hard to improve education for high-tech jobs, since China faces major shortages of high-skilled tech workers in semiconductors, robotics, and artificial intelligence. But there are also shortages of qualified teachers and open university slots, leaving huge numbers of workers with a fast-narrowing set of work options.

Failure to protect rising middle classes from crime, corruption, and contaminated food, air, and water, along with failure to care for the unemployed, sick, and elderly, creates a profoundly dangerous situation for China. But it is the extreme disruption of the workforce and massive loss of jobs that could push tens or hundreds of millions back toward poverty that might prove an entirely new kind of threat to the country’s stability and its future.

China has some obvious advantages. It’s the one government that, at least for now, can afford to spend huge amounts of money to create unnecessary jobs to avoid political unrest. China’s historic successes suggest this might be the one country that can find a way to adjust, and the aging of its population could be a plus as the country needs fewer jobs in coming years than rival India. We all better hope so, because, month by month, the entire global economy is becoming more dependent on China’s continued stability and growth.

Excerpted from Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism by Ian Bremmer, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Ian Bremmer, 2018.

China’s role in the next phase of globalization

Globalization has been a powerful force for economic growth. Research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that the movement of goods, services, finance, data, and people across borders adds to GDP and fuels productivity growth —and China has been one of the world’s major beneficiaries. The nation’s period of double-digit GDP growth in the mid-2000s was fueled by even faster growth in the flow of goods in and out of China. As exports surged from just $257 billion in 2000 to $2.4 trillion in 2016, China became the world’s top exporter.

But while globalization accelerates growth, it also amplifies inequality and disruption. Across 25 advanced economies, some two-thirds of households experienced stagnating or declining income from 2005 to 2014—all while watching the wealthiest few in their countries realize tremendous gains. This growing inequality  has spawned a political backlash, with calls for protectionism and immigration restrictions gaining traction in many countries. This path could have damaging consequences in a world still struggling to jump-start growth.

Policy makers are now being challenged to preserve the benefits of globalization while addressing its negative externalities. Although inequality is a largely a question of domestic policy, there is also work to be done at the international level. The world needs to bring new urgency and innovation to the task of helping workers adjust to fast-moving labor-market shifts, whether caused by foreign competition or automation technologies . Additional priorities include broadening participation in the digital economy, launching infrastructure projects  that can boost global demand and productivity, and improving global governance of cross-border investment and digital flows. Innovations fostered in one part of the world need to make their way to the broader global populations who stand to benefit.

Would you like to learn more about the McKinsey Global Institute ?

This MGI discussion paper outlines opportunities for China to exert global leadership in these areas, such as directing its considerable research capacity to shared scientific challenges and marshaling an effort to bring the entire world online. The nation also can continue to put its capital and expertise into global infrastructure projects, building on the momentum of the One Belt, One Road initiative . More broadly, China can bridge the perspectives of developing and advanced economies within multilateral institutions.

The erosion of support for globalization poses real risks for China, whose economic prospects are deeply intertwined with its integration into world markets. China has articulated its desire to champion a more sustainable and inclusive version of globalization, and now the world will be watching its follow-up actions. With some advanced economies turning inward, the future of globalization may depend on whether China throws its considerable weight behind a new approach.

Lola Woetzel is a director of the McKinsey Global Institute, where Jeongmin Seong is a senior fellow and Anu Madgavkar and Susan Lund are partners; Diaan-Yi Lin is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Singapore office.

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Globalization’s Impact on China and the USA Essay

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In the following essay a socio-economic profile will be made of two countries and will be discussed that how does globalization effect those countries. China and America have been selected for the discussion of globalization because they are the leaders in today’s world of the economic activities. China and America have the largest population among all the countries of the world, China on the number one place and America on number third. The table drawn below gives all the necessary economic and population based information about both the countries. In the following essay those issues of the both countries will be discussed which are the challenge of most of the families and how does globalization is related to it.

The term “Globalization” is widely used but hardly ever defined. Globalization is basically the rapid raise in the economic activities which take place across the national boundaries. Globalization assists in expanding the economical and social linkages worldwide which in fact increases the flow of information and contributes significantly towards spreading of economic benefits. It basically means economies getting interrelated with another through transportation, trade etc. It is a universal definition which explains what the term commonly means but still its meaning has raised a lot of debates and most of the time people do not agree.

It revolves around variety of processes which may vary in their definitive analysis. Globalization has a negative sphere among the critiques of capitalism and global injustice. Globalization is a very complex matter and its definitions vary in different areas. The term globalization is biased and its definitions express varying evaluations of global change (Sociology emory, 2001). Globalization contributes in the downfall of the poor across the globe but this only happens if the governments do not apply the correct policies when globalizing.

There are number of countries those who have failed the globalization process and any country which is about to start the globalizing process, than it is very necessary for them to look at those countries who have failed in this process and not to repeat the mistakes as the other countries made. If a country is globalizing, than it is very necessary for that country to take decisions very carefully. In today’s world, avoiding globalization is next to impossible because if any country tries to do so than there are many chances of that country to end up the same as Sub-Saharan Africa.

China is an agro based country but still the way they are taking over everything they can get is something which can’t be understood. There was a generation gap in China from 1960 – 1980 which could be the biggest reason of globalization in China. This generation gap caused a lot of problems for the people. In 1979, one child policy was implemented. No one could give birth to more than one child and if somebody went against then they faced problems including fines and social discrimination by the people who employed them. Whereas those couples who accepted this policy and agreed to having only one child then they were rewarded with bonuses, bigger homes etc (Tian, 2010)

This one child implemented policy may have helped china in controlling the population at that time but surely damaged the Chinese if we link it to the globalization. This was a democratic policy by the government of china commonly known as DINK, double income, no kids. It meant that if any couple will not have kids than their pays will be doubled. Because of this policy, Chinese stopped giving birth which is the cause of the generation gap which has been built in China (Loveless & Holman, 2001, p. 103).

There is a huge age difference between the old ones and the young ones which brings a communication barrier between them. Imperialism has become a part of China’s culture, the younger generation has been attracted by the western trends that they have started to adopt almost every western culture. Due to this generation gap the older generation is not able to compete with the development of today’s world which is the biggest drawback of the Chinese people that they were not able to connect with the world. Policies are being made to remove the DINK policy but whatever damage is done, it can’t be changed. Applying this policy was the biggest mistake because it damaged the country from globalization but the work which younger generation of china has done is immense and because of them China has become a part of the super powers.

Even in the developed countries racism is found in today’s world as well. Racism in America is a lot. Two different communities are formed by the citizens, one being the white people and the other black people. Black communities have been complaining from over decades now that they do not get their right which is quite true. The solution for them to be successful in today’s world is not to protest for it but to get good education for their future generations and to accept the changes which are taking place in today’s world (Dudley & Cozic, 1991).

The most authoritative trend of our time is globalization. Almost every multinational company has become a part of this process. Countries like America have many multinational companies and these are easily able to earn more than a country does. America being the developed nations of all but still there are parts of America which do get affected by the process of globalization. For example Puerto Rica in South America is affected by globalization where black people working Del Monte banana plantations have been complaining for a while now.

They say that the working and living conditions are just too dangerous for them. After the few months employees are usually fired because they are not able to cope with the requirements and this all happens because of the fields in which pesticides are sprayed without any warning which become a cause of different diseases. This Industry is not giving the workers its complete rights and not treating them the way they should be.

Black America not responding to globalization has also caused major problems for it. Everyone in today’s world is accepting globalization but the Black America is not ready to accept it. Globalization is a very complex matter, it can turn out to be good for a nation but it can be worse for the other nations as well. Educating the Black community of and sending them to American schools without any motive has come into a bad situation. Black people blindly depended on the education system of America has made them fall very much behind.

The Black people need to bring a change in their lives and they have to accept the process of globalization which has become a part of every country. It will become very difficult for the countries to prosper in those areas where black communities live. Education is the basic need of every black person from the black community if they want to succeed in this world. The education systems for the black communities of all over the world should be made better so that black communities are not left behind while the others march forward to success. Success only comes to those people who are ready to accept a change for their betterment. Black people also need to accept the process of globalization if they want to become a successful community (Jackson, 2010).

The UN is trying to find solutions for the kinds of problem discussed above; Millennium Development Goals also called MDGs are set of goals which are made by them for the progress of different communities till a future date. Many of them have been achieved but many are yet to be. MDGs might be able to solve these problems which we have discussed throughout this essay, that how does globalization effect both of these countries and to conclude this discussion, it can be rightly said that globalization which is spreading day by day might be a good thing for the countries to get integrated but still there are some points which require the need of being highlighted.

Globalization is causing a lot of problems for the developing nations in different areas, some of which were mentioned in this essay yet there are many other issues which are not being heard. There is an urgent need of finding a solution for the kind of issues which were discussed above. If a country does not wishes to end up same as the other countries that did not take this route and are regretting now than that country is in need of globalization but with the right kind of policies set by the governments.

Business Maps of India. (2011). Effect of Globalization on Indian Poverty Level . Web.

CIA. (2011). China – Country Profile . Web.

CIA. (2011). United States – Country Profile . Web.

Dhanaseeli, D., & Thatheyus, J. (2003). Globalization of Rural Poor. Eubios Journal of Asian and Internation Bioethics 13 , 63-65.

Dudley, W., & Cozic, C. (1991). Racism in America. Michigan: Greenhaven Press.

Jackson, P. (2010). The Big Divide . Web.

Loveless, S., & Holman, T. (2001). The Family in the New Millennium: the place of family in human society. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Mehta, P. (2004). Lessons on Globalization from India . Web.

Sociology emory. (2001). Globalization issues . Web.Tian, C. (2010). Generation Gap in 1960-1980 in China . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, June 25). Globalization's Impact on China and the USA. https://ivypanda.com/essays/globalizations-impact-on-china-and-the-usa/

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Tracing the history of modern globalisation in China

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A Sino-British project is examining the history of China’s first age of modern globalisation, enabling China and Britain to rediscover their interconnected past.

The ‘in-between’ nature of the Customs, at the interface between China and the rest of the world, has provided a remarkable opportunity to examine how globalisation played out in the century before China was closed off from the rest of the world in the 1950s.

Walking through the streets of Shanghai today, you see a city full of dynamism, enterprise and quirky creativity, a ‘must visit’ place that draws talents from across China and the rest of the world. Yet, in the mid-1980s you would have been struck by the fact that the former ‘Paris of the East’ seemed a gothic ruin, a melancholy reminder of a past that China had turned against after the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s recent rapid take-off into globalisation, only a few short years after Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s successor, instituted the policy of ‘reform and open up’, shows that China was never entirely a closed country. History shows that wave after wave of foreign goods, people and ideas have rolled into China, been absorbed, and in turn have transformed its economy, patterns of consumption, lifestyles, imaginative life, architecture and spatial organisation.

Professor Hans van de Ven, Chair of the University’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, has been researching a key resource in tracing the history of modern globalisation in China: the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. In its almost century-long history between 1853 and 1950, the Customs Service kept records detailing how the key globalising commodities of the time – opium, sugar, kerosene, tobacco and arms – spread through China and were taken up differently in its regions. This little-studied institution was at the heart of China’s encounter with globalisation in the years between the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and the Communist assumption of power. The ‘in-between’ nature of the Customs, at the interface between China and the rest of the world, has provided a remarkable opportunity to examine how globalisation played out in the century before China was closed off from the rest of the world in the 1950s.

Seeded by a serendipitous encounter

In the late 1990s, while Professor van de Ven was studying documents at the Second Historical Archives of China in Nanjing, a chance conversation with Vice-Director Ma Zhendu led to him hearing about the recent acquisition of 55,000 files from the Customs that had just arrived by train from various parts of China. Out of this has grown a fruitful collaborative project involving historians in China and Britain that continues today.

Initial funding for the project came from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, an organisation for international scholarly exchange that supports and promotes the understanding of Chinese culture and society overseas. This allowed the cataloguing of all 55,000 files in the archives; an effort that took a team of four Chinese archivists four years to conclude. Professor van de Ven and his collaborator, Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol, simultaneously compiled databases from Customs data on China’s international trade, wages and arms trade. In 2003, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Major Research Grant allowed the employment of a research assistant and the recruitment of two PhD students. The project is now in full swing, with a website in operation( www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs ), monographs being produced, guides to the archives being completed, databases in the final stages of verification, and 350 reels of microfilms now published to enable researchers worldwide to make use of the archives.

A unique institution in Sino-British history

The Customs was founded in Shanghai at the time when the Taiping Rebellion against the authority of the Qing government raged inland, and a local uprising drove Qing Dynasty officials out of the city in 1853. Bound by treaty obligations to ensure that foreign merchants fulfilled their tax obligations, the British, French and US consuls stepped in. They established a foreign board for the local Customs Stations to enforce trade tariffs. Although intended as a temporary measure, out of this small beginning grew a huge organisation whose influence rippled out across China and to the rest of the world.

The Customs managed nearly 60 harbours along China’s coast and rivers; collected about a third of the entire national revenue; established China’s national postal service; financed China’s legations abroad; assembled its contributions to international fairs and exhibitions; funded a Quarantine Service to protect China from pandemics; formed China’s coastguard and railroad police; and supported scholarly enterprises such as the translation of Western textbooks on political economy and international law.

Unique in many ways, the Customs was the only integrated national bureaucracy that continued to function through the many civil wars and foreign invasions that preceded the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Although the Customs was always a Chinese organisation, foreigners dominated its upper echelons in rough proportion to a country’s significance in their trade with China. As Britain was the dominant trade partner, the Head of the Customs was British until the final few years of the institution, when it was led by an American. A cosmopolitan mix of French, British, Russian, German and Japanese staff worked together in the Customs, even as their countries went to war elsewhere or their armies invaded China.

Researching the files has yielded details of the complex roles that the foreigners performed within the institution. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Sir Robert Hart, the Head at the time, secured the food supply to the city and effectively knocked foreign and Chinese heads together to end the fighting and restore central administration, thus helping to prevent the country’s dismemberment. (Unfortunately, he also negotiated an indemnity that crippled China financially for many years.)

The Customs was a pillar of foreign privilege in China, but China’s rulers also used ‘foreigners to control foreigners’, establishing Customs Stations with foreign Commissioners along China’s borders as bulwarks against foreign encroachment. Because of this role, Custom Houses appeared in some rather odd places, including along the mountainous border with Burma and the arid deserts of Xinjiang, as well as between Chinese and Japanese frontlines deep in inland China during the 1937–1945 War of Resistance against Japan.

More than a collector of taxes

The Customs was always much more than just a tax collection agency. It was well informed about local conditions, deeply involved in local, provincial and national politics, and also in international affairs. To some extent, its influence is still felt today. China’s Custom Houses and lighthouses often occupy the same place as those before 1949, sometimes still operating from the same buildings. Hosea Ballou Morse, one of the Chinese Customs Commissioners, and his wife were avid botanists whose samples continue to enrich Kew Gardens and helped make China’s flora popular in Britain. Many foreign Customs officials learned Chinese, wrote on Chinese history and translated Chinese books, some of which are still read today. As Chinese Studies became established as an academic discipline, universities around the world recruited Customs scholars: indeed, the founder of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Sir Thomas Wade, was the first Professor of Chinese at Cambridge. By tapping into the vast resources of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, this research project is casting a fascinating historical perspective on the history of globalisation in China.

For more information, please contact the author Professor Hans van de Ven: ( [email protected] ) at the Department of East Asian Studies, or see the project website ( www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs ), which was created by Professor Robert Bickers and hosts research tools and publications.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence . If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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China’s Rise, World Order, and the Implications for International Business

• Research Article
• Published: 03 March 2021
• Volume 61 , pages 1–26, ( 2021 )

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• Robert Grosse   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2239-5555 1 ,
• Jonas Gamso 1 &
• Roy C. Nelson 1  

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It is increasingly clear that China’s economic and political power rivals that of the US. This is potentially a serious problem for multinational companies, since China’s rise could lead to more US–China trade conflict and disruption of supply chains, threatening new and ongoing foreign direct investment, and drawing other countries into the jostling for power. However, we argue that globalization is not necessarily endangered by China’s emergence as a comparable power to the US. The US and China both have vested interests in maintaining the open economic order, and these two countries are each providing the global public goods that incentivize economic openness among other countries of the world. In this paper, we develop a theory corresponding to this argument and provide evidence that globalization has not declined even as the global distribution of power has shifted. While global integration is likely to persist, disruptive skirmishes between the US and China will occur with some regularity. Therefore, we suggest that international company strategies today should focus more on risk management related to policy shifts stemming from China’s rise and less on achieving least-cost global supply chains. We present a risk management framework for this purpose.

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Introduction

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Scholars and commentators increasingly see China as a global superpower (Anngang 2012; Cao and Paltiel 2015 ; Fish 2017 ) and China’s rise is widely understood to be ushering in a new global power distribution (Maher 2016 ; Shifrinson 2018 ; Tunsjø 2018 ; Zeng and Breslin 2016 ; Xuetong 2019 ). Footnote 1 China has the world’s second largest economy, trailing only the United States (International Monetary Fund 2020 ). It was the world’s leading exporter and second largest importer in 2018, the last year for which data were available (World Bank 2020a ), and its foreign aid provision and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) have also grown over the last decade (Dreher et al. 2018 ; Kolstad and Wiig 2012 ; Wang and Zhao 2017 ). Accompanying China’s economic rise has been an escalating assertiveness geopolitically (Liao 2018 ) that reflects China’s growing hard power (Robertson and Sin 2017 ; Tayloe 2017 ) and soft power capabilities (Shambaugh 2015 ).

In short, there is now a strong case to be made that the world has entered an era in which the US and China are approximately equally powerful. This is a marked contrast from the post-World War II era, during which the US dominated in the realms of economy, security, and technology (Ikenberry 2005 ). China’s emergence as a comparable power to the US raises concerns, since “realist” international relations theory suggests that such a trend will lead to a collapse of globalization as countries reject economic openness in favor of economic nationalism (Mearsheimer 2019 ). In contrast, we argue that China’s rise does not have to result in reduced international economic integration, and so we present a first research proposition to explore this issue:

Proposition 1:

China’s rise will not promote de-globalization, though it will lead to jostling for power between the US and China .

There has been a rise of political nationalism in the latter half of the 2010s (Snyder 2019 ). This has been accompanied by some degree of economic protectionism (Fajgelbaum et al. 2020 ), raising alarms among business leaders (Edgecliffe-Johnson and Waldmeir 2018 ). Much has also been made of the ongoing US–China trade war and hostility by US leadership toward the international institutions tasked with supporting economic globalization (Brown and Irwin 2019 ). However, these concerns may be overblown, as world tariff levels remain low by historical standards (Russ 2019 ), international trade and investment remain at or near their peaks, and the incoming Biden Administration may be more supportive economic globalization.

In fact, there are significant reasons to suspect that China’s rise will not usher in an era of protectionism and deglobalization. In the analysis that follows, we theorize that a world order in which China and the United States constitute a “G-2” can be conducive to the continuation of global economic integration. Maintaining a relatively open world economy is in the national interests of both of these countries. For that reason, both have committed themselves to international and regional economic agreements to help sustain that outcome. As long as both the US and China see the maintenance of the globalized world as being in their interest, each will adhere to the norms supporting globalization and help those norms to endure. In this sense, as we will explain further below, they will act as “ dual hegemons.” As we demonstrate in our analysis, the evidence supports this expectation, such that economic globalization has persisted even as China has become a superpower on (or near) par with the United States.

Even so, China’s rise and the changing global power dynamics that are accompanying it carry significant risks for international business. The new order brings changes to the nature of globalization: Skirmishes between China and the US may disrupt supply chains, threaten new and existing FDI, and include the establishment of new trade barriers. While we do not expect these changes and conflicts to cause a decline in net global integration, we argue that multinational firms need to evaluate and manage the risks that will occur as a result of changes in the nature of globalization.

Just dealing with China has been a risk for foreign businesses, because of the Chinese government’s protectionist tendencies. For example, China requires foreign auto manufacturers to have local partners with at least 50% ownership, as with Volkswagen and GM in their joint ventures with Shanghai Automotive. The government has also shown its disapproval of moving information across borders, as in the case of Amazon Web Services being essentially shut out of the market, and Google and Facebook being severely restricted and banned, respectively. And these policies predate the China–US trade war, which further threatens US-based businesses in China as well as Chinese business going overseas, particularly to the United States. The trade war has resulted in tariffs being imposed on a wide range of products, from steel and aluminum imports into the US to agricultural products exported from the US to China.

While the recent US–China trade tensions are likely to die down, the emerging world order is sure to create more frequent risks for companies engaging in international business, making risk management a priority going forward. A risk management strategy can be sketched broadly by looking at the methods available to MNEs for this purpose. Companies can explore the establishment of production and distribution facilities located outside of the two main protagonist countries. For example, electronics could be assembled in Vietnam or in Thailand rather than only in China; and Mexico or Colombia could be used for additional assembly of electronics, autos, and textiles. Companies also can diversify their business activities such as sales and input purchases into additional countries, again to reduce the dependence on the two main protagonists. A wide range of steps could be taken to mitigate the risks, from the use of insurance contracts for insurable risks to partnering with local companies in the US and China to reduce the liability of foreignness. So, we present a second research proposition:

Proposition 2:

MNEs need to develop risk management strategies to deal with the US-China competition that will occasionally produce trade barriers and other policy interventions .

The remainder of our analysis proceeds as follows. In Sect. 2 , we discuss China’s rise and demonstrate that US and China are approximately equally powerful hegemons. Next, in Sect. 3 , we introduce our theory, which posits that global economic integration will persist through an era in which China and the United States are each global superpowers, drawing on theories of international relations. In Sect. 4 , we present the evidence so far, which suggests that little shift in global economic engagement can be attributed to China’s rise. In Sect. 5 , we discuss in more detail the implications for multinational enterprise (MNE) strategies and we lay out a framework for managing this geopolitical risk. Finally, we note challenges to long-term stability in a world with two global superpowers.

2 Changing Power Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century

China’s rise is, perhaps, the single most important economic and political phenomenon in the twenty-first century. It has implications for global security (Toje 2018 ), for international development (Gallagher and Porzecanski 2010 ; Lin 2018 ), for global governance (Beeson and Li 2016 ; Economy 2018 ), and for human rights (Gamso 2019 ), among other things. While China’s status in international trade is especially noteworthy, it is also growing by other measures of international power. China’s growing clout in international production and financial markets are evident in terms of its global leadership in overall manufacturing, in the offshore assembly of electronics and textiles, and its growing financial leadership through owning the world’s four largest banks. China is also growing in global leadership through development of new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the recently signed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and its Belt and Road initiative (Soong 2018 ). The Belt and Road scope is pictured in Fig.  1 .

One (land) belt and one (ocean) road initiative. Source: OECD 2018 , p. 11

In terms of total market size, China is nearly as large as the US and much larger than any other country, whether measured in current dollars or in purchasing power parity dollars. In 2019, US GDP was $US 21.4 trillion, while Chinese GDP was $US 14.1 trillion in nominal terms and in purchasing power parity terms, Chinese GDP was $US 27 billion. In terms of company competitiveness, China had 119 Fortune Global 500 companies and the US had 121 in 2019. In terms of innovation, measured as R&D spending in the country, the US led the world by far with spending of $US 581 billion in 2018, while China was second with $US 293 billion, and both countries were far ahead of the third leader, which was Japan at $US 193 billion. Footnote 2 Table 1 presents a comparison of China and the US in terms of some key economic/business indicators.

China has also modernized the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in order to counter potential invasion (Montgomery 2014 ), while asserting its dominance over the South China Sea (Morton 2016 ; Thayer 2011 ; Turcsányi 2018 ). Likewise, China has become a major producer of science and technology, owing to public investment in the sciences such as the 2006 Medium to Long Term Program of Science and Technology (MLP) and Made in China 2025 initiative (Cao et al. 2006 ; McBride and Chatzky 2019 ; Xie et al. 2014 ). Taken together, this expansion of Chinese power suggests the emergence of a new world order, in which there is a roughly equal distribution of power between the United States and China.

While the US and China are rivals on some political issues (Scobell 2018 ), they do not necessarily have different visions for the global economy, as both operate open economic policy regimes, even with some significant differences in structure (for example, China has many more state-owned companies than the handful in the US). Moreover, there is an economic symbiosis, in which each country offers features that are helpful to the other. China offers low-cost manufacturing capabilities that complement US design of manufactured goods and a market for selling them. The US offers manufactured goods that are not made in China to the Chinese market, plus ones assembled in China but developed in the US, as well as primary products such as agricultural and mining goods, and also a wide range of services. And of course, the US offers China the world’s largest market for selling Chinese goods and services.

3 Global Stability in a Two-Hegemon World

The modern era of globalization coincided with the era of US hegemony, and US support for the global economic order was crucial for its success and its persistence. Despite occasional protectionist policies, the US offered global public goods that compelled other countries to trade and invest with the US and with one another (Kindleberger 1973 ). These public goods included the provision of global security, which reduced transaction costs for traders around the world, a large import market to absorb goods produced abroad, and lending facilities that helped to promote development and financial stability in developing countries, so long as those countries remained open to international trade and investment.

There were challengers to US dominance in the years after WWII, with the Soviet Union being especially noteworthy, but they were not ultimately able to match US power or to credibly challenge the open economic order that US leadership established after WWII. While the Soviet Union never presented a viable economic threat to US dominance of the capitalist global economy, its nuclear capabilities allowed the Soviet Union to present a military threat to the US that led to a bipolar balance of power in the years after WWII. The result was the Cold War, with tensions, hostilities, and sometimes outright minor skirmishes. But the overwhelming threat of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) if either side were to strike first deterred each country from engaging in more aggressive behavior, which prevented more major conflict from occurring (Brennan 1971 ; Schelling 1966 ).

As we have shown, China now, even more than the Soviet Union, is a viable challenger to US dominance, not just militarily, but economically as well. We argue, however, that just as the bipolar balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union led to a relatively stable outcome, albeit with significant tension and minor skirmishes, a similar outcome will prevail now between the US and China. These days it is not the threat of mutually assured destruction that prevents more aggressive behavior on both sides, but, as others have noted, the threat of “mutually assured recession” if either side were to engage in actions that could result in an outright trade war, or even worse, the destruction of the liberal economic order. For this reason, we expect both the US and China to provide support for globalization, even as they vie for global power.

3.1 A Theory of Dual Hegemonic Stability

According to the international relations theory of hegemonic stability in the tradition of Kindleberger ( 1973 ), the hegemon is understood to provide public goods that, in turn, encourage and facilitate economic openness among weaker countries. These public goods include an import market for producers around the world, lending facilities for countries in crisis, and international security, which reduces transaction costs for traders and investors. Kindleberger argued that public goods provision will become difficult where two or more states are bargaining with comparable leverage, due to collective action problems (Olson 1965 ). Thus, by his estimation, economic globalization will collapse as unipolarity wanes, much as it did in the early twentieth century.

However, scholars have noted that multiple states can provide public goods, should they see the benefits of doing so (Lake 1993 ; Snidal 1985 ). Within this context, it is perfectly plausible that China and the US can act as ‘dual hegemons’. We argue that to promote their own national interests, each will provide public goods that facilitate free trade, such as support for the multilateral trade regime, lending to countries in crisis, and providing large import markets. That said, in order for two states to provide public goods that advance the same outcome—that being an open global economic order—it is necessary that they both have a common perspective on how the global order should look and act. In other words, they must both support the international ‘regime’.

Krasner defined regimes as “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner 1983a , p. 2). As a Realist, Krasner argued that states pursuing their own self-interests could create and use regimes to help attain objectives that they perceived to be in their national interest, such as continued economic openness. For example, as the hegemon, the US persuaded other countries to become contracting parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) free trade regime, which required that they adhere to the GATT’s principles of reciprocity and non-discrimination in trade, encouraged them to use the GATT’s dispute settlement process to resolve contracts in a multilateral way, and commited them to regular ‘rounds’ or multi-year negotiations to reduce barriers to trade. This clearly served US national interests because it made US trade relations with other contracting parties to the GATT more stable, predictable, and open. Once the regime was established, however, it would exert an influence of its own on the behavior of countries that joined the regime, making it easier for them to comply with the rules of the open global economy for a time at least, even after the hegemon’s power declined (Krasner 1983b ).

Keohane used a modified version Realist rational actor model to explain why countries would continue to support the free trade regime even in the absence of US hegemony. He argued that as the relative power of the US diminished, countries that were part of the regime would continue to adhere to its rules, norms, and operating procedures, and it would continue to constrain their behavior, in part because it served the national interests of these governments to continue to belong to the regime (Keohane 1984 ). While Keohane agreed with the Realist view that countries would pursue their own national interests, he argued that this did not prevent them from cooperating in adhering to the trade regime, or even changing the rules in a cooperative way, if needed, to create a modified regime. Regimes could help reduce uncertainty about other governments’ actions, thereby creating an environment more conducive to cooperation. If countries had at least some idea about how their trading partners would behave, then it would be easier for them to perceive that cooperating with each other to maintain an open global economy could be more beneficial to their long-term, overall national interests than responding to every trade dispute with retaliation.

Building on these concepts, we argue the United States and China are today acting as dual hegemons . Both have benefited from economic globalization and now, to advance their own national interests, both are committed to the principles of free trade and open foreign investment, despite some deviations from those principles on both sides (e.g., Steinberg and Josling 2003 ; Wu 2017 ).

China began opening its economy to imports and FDI in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. China reaped the benefits of the free trade regime as it prospered in the 1980s and 1990s. For this reason, it sought officially to become a permanent and full-fledged member of the regime, a goal it fulfilled when it became a full member of WTO in 2001. In that step the country cemented its commitment to an open trade regime, while domestically the economy continued to open further to domestic private-sector businesses and foreign investors (Garnaut et al. 2018 ).

As China adopted the norms of the open international order founded by the US, it became a beneficiary of that system. Within this context, China should see benefits in bolstering the norms of the system under which it has flourished. Therefore, it would not be in China's interest to implement policies that could threaten the open economic order. Likewise, the US should similarly continue to support the system that it established and has led, since it has benefitted the US itself as well as the other members of the system. Therefore, neither China nor the United States should take actions that could threaten this situation, for example by causing a destructive trade war with each other. Of course, the trade war started by the Trump Administration has led to Chinese retaliation—but despite the verbal and political positioning, US-Chinese trade had not declined dramatically prior to COVID 19. Footnote 3

By the same token, both countries should take efforts to provide the sorts of public goods that promote the open economic order. This dual willingness and ability to provide the public good of supporting the global open economic system has been demonstrated by both the US and China. The US took on this role after World War II and has not renounced this position despite ups and downs of populism at various times along the way, especially after 9/11 and during the Trump Administration. China has continued to increase its openness over the years after 1978, and has demonstrated a willingness to support other countries in trade, finance and FDI through the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS Bank (now called the New Development Bank), and the Contingency Reserve Agreement.

The challenge to this system comes when one or both countries no longer see benefits to supporting it. The WTO can prevent protectionist backsliding by securing commitments to its rules and by providing a forum for governments to settle trade disputes. However, if one or both of the hegemonic powers renounce their obligations or take actions that significantly weaken the WTO, then there are few formal safeguards to prevent economic disputes from escalating into intensive protectionism. Worryingly, the Trump Administration has taken efforts to undermine the WTO and the multilateral trade regime more generally (Petersmann 2019 ; Skonieczny 2019), leading many scholars and analysts to declare the Post-WWII world order as dying or dead (Kagan 2017 ; Mearsheimer 2019 ; Walt 2016 ).

In practice, however, it is not clear that ‘Trumpism’ has undermined the global trading system. For example, his argument that “NAFTA is the worst trade deal ever” (e.g., Gandel 2016 ; The Economist 2017 ) led to its replacement by a renegotiated treaty (USMCA) in 2019 with very similar conditions, adding a higher local content requirement for automobile assembly and some additional labor protections. Likewise, Trump’s harsh criticism and rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 has been replaced by his effort to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with Japan and the continuation of existing bilateral treaties with other countries involved (e.g., Peru, Chile, and Australia). Additionally, in 2020 Gallup polls showed US people favor trade more than ever, suggesting that trade openness will persist going forward, Footnote 4 and the incoming Biden Administration is likely to show less overt hostility to the WTO or to existing US agreements.

At the same time China is opening up its financial services sector. New rules announced in January of 2020 allow foreign banks full ownership of their operations in China, and remove the limit on the size of their activities (Xinhuanet 2020 ). In March of that year, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were permitted to take majority ownership of their securities businesses in China (Yang 2020 ). China also has begun opening up the automobile market to foreign firms. In 2018 the Chinese government announced that electric vehicle production could be 100% foreign owned, and that by 2022 passenger vehicle production will be fully open to foreign ownership (Shirouzu and Jourdan 2018 ). In short, despite frictions between the two countries, openness to trade and investment have not declined in recent years. Footnote 5

Even if the US or China were to step back in their commitments to the WTO, there are hundreds of regional trade agreements (RTAs) that can fill the void in the multilateral trade regime left by a potentially weakened WTO (Murphy and McLarney 2018 ). RTAs began emerging in large numbers in the mid-1990s, as it became clear that successful WTO negotiations would be rare in the coming decades (Crawford and Laird 2001 ). These RTAs reduce tariffs between members, but also often provide many additional features that build upon existing WTO rules, such as robust intellectual property rights rules, dispute resolution mechanisms for trading partners, and investor protections (Hofmann et al. 2019 ). This patchwork of agreements covers even more countries than the WTO, and these agreements reinforce and even enhance WTO-level commitments. In doing so, they provide an extra guardrail against sharp protectionist backslides from the US, China, or other powerful states.

The US and Chinese economies are both reliant on economic globalization, with exports constituting approximately 12% of US GDP and 20% of China’s GDP in 2018. Moreover, these countries are highly dependent on one another, with the US being China’s largest import market and China being the US’s third largest import market (World Bank 2020a ). As noted previously, just as the fear of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) provided a deterrent to war between the US and the USSR during the bipolar cold war era, the fear of “mutually assured recession” today should prevent either the US or China from taking actions that threaten the open economic order.

For these reasons, we expect that economic globalization will not suffer the sort of downturn predicted by realist international relations scholars and other observers. Instead, commitments to international organizations and agreements, as well as the threat of economic harm, should lead the US and China to support the open economic order for the foreseeable future.

3.2 Changes to Globalization in an Era of Dual Hegemons

This is not, however, to say that the character of the open economic order cannot be altered. As noted above, the US and China waged a costly trade skirmish in 2019 and the US has recently focused on restricting the access of Chinese technology firms to the US market (Pham 2020 ). It seems likely that isolated disputes such as these will occur with some frequency in the future, as the US and China each seek to limit the other’s influence. The likely result will be selective decoupling, as China finds itself partially or entirely excluded from certain sectors in the US, and vice versa. This has important implications for US companies, which might be inclined to seek Chinese investment or to build supply chains through China. While these companies will surely still seek Chinese engagement, the likelihood that disputes will flair up periodically suggests that a more diversified strategy will be necessary, even if it increases costs.

It is also likely that China and the US will each take efforts to build strategic alliances with other countries, such as through the formation of trade and investment agreements. For example, the US has offered Mexico and Canada preferential access to its market through USMCA, while China has offered countries such as Japan, Thailand, and Australia preferential access to its market through RCEP. As noted above, these agreements promote economic integration, going beyond what is agreed upon through WTO, but they also can foster trade diversion (Dai et al. 2014 ). Trade agreements are typically exempt from most favored nation (MFN) rules in the WTO, and so the proliferation of agreements with China or the US will affect trade patterns in ways that distort existing trade relationships. For example, a country like Thailand may trade more with China than with the US, even in areas where the US actually has a comparative advantage to China, simply because Thailand gains preferential access to the Chinese market through RCEP.

An additional concern about trade agreements is that they may be constructed in ways that prevent partners from forming subsequent agreements with certain countries. For example, USMCA has a clause that prevents member countries from forming trade agreements with “non-market” economies, which implicitly refers to China (Scissors 2019 ). This clause, or others like it, could be used by the US in future agreements to prevent their partners from forming trade agreements with China, and China could include similar provisions in its subsequent trade agreements to prevent partners from forming trade agreements with the US. This will not have the effect of ending trade between any of the countries involved, but it will likely lead to further trade diversion as countries such as Canada and Mexico are unable to establish agreements with China to lower trade barriers. This has important implications for supply chains, as MNEs must seek suppliers with an eye to trade diverting effects of future trade and investment agreements.

4 Economic Globalization in an Era of Dual Hegemons

As discussed above, international relations theorists in the realist tradition predicted that a decline in global integration would accompany China’s rise and earlier work shows data appearing to support this prediction (Witt 2019 ). However, we show below that, despite the massive economic opening in China and increasing competition with the US for global economic leadership, economic globalization has remained quite stable. Consider Fig.  2 , which shows the trends in world trade since before China first opened its market, in 1978.

World exports and world GDP, 1960–2018

The figure shows that the growth of global trade has plateaued in the 2010s, but that it has not declined and that it remains at or near its peak. This is true whether we look at trade as a share of GDP, as Witt ( 2019 ) does, or if we simply look at trade volume independent of GDP. We believe that the latter measure is preferable, insomuch as trade growth may be obscured by faster growth in global GDP, as occurred in the 2014–2016 period. In any case, the figure clarifies that global trade has not declined, suggesting that deglobalization has not been occurring. Footnote 6

The major drop-offs in world trade growth since the early years of the Great Depression in the 1930s have been during World War II, and then, as shown in Fig.  2 , during the early 1980s emerging market debt crisis, as well as the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis, a global economic slowdown in 2016, and most recently during the Coronavirus crisis of 2020 (not shown). These events each had short-term impacts on globalization, but they did not lead to a sustained reduction in global trade (Coronavirus notwithstanding).

The 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis illustrates this point and, in the process, offers support for our dual hegemonic stability theory framework. Caused by a malfunction of the US financial system, in which banks and investors overexposed themselves to the real estate loan market and related derivatives, this crisis spread worldwide and caused a recession in many countries. Globalization did indeed decline for that brief period during the crisis. However, this decline proved short-lived, as the US government implemented policies to bolster the global financial system, while China began lending more money to countries around the world. Consistent with dual hegemonic stability, the two global leaders each provided global public goods that prevented what might otherwise have been a dramatic decline in globalization, akin to the one that occurred in the Great Depression.

The trend in trade regulation over time is similarly at odds with the deglobalization narrative. Looking at average tariffs of major trading countries, it is evident in Fig.  3 that tariff barriers have continued to fall, from an already low level, since China joined the WTO in 2001.

Tariff rates in major trading countries

Non-tariff barriers to international trade, such as import quotas and subsidization of domestic firms to fend off imports, as well as subsidization of exports, have also remained low during the twenty-first century.

While tariffs have decreased steadily overall, there have been exceptions. The US continues to impose restrictions on steel and auto imports, as has frequently been done since Lyndon Johnson imposed steel import quotas in 1969. Ronald Reagan imposed restrictive policies in 1981 (on autos) and 1984 (on steel). Subsequent US Presidents, from George W. Bush (in 2002) to Barack Obama (in 2015) have restricted steel imports with tariffs or quotas, often as a result of claims that foreign governments were unfairly subsidizing their steel exports. These examples suggest that the Trump Administration’s protectionism is not out of line with US policy in the past, contrary to suggestions that the Administration is leading a decline of the global economic order (Walt 2016 ). Of course, the Trump Administration has implemented its share of protectionism, such as the recent ban on Huawei from selling its telecom equipment in the United States, based on a claim that Huawei was supplying or could supply information about users of the telecom system to the Chinese military (Swanson 2020 ).

For its part, China also restricts auto imports with high tariffs and subsidies for domestic producers (including subsidiaries of foreign automakers). China also keeps foreign firms out of what they consider sensitive industries such as telecommunications, and they limit foreign financial services firms to a tiny market share in China. China restricts imports of several agricultural products, such as wheat and rice—just as the United States has done for decades. In short, while both countries have exceptions to a free trade policy, over half of the products imported into both countries enter without restrictions, with an overall average tariff of 1.6% in the US and 3.4% in China in 2019 (United States Trade Representative 2020 ; World Bank 2020a ).

Considering other measures of economic openness, FDI is often seen as an indicator of countries’ willingness to allow foreign business to operate locally. The growth of FDI after World War II has been more rapid than growth of GDP for most of the period. As shown in Fig.  4 , the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 was accompanied by a major downturn in FDI, and since then the growth of this investment has been volatile, though still positive overall. The key point with respect to globalization is that FDI has remained at or near its peak in the years since China emerged as a global power on-or-near par with the US.

Global and regional FDI inflows, 1970–2018

Likewise, global financial flows such as international portfolio investment and foreign exchange transactions have trended upward, albeit with considerable volatility and with a decline during the Global Financial Crisis. Foreign exchange transactions, mainly in London and New York, exceeded $6 trillion per day in 2019 compared with $1.2 trillion in 2001 (Bank for International Settlements 2019 ). Global portfolio investment grew at an average rate of 44% per year during the 2010s, but it has been very volatile, as shown in Fig.  5 . It is clear that globalization has not declined by these financial measures.

Source: World Bank 2020b

Cross-border portfolio investment, 1960–2018.

International immigration flows are another measure of economic openness, involving people as the factor that crosses borders. People and capital are generally viewed as the two mobile factors of production, while land is not. And final products and services also may or may not be mobile, as measured by trade flows. It is clear in Fig.  6 that global migration flows have not decreased during the 2010s, but rather they show an increasing rate since the turn of the century.

Source: de Haas et al. 2019 , p. 888. Authors' calculations based on the Global Migrant Origin Database (World Bank) (1960–1980 data) and UN Population Division Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2017 Revision (1990–2017 data)

International migration flows, 1960–2017.

The evidence presented in this section contests the deglobalization narrative, showing instead that the global flows of products, money, and people have increased in the twenty-first century and remain near their peaks, and supporting our Proposition 1 .

5 Dual Hegemonic Stability and International Business in the Twenty-First Century

While much of the discussion above has focused on macro indicators of international openness and government policies, it all relates to business, mostly to international business. Our principal measure of openness is the amount of trade and investment taking place, and of course it is companies that are carrying out those exports, imports and investments. International bank lending and foreign exchange are mainly carried out by multinational banks, operating principally in London and New York. Footnote 7 Likewise, some international movement of people occurs within multinational firms. These indicators all show positive growth trends in the twenty-first Century, even after the Global Financial Crisis.

From a business perspective, dual hegemonic stability means that countries will maintain an open market environment of the sort that has been demonstrated to attract FDI and also international trade (Ahlquist 2006; Büthe and Milner 2008; Gamso and Grosse 2020 ). In this context, global companies will continue to engage in trade and investment around the world and do not need to dramatically reorient themselves in response to, or in anticipation of, a wave of tariff hikes or other non-tariff barriers. Supply chains can continue to function and may even deepen as China’s Belt and Road projects bring more countries into the globalized economy. Companies around the world can also expect both China and the US to remain largely open to global business, with positive implications for those firms that are interested in expanding into these markets. Of course, globalization creates losers as well as winners, and our analysis suggests that import-competing companies will not see their fortunes improve in a world of dual hegemonic stability.

That said, US–China skirmishing to build greater economic and political power will produce some policy changes that do constrain firms. Economic issues such as ‘unfair’ trade restrictions on both sides can lead to higher-cost exports if new tariffs are imposed on specific products, even though tariff barriers overall are quite low in both countries. Specific restrictions, as the US has imposed on auto and steel imports from several countries on and off over the past six decades, do raise significant barriers in those sectors. Likewise, China’s refusal to allow foreign telecom companies to provide various services in China, and precluding trans-border transfer of information from China, severely restrict leading US companies in that sector. Chinese government subsidization of state-owned companies in many sectors enables them to compete overseas with an advantage that is difficult to measure and restrain, although it is possible to deal with this challenge through the WTO.

Multinational firms interested in operating in China will continue to have to deal with the restrictions there in sectors such as automobiles, financial services, telecommunications, electric power and operation of any business that requires cross-border transmission of customer information. Constraints there have hobbled the businesses of Google, Facebook, and Amazon Web Services. Auto companies since the 1980s have faced the requirement to operate only with a joint venture partner that owns at least 50% of the company in China. This last point suggests that a strategy for other kinds of firms may be to use a joint venture partner to avoid potential limitations that the government might impose (Zhu and Sardana 2020 ). And from the opposite perspective, at least for Chinese SOEs, their performance has been better when they have foreign investors involved, such as SAIC with GM and Volkswagen and foreign listings that attract portfolio investors (Zhu et al. 2019 ).

To deal more comprehensively with these risks, we suggest a geopolitical risk management framework within which companies can design strategies to reduce the potential negative impacts of US–China government decisions. The framework is depicted in Fig.  7 .

Geopolitical risk management framework

The framework points out four categories of responses to geopolitical risks. First is to simply run the risk when it is perceived to be low or manageable. This strategy will be useful for companies that are not exposed to business activity in the US or China, or for companies that operate only domestically in the US or China. For example, European firms that operate hotels, restaurants, local professional services, and other businesses that are highly local can likely avoid the risk. The more local or regional the business and the supply chain, the more likely that the avoidance strategy can serve well.

Another aspect of this avoidance strategy to deal with US–China conflict suggests that companies should look to avoid putting their business in one of the risky countries, if that risk indeed is very significant for the particular firm or industry (e.g., US defense contractors staying away from Chinese operations, and Chinese companies such as Huawei, TikTok and other Internet companies that could transfer US information to the Chinese military staying away from the US). Many times this is not possible, but when the US-based or Chinese firm can operate in other countries, this can help reduce their bilateral risk.

A second category of response to geopolitical risk is to transfer it to a third party. Insurance is the most common mechanism to accomplish this goal. A political risk insurance policy for a US company from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) can insure its business in an emerging market against political violence including terrorism, currency inconvertibility and government interference in the firm’s business activities, including expropriation. Similar policies are available from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) in the World Bank group for companies from any member country operating in an emerging market. Private sector insurance policies against political risk are available from companies such as AIG and Zurich Insurance. This category of response could serve the interests of companies that require significant capital investment in facilities in the host country, such as manufacturing companies, hotels, mining companies, and agricultural companies.

Additional means of transferring geopolitical risks to third parties include measures for guaranteeing delivery of a product that may be a part of a company’s supply chain. For example, if oil is needed for the company’s business, (deliverable) futures contracts exist that guarantee a price and the delivery of a specified quantity of oil at a particular future date (e.g., for 1000 barrels per contract at the New York Mercantile Exchange). Similar contracts exist for some other commodities and at some other exchanges as well. Options contracts and swaps for commodities provide additional sources of protection against the risk of breakdowns in a supply chain.

A third strategy dimension is to  adapt the company’s business to deal with the risk. This strategy includes setting up plants or offices or other facilities in countries other than China or the US to avoid the direct threat of government intervention. Footnote 8 A company such as Apple can contract out with other companies to provide components for their iPhones and even assembly of those phones, as Apple has done for many years. If key suppliers are in the US or China, then Apple can look to providers in third countries. For any company, if China is the location of production facilities, then adaptation could involve moving to another emerging market in Asia, from Vietnam and Thailand to India.

Chinese firms interested in operating in the US are likely to find more constraints in the way that Huawei and ZTE have experienced in telecommunications equipment and TikTok is experiencing in online video sharing. National security concerns easily could be extended to other sectors, from agricultural products to pharmaceuticals. A Chinese company in many industries would be best served by adapting its business via operating with a US partner, and maybe even operating through a subsidiary in another country such as the UK or maybe Dubai/UAE or the Cayman Islands. Populist pressures as well as national security concerns will likely make it more difficult for a range of Chinese companies to enter the US in the future.

Adapting the company’s business financially may also be beneficial, for example, by taking on local debt in the country where local assets are exposed to risk. Just balancing accounts payable and receivable for a western company in China or a Chinese company in the US could limit the exposure of assets to some extent. Broadly speaking, building up local liabilities where local assets are at risk will help to protect the company.

Many additional possibilities exist to adapt the company’s business activities so that geopolitical risk can be reduced. For both US-based and Chinese companies, finding a joint venture partner in the other country may reduce the risk of negative government policy changes toward that company (Johns and Wellhausen 2016 ), as might working with an intergovernmental organization such as the World Bank (Gamso and Nelson 2019 ). For European or emerging market-based companies, finding production locations outside of the US and China can reduce the risk, as can looking to additional markets in other countries such as the EU, India, and other large economies. Aiming directly at the government of China or the US to curry favor, through corporate social responsibility programs (Darendeli and Hill 2016 ) or just lobbying (Keillor et al. 2005 ) can also be useful tools.

The fourth and final category of responses is to diversify the company’s business outside of the US and China. This diversification of business activities does not reduce the risk to a particular facility or supply source in the US or China, but it does enable the firm to have alternative(s) in the event of adverse policy moves by either of those governments. So, as with any diversification strategy, moving some activities outside of the two protagonist countries will enable a company to reduce the overall impact of adverse policies on its total business worldwide. An MNE also could aim to denominate more of its business in currencies other than dollars or renminbi, to avoid possible harmful exchange rate changes in response to policies in either the US or China.

This current reality suggests that companies should look to diversify their markets and supply chain activities. Already, a significant amount of reshuffling of offshore production in textiles and electronics has seen assembly activities move from China to other countries in Asia such as Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as India (Hufford and Tita 2019 ). China’s large market remains very attractive to many multinationals, but India’s market has grown faster in several recent years and provides possible diversification opportunities. And on the other side of the Pacific, the US has recently used policies to dissuade companies from dealing with China, so that a strategy of focusing more on Europe, Japan, and non-China emerging markets makes sense as well for multinationals, even though a significant decoupling of the US and Chinese economies seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Each of these strategies implies a move to greater emphasis on risk management and less focus on lean supply chains that has dominated in recent years. In fact, multinational firms would be well-served by implementing a range of risk-management tools, as suggested by our Proposition 2 and shown in Fig.  7 and Table 2 in the “ Appendix ”.

An open global economy does not mean that companies should naive the risks associated with international business in the context of a changing world order. More short-term trade or investment barriers could be implemented, as the US and China use these policies to compete with one another in various areas of international business and international relations. The bilateral jockeying for position in the international system between China and the US will be a feature that firms will need to contend with for the foreseeable future. Additionally, trade and investment diversion stemming from new bilateral and regional economic agreements must be factored into firms’ assessments as they identify suppliers and consider investments.

6 Long-Term Dual Hegemonic Stability

There are challenges to the long-term persistence of dual hegemonic stability. These include political tensions between the United States and China, the rise of political nationalism around the world, and the COVID 19 pandemic. The first challenge is the emerging tension between the US and Chinese governments. Tensions over China’s economic policies generated a serious trade dispute between the two countries, which has been partially resolved with the 2020 Phase One trade agreement (Setser 2020 ). These economic tensions are likely to reemerge and other disputes will surely arise as well. If tensions become sufficiently intense, there is a possibility that the countries will engage in a Cold War-type standoff, perhaps leading other countries to trade intensively with one party or the other. As discussed above, we do not see this as a likely outcome, given the membership of China and the US in the WTO, as well as the enormous economic benefits that both countries obtain from allowing the open economic system to operate. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning, as this outcome is seen as likely by some analysts (e.g., Khong 2019 ).

The second challenge is the rise of political nationalism around the world. In the latter half of the 2010s, nationalist governments came to power in the United States, Brazil, countries of Western Europe, the Philippines, Turkey, and elsewhere (Snyder 2019 ). China’s government may also be described as nationalistic (Economy 2014 ), even though it sometimes shows support for global governance (Kastner et al. 2020 ). Despite some new tariffs, this political nationalism has not led to widespread protectionism, but it has been accompanied by efforts (some successful) to undermine organizations like the WTO (Brown and Irwin 2019 ). If political nationalism leads to more sustained economic nationalism, particularly from the United States and China, which are the world’s two largest traders, then it may lead to a deterioration of hegemonic stability. This is not currently in the interest of either state, but interests may change in the future.

Military conflict, such as a possible skirmish in the South China Sea, is also conceivable. Any attack by a Chinese ship or plane on a US ship operating in international waters that the Chinese claim as their own could lead to escalation of some sort. Ramped-up military attacks are not likely, but economic sanctions certainly are. This would push each hegemon to raise more economic barriers on the other, and hurt MNE interests. While this is far from a Pearl Harbor or a frontal attack on the other hegemon, still such skirmishes are likely, and their policy implications are something that companies should plan for.

COVID 19 may exacerbate the first two challenges. The virus appears to be worsening relations between the United States and China, at least in the short term (Buckley and Myers 2020 ). Likewise, there are some indications that COVID 19 is encouraging countries to turn inward, in an effort to increase self-sufficiency (Irwin 2020 ). However, it is too soon to say how exactly the 2020 pandemic will affect global commerce in the coming years and decades, and there are reasons to suspect that its long-term impacts on globalization will not be severe (O’Neill 2020 ). Nevertheless, this unprecedented challenge must be acknowledged.

These possibilities notwithstanding, the most likely scenario for world order in the twenty-first century is ongoing economic globalization, led by two states that have persistently supported and benefited from this status quo. Continuing to support globalization is in the best interests of both of these states, and so we expect them each to continue providing global public goods that incentivize global trade and investment. Therefore, contrary to the increasingly common journalistic narrative, globalization should persist for the foreseeable future. Even with a continuation of globalization, companies need to be prepared to deal with bilateral frictions between the US and China, so the four-pronged risk management strategy described above can help them to manage future shocks.

It should be noted that there are dissenting opinions to this emerging conventional wisdom, as some analysts are skeptical of US decline (e.g., Brooks and Wohlforth 2016a , b ), others are skeptical of China’s rise (e.g., Lynch 2019 ), and still others propose that a multipolar world order has emerged (e.g., Mearsheimer 2019 ).

While one could debate the appropriateness of R&D spending as a measure of innovation, the US-China dual leadership also is evidenced by patents and trademarks granted, and by other measures collected by the World Intellectual Property Organization ( 2019 ). While no measure of innovation is complete, the various indicators all point toward US-China leadership.

US-China trade was valued at $578 billion, with a US deficit of $347 billion, in the last year of the Obama administration (2016). US-China trade was valued at $558 billion, with a US deficit of $345 billion, in 2019.

“More Americans than Gallup has seen in a quarter century view foreign trade positively, with 79% calling it "an opportunity for economic growth through increased U.S. exports" (Saad 2020 ).

This is not to deny the real trade barriers that have been imposed on US-China trade by President Trump since 2017, and the retaliation by China’s government. These restrictions, mainly tariffs, have had some impact on that trade, though it continues fairly similar in volume and value to previous years, with some exceptions.

Of course, this does not take into account the impacts of COVID 19 on global trade.

It would be logical to expect Hong Kong, or even Shanghai, to join London and New York as the chief global financial centers. For several reasons, mainly to do with political risk of the Chinese government in Hong Kong, this last center has not (yet) developed on the level of the London or New York.

If the company is changing an existing activity, such as moving production out of China, or contracting production to a third party, then this is adaptation. If the company adds new operations outside of China or the US to deal with this geopolitical risk, then this would be diversification, as discussed in the next category.

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We would like to thank Mark Casson and Rob Spich, as well as the editors of MIR, for their very helpful comments on this paper.

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Grosse, R., Gamso, J. & Nelson, R.C. China’s Rise, World Order, and the Implications for International Business. Manag Int Rev 61 , 1–26 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-020-00433-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-020-00433-8

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Navigating complexity: globalization narratives in China and the West

Anthea roberts.

1 School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), College of Asia & the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Nicolas Lamp

2 Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Relations between China and the West appear to be caught in a downward spiral. In the West, there is a widespread perception that China has unduly benefited from economic globalization, while in China, there appears to be increasing concern that the West is seeking to contain China’s rise. In this essay, we argue that the picture is more complex. We first discuss the highly varied ways in which China appears in Western narratives about economic globalization. We then sketch our understanding of how different narratives about globalization are playing out in China. Our approach highlights the diversity of perspectives within and between the West and China. How countries, companies, and individuals navigate this complexity depends not just on the rise and fall of narratives within the West and China, but also on how these narratives intersect and interact with each other.

Introduction

Complex issues look different from different perspectives. In Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters , we track the main narratives that have dominated Western debates about economic globalization in recent years. We argue that no one view holds the whole truth. Competing narratives identify different winners and losers of economic globalization while advancing different claims about whether these wins and losses are good or bad. However, a common theme, particularly since 2016, has been the growing pushback against the upbeat establishment account of economic globalization from narratives that focus on issues such the increasing class divide in Western societies, the West’s relative loss of economic power, and skyrocketing carbon emissions. In the West, globalization’s discontents have been growing in number and strength.

But the backlash against economic globalization in Western countries is not the whole story. Perspectives on globalization in countries outside the West differ significantly from the views that dominate Western media and political debates. As the Singaporean public intellectual and former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani notes, “for the majority of us, the past three decades—1990 to 2020—have been the best in human history,” as hundreds of millions lifted themselves out of poverty, and living standards soared across much of the developing world (Mahbubani 2018 ). Parag Khanna, the author of the book The Future Is Asian , concurs: “Western populist politics from Brexit to Trump haven’t infected Asia.... Rather than being backward-looking, navel-gazing, and pessimistic, billions of Asians are forward-looking, outward-orientated, and optimistic” (Khanna 2019 ). Globalization continues to have many supporters around the globe, particularly in Asia.

Where does China fit into this story? In this essay, we explore two aspects of this question: what role does China play in the Western narratives, and what role do these or other narratives play in China? We first explore the multiple ways China appears in different Western narratives—as a poster child, a villain, a scapegoat, a threat, and an indispensable nation. We then sketch our understanding of how different narratives about globalization are playing out in China, from the embrace of free trade as a driver of prosperity to increased concerns about the economic and security implications of rising geoeconomic tensions to a turn toward common prosperity instead of simple economic growth.

Our multi-narrative analysis highlights the diversity of perspectives not just within but also between the West and China—an approach that psychologists have found to be useful in understanding complex issues more holistically and in identifying potential pathways forward. 1 How countries, companies, and individuals navigate these complexities depends not just on the rise and fall of narratives within the West and China, but also on how these narratives intersect and interact with each other on the international plane and, in turn, influence domestic politics and policies in an iterative and recursive manner. 2 Narratives in the West about China can affect narratives in China about the West, which can in turn affect narratives in the West and so on. As relations between the West and China become more fraught, understanding this interplay becomes ever more important.

China’s role in western narratives about globalization

The relationship between the West and China appears to be caught in a downward spiral. The trade war initiated by former US President Trump has morphed into simmering hostility under the Biden administration. In quarrels over politically sensitive questions, such as an international inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic or relations with Taiwan, China has at times resorted to trade restrictions that its trading partners (such as Australia and the European Union) decry as economic coercion, prompting the lodging of legal challenges in the World Trade Organization and the development of anti-coercion instruments. The Chinese government’s decision not to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has further deepened estrangement between the two sides.

While an antagonistic view of the relationship has come to dominate public debates in the West, especially in the United States, just below the surface there are a variety of Western narratives that depict China’s role in the global economy in widely varying ways. Just as there is no one view of economic globalization, so too there is no one view of China and its role in the process. Examining these competing narratives not only provides a nuanced picture of Western debates but also highlights the contradictions and trade-offs that the West must navigate as it reassesses its relationship with China.

The establishment position: China as a poster child

Not long ago, the perhaps dominant view of China in the West was that it was a poster child for economic globalization’s successes. After all, here was a country that had managed to fulfill the aspiration shared by every “developing country” since that concept was first coined in the period of decolonization, namely, to follow the path trodden by today’s “developed countries” while at the same time contributing to the economic growth of its trading partners.

China stuck to that economic development path almost to a tee: it first attracted labor-intensive manufacturing industries, then moved up the value chain by acquiring advanced technologies, and finally evolved from imitator to innovator to attain technological leadership in important sectors, just as the United States and Germany had done in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, China created the conditions for hundreds of millions of its citizens to lift themselves out of destitution in just a few short decades—a reduction of poverty on a scale and speed unparalleled in human history. Even as globalization has started to lose its luster in the West, the proponents of what we call the pro-globalization “establishment” narrative keep pointing to this historic achievement as a knockout argument for its benefits.

However, China not only benefited its own citizens by opening up to the global economy: its manufacturing prowess and its status as the largest and fastest-growing market in the world in many industries also benefited producers, service providers, consumers, and entrepreneurs all over the world. The prices of manufactured goods, from fridges to solar panels to clothing, have fallen dramatically as hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have joined the global labor force, producing large savings for consumers and allowing businesses to source cheap inputs and products, boosting their profits. Many multinational companies also generate a significant share of their global revenues from their businesses in China, supporting employment and R&D in their home countries. Technological collaboration has led to scientific advances and business innovation. On this view, China’s integration into the world economy produced an economic bonanza that showcased the potential of globalization to make (almost) everyone better off.

The right-wing populist view: China as a villain

In the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump garnered support among US voters by painting China’s role in the global economy in starkly different terms. In his telling, China had achieved its astounding economic success not through hard work, ingenuity, and sacrifice, but by cheating its way around international trade rules. By using export subsidies to prop up its own companies, engaging in theft of intellectual property from Western companies, and undercutting labor and environmental standards, China had been able to “steal” the jobs of hard-working American manufacturing workers, leaving behind “rusted out factories” and devastated communities marked by unemployment and despair. In this view, Chinese workers had won at the expense of American workers.

This right-wing populist view, which continues to resonate among many American voters, discounts the benefits of trade with China, such as access to cheap products and to China’s large domestic market, and instead highlights the costs, which it measures first and foremost in terms of the decline of US manufacturing employment and the social ills that have followed in its wake. Proponents of this narrative argue for reshoring manufacturing in the hope of reviving communities in America’s rust belt so that they, rather than Chinese workers, may flourish again. In this view, China has taken advantage of America and left it weak; bringing back jobs in coal mines, steel smelters, and auto plants is vital to rebuilding the country’s industrial strength and making America great again.

Left-wing and corporate power concerns: China as a scapegoat

Many on the political left share concerns about the effects of China’s economic practices on US manufacturing employment, but there is also another prominent theme in left-wing narratives: the charge that those on the political right use China as a scapegoat for problems that are in large part the product of domestic policies within Western countries.

On this view, blaming China for the malaise of the middle and working classes in developed economies obscures the role that domestic policy failures have played in widening the gap between the rich and the poor in many Western countries. From underinvestment in schools and infrastructure to restrictive zoning laws that drive up the cost of housing, from anti-union legislation to regressive tax codes, it is largely domestic policies that rig the economy in favor of an entrenched elite.

A key piece of evidence for this narrative is the fact that the socio-economic impact of trade with China has been highly uneven across Western economies. Countries with active labor market policies and developed welfare states have fared much better than those with lax social safety nets and few union protections: they have lower inequality, healthier populations, and less polarized electorates. Left-wing populists view the anti-China rhetoric in many domestic debates as a way of distracting from these domestic failures and demonizing an external “other” to cover class divisions occurring within these countries.

Some on the left also point to the complicity of Western corporations in China’s supposed misdeeds. After all, no one forced these companies to offshore their production to China or to source inputs from shady suppliers with questionable commitments to labor and environmental standards. Again, they argue that the culprit for the West’s problems can be found closer to home: in governments that negotiate corporate-friendly trade deals and in corporate cultures and governance structures that legitimize the offshoring of jobs while CEOs and shareholders reap billions. On this view, complaints against China often reflect an attempt to shift the blame away from ill-advised domestic policies and unscrupulous corporate actors.

The geoeconomic perspective: China as a threat

For all the economic establishment’s crowing over globalization’s success in reducing absolute poverty, it cannot deny that China’s integration into the global economy has failed to achieve another aspiration, namely, to transform China into a more democratic and pluralistic society. In other Asian powers, such as Japan and South Korea, successful capitalist development went along with a degree of political convergence with the West. Not so in China, which has instead charted its own course ideologically in a way that has contributed to growing geostrategic rivalry with the West and has undermined the assumption that engagement would lead to democratization.

Strategic distrust is at the heart of this fourth view of China’s role in a globalized world: a geoeconomic perspective that sees an emboldened and increasingly capable China as an economic and security threat to the West. On this view, the deep economic ties between China and the West are a source of vulnerability rather than opportunity. Instead of increasing the prospects of peace and prosperity, economic interdependence enabled China to close the gap on the West economically, technologically, and militarily while multiplying avenues for coercion, espionage, and sabotage. In absolute terms, both China and America may have benefited from economic globalization. In relative terms, however, economic integration has helped China catch up to America in a way that now raises deep economic and security concerns in Washington, DC and other Western capitals.

Instead of lamenting the offshoring of manufacturing jobs because of its effects on working class communities, the geoeconomic narrative focuses on the US–China battle for technological supremacy, with a particular focus on AI, quantum computing, and 5G telecommunications. It reasserts the importance of sovereign capabilities and supply chain security and resilience. As tensions between China and the West mount, so too do calls for Western companies to reduce their reliance on China and to decouple in various ways, first and foremost when it comes to critical technologies and critical goods. While the establishment narrative believed that trade would lead to peace, the geoeconomic narrative sees trust and peace as preconditions for trade, at least in areas in which being dependent on the trading partner would produce significant vulnerabilities. These concerns are leading to increased calls for reshoring and ally-shoring, as well as a revival of industrial policy.

Confronting global threats: China as an indispensable nation

For a fifth narrative, all complaints that the West may have about China must not obscure an inescapable reality: the gravest threat that humanity faces is climate change, and this threat cannot possibly be tackled if China is not on board. China is not only the largest emitter of greenhouse gases; it also plays a leading role in the production and deployment of renewable energy equipment. On this view, it may well be that China has not always played by the Western rules of the game, and it may also be that its security interests are not aligned with those of the West, but these are of secondary importance compared to the existential challenge of tackling the climate crisis.

For this narrative, China is an indispensable nation, and prioritizing cooperation with China is essential. Instead of falling into the trap of us-versus-them thinking, this narrative argues that China and the West must see themselves as engaged in a common fight to preserve a habitable planet. Only by working together can we effectively tackle global threats. The same logic applies to the fight against pandemics. Without the early scientific collaboration that took place after the discovery of the novel coronavirus and that facilitated the development of tests and vaccines, the COVID-19 pandemic would have claimed many more lives. On this view, we need more, not less, scientific and technological engagement between the West and China and more, not less, global cooperation.

How different narratives play out in China

The role that China plays in Western narratives is important, but so too is the role that these and other narratives play in China. Although the importance of both questions is equal, our ability to speak to them is not. As Western scholars who are deeply immersed in Western debates about globalization, we can speak confidently on the first question but only tentatively on the second. This asymmetry is true for many Western scholars—few of whom have lived in China or have Chinese language skills. This lopsidedness is something that will need to be rebalanced as global power dynamics shift.

We are also conscious that narratives operate differently in China than in the West, with the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping playing a much greater role in shaping narratives—both directly through their pronouncements and campaigns and indirectly through censorship and other limits on free speech—than governments do in the West. That does not mean that there is a single coherent narrative about globalization in China; instead, the Party may keep several narratives in tension to maximize its room for maneuver. But it does mean that those narratives do not emerge from and clash in open debates in the same way as they do in the West. It also means that some nonmainstream narratives are suppressed, while others percolate openly on social media but tend not to make the official Chinese newspapers.

With those caveats in mind, what have we gleaned from our reading of Chinese materials and our discussions with Chinese scholars and experts about how these narratives play out in China? As in the West, there is no monolithic view of economic globalization in China. Instead, we observe multiple narratives at play, as well as the relative rise and fall of different narratives over time.

The establishment view with Chinese characteristics: Win–Win globalization

In some respects, China has taken on the mantle of economic globalization’s main defender, embracing a Chinese version of the establishment narrative just as it was falling out of favor in the West. A signature moment for this narrative occurred in 2017, when President Xi took to the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos to stand proudly against the rising tide of anti-globalization sentiment in the West, declaring that “We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation through opening-up and say no to protectionism” (Xi 2017a ). This view encapsulates the win–win narrative about free trade according to which economic globalization is a positive force that has “powered global growth and facilitated movement of goods and capital, advances in science, technology and civilization, and interactions among peoples” (Xi 2017a ). (The narrative glosses over areas in which China has not globalized, which range from strict capital controls to limits on access to its domestic market in certain areas to the Great Firewall around its internet.)

This view acknowledges that economic globalization has played a crucial role in allowing China, along with many other Asian nations, to transform their economies and to boost living standards at a remarkable pace. The offshoring of manufacturing may have led to the decline of America’s rust belt, but it also fueled the development of a rising middle class in China, resulting in gleaming new cities and unprecedented prosperity for hundreds of millions. These enviable results arise not just from the opportunities presented by economic globalization, but from hard work by ordinary Chinese people and from good management by the country’s leadership in opening up gradually to the global economy while successfully navigating its whirlpools and waves. As a result, according to President Xi, China has “stood up, grown rich, and is becoming strong.” No longer the sick man of Asia, the “Chinese nation, with an entirely new posture, now stands tall and firm” (Xi 2017b ,  2019a ).

Given this positive framing, it is not surprising that the classic neocolonial narrative—which views economic globalization as a form of exploitation of the Global South by the transnational capitalist class that comes predominantly from the Global North—is largely absent in China, even though it has historically shaped attitudes towards globalization in other major developing countries, such as Brazil, India, and South Africa. Moreover, in the Party’s and Xi’s telling, what is good for China is also good for the world—a true win–win scenario. “China’s development is an opportunity for the world,” Xi explains, as “China has not only benefited from economic globalization but also contributed to it” (Xi 2017a ). For many years, China’s growth has lent momentum to the world economy, which became particularly important when it helped to offset the recessions in the West that resulted from the Global Financial Crisis.

Not only has China been the engine of global growth, but President Xi suggests that China’s experience can provide a model for other countries seeking to follow China’s development trajectory. “We will open our arms to the people of other countries and welcome them aboard the express train of China’s development,” Xi has declared, suggesting that China would not be jealous of the achievements of other countries, unlike certain other unnamed countries (read: the United States) whom Xi implies have reacted jealously to China’s rise (Xi 2017a ). China is able to supercharge the growth of other developing countries by providing global goods, such as fast and cheap infrastructure investment, making it a “leading dragon” in the tradition of Kaname Akamatsu’s “flying geese” paradigm of development. 3 A concrete manifestation of this outward looking agenda is the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to bring infrastructure development and deeper trade and investment ties to Chinese trading partners from Asia to Europe to Africa.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a key building block of President Xi’s vision of a “human community with a shared future,” which embraces some features of the liberal international order created after the Second World War, such as the sovereign equality of states and noninterference in internal affairs, while also supporting changes to that order (a point we explore in the next section) (Xi 2019a , b , c ). Instead of being a predatory state engaged in debt trap diplomacy, as China is sometimes portrayed in the Western media, Chinese officials and media present their country as encouraging global development through foreign investment, infrastructure building, and (at times) debt forgiveness.

The anti-establishment view: against western hegemony

In a different—and decidedly more negative—vein, the Chinese leadership, along with Russia, sometimes adopts an anti-hegemony narrative which charges that the West is trying to use globalization to universalize its model of liberal democracy and market-led capitalism. This narrative paints the West as hypocritical and hegemonic. On this view, Western countries are hypocritical because they wrote the global rules and expect other countries to follow those rules while often exempting themselves from the same standards. And Western countries are hegemonic in that they use their power to promote a one-size-fits-all model of political, social, and economic organization. Proponents of this critical narrative insist that different models must be respected and that multipolarity, not hegemony, must be the global organizing principle.

The Global Financial Crisis led to a significant loss of prestige in China for the West’s economic model and boosted the Chinese leadership’s resolve to chart its own path. As Wang Wen, a Chinese Communist Party member and a former chief opinion editor of The Global Times , explains:

[I]n contrast to my university days, the tone of Chinese academic research on the United States has shifted markedly. Chinese government officials used to consult me on the benefits of American capital markets and other economic concepts. Now I am called upon to discuss U.S. cautionary tales, such as the factors that led to the financial crisis. We once sought to learn from U.S. successes; now we study its mistakes so that we can avoid them (Wang 2022 ).

But the narrative against Western hegemony goes well beyond a rejection of the US model. In a joint declaration adopted in 2016, Russia and China explicitly take aim at the Western—and in particular the US—practice of using unilateral sanctions and the extraterritorial application of domestic laws to shape international developments. For Russia and China, this practice represents an application of “double standards” and the “imposition by some States of their will on other States,” as well as a violation of the principle of non-intervention (Anderson 2016 ). In another joint statement adopted in February 2022—just before Russia’s attack against Ukraine—the two governments lament the attempts by “certain States … to impose their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries [and] to monopolize the right to assess the level of compliance with democratic criteria,” among other “attempts at hegemony” (Kremlin.ru. 2022 ).

According to this narrative, economic globalization may be good, but Western hegemony is bad. Every state should be permitted to chart its own path to development, Chinese officials regularly declare. As President Xi states: “No country should view its own development path as the only viable one, still less should it impose its own development path on others” (Xi 2017a ). In the face of escalating pressure from the West, Chinese officials have insisted that China will not compromise its “core interests” or its model of development and will “struggle” against those who seek to contain its rise (Zhou and Zheng 2019 ). China suffered the “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of Western oppressors in the past, they remind national and international audiences. Now that China has grown strong, it will not allow itself to be the victim of such humiliation or containment again.

The perceived need to take a stand against Western hegemony has become more pronounced in recent years as a series of crises have rendered the relationship between the West and China more hostile. Chinese officials and commentators charge that Western countries, instead of celebrating China’s hard-earned economic success, are engaging in Cold War thinking and have invented a “China threat theory” to justify taking geoeconomic measures to contain China’s rise. 4 These actions have led to calls within China to decouple from the West economically and technologically in everything from the internet and information flows (in which decoupling already exists to a large degree) to payment systems and technology (in which decoupling is suggested as a means of reducing Western leverage and Chinese vulnerability). On this view, China’s advances have pricked Western insecurities, leading to a backlash that China must now navigate.

Interdependence may be a source of economic gains, but it can also be a source of vulnerability. As hostility increases, those vulnerabilities have been front of mind for many in China. In increasingly securitized debates about interdependence, Xi has endorsed a broad notion of “national security” or “big security” that encompasses “economic security,” including “the security of important industries and key areas that are related to the lifeline of the national economy.” 5 He has increasingly invoked the importance of zìlìgēngshēng (often translated as self-reliance and self-sufficiency) with respect to core technologies and emphasized the need for indigenization of technologies (e.g., Made in China 2025) to prevent the United States and other Western countries from exercising a chokehold over key items, such as semiconductors. “Advanced technology is the sharp weapon of the modern state,” observes Xi. “We must make a big effort in key fields and areas where there is a stranglehold.” 6

Although some prominent Chinese thinkers view potential decoupling as “dangerous” and a “disaster for both China and the United States and the whole world,” an increasing number of elite Chinese thinkers have come to accept it as inevitable, particularly given US geoeconomic actions with respect to key Chinese technology firms such as Huawei, ZTE, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), and Hikvision. 7 This view has also been embraced by Xi, who has pledged technological independence in key areas: “Only by holding these technologies in our own hands can we ensure economic security, national security and security in other areas.” China’s 14th Five-Year Plan describes technological development as a matter of national security, not just economic development, marking a departure from previous plans. 8 Western sanctions against Russia after the latter’s invasion of Ukraine seem to have only confirmed these views about the need for China to protect itself from the potential weaponization of interdependence (Asia 2022 ). 9

The Chinese government has also embraced the importance of a dual circulation strategy, which aims to reduce China’s vulnerability to external shocks by increasing domestic consumption and reducing reliance on export-led growth.

Left-wing and corporate power concerns: the need for common prosperity

While there is much to be celebrated about China’s economic advances, danger lurks in the country’s growing inequality and rising corporate power. New Left and neo-Maoist groups in China have objected to the country’s market transformation, framing the World Trade Organization as the tool of a “‘soft war’ waged by Western powers, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, to pry open China’s markets for the benefit of Western corporations” (Blanchette 2019 ). These views, although present, have not been mainstream in Chinese debates, perhaps partly because they have not been endorsed by Xi and the Chinese Communist Party. What has taken center stage in Chinese government policy in recent years, however, are efforts to curb inequality and corporate power in the name of realizing “common prosperity.” Achieving a fair distribution of the gains from globalization, and not just growth per se, has become a critical goal.

While the mantra during the Deng Xiaoping years was to “let some get rich first,” Xi now emphasizes the need to focus on common prosperity: raising the fortunes of low-income groups, promoting fairness in society, making regional development more balanced, and emphasizing the importance of people-centered growth (Xi 2021 ). Whether it is cracking down on the private education sector or bringing China’s technology giants to heel, the narrative of common prosperity calls for a Chinese society that is more egalitarian and less liable to the economic inequalities among classes and regions that have led to populist backlash in many Western countries, most notably the United States. Hypercompetition embodied in the 9–9–6 culture, which has caused some young people to rebel by “lying flat,” is out; more equitable and sustainable approaches are in.

Although this narrative has a lot in common with the left-wing and corporate power narratives in the West, it is also mixed with some conservative cultural impulses—such as a desire to crack down on celebrities and “sissy boys”—that are more reminiscent of right-wing perspectives in the West. This narrative is not just critical of Wall Street-style greed, but also of Hollywood-style moral corruption.

On the whole, common prosperity is not viewed as being in tension with a commitment to economic globalization, which may reflect the fact that all income brackets in China gained over the last few decades, even if some gained more than others. The common prosperity push is in keeping with the Party’s professed socialist values, with equality being seen as an important tempering force for some of the excesses of capitalism.

The interplay between narratives in the West and in China

What makes economic globalization complex is not only that it has many facets and looks different from different vantage points, but that its evolution depends on the (often unpredictable) interactions among many actors, including governments, companies, civil society, and individuals. The narratives about economic globalization circulating in the West and in China differ based on each side’s concerns and imperatives. But these domestic spheres are not isolated from each other. What is said and done within one group or country may be listened to and have effects in the other.

In some areas, the narratives in the West and China are mirror images of each other: the developments lamented by right-wing populists in the United States—in particular the movement of manufacturing jobs to Asia—are perceived as positive from the perspective of China and other Asian countries.

In other areas, the narratives clash with and fuel each other. The best example is the interaction of the Western geoeconomic narrative and the Chinese anti-hegemony narrative. In the West, concerns about a rising China have led to the increased securitization of debates about economic interdependence and to policies such as bans on 5G equipment manufactured by Huawei and export restrictions to curtail access by Chinese companies to advanced semiconductors. In China, these actions are perceived as examples of Western hegemony and as attempts to contain China’s rise, which in turn prompt the increased securitization of economic policies, in particular attempts to achieve technological self-reliance. This dynamic results in an amplifying feedback loop that has made geoeconomic framings ascendant in both China and the West in recent years, leading to increased pressures to decouple.

In yet other areas, Chinese and Western narratives seem to be running in parallel without much mutual reinforcement and amplification. Rising concerns about inequality and corporate power in both the West and China are giving rise to crackdowns on Big Tech on both sides through regulatory actions such as antitrust enforcement. In some ways, what is happening in one market could be seen as justification for the adoption of similar policies in the other market. For the most part, however, it seems that each debate is developing in a relatively autonomous way. The impetus for crackdowns in the United States appears to spring from domestic economic pressures, as well as a renewed appreciation of the importance of rigorous antitrust enforcement in the platform economy. And while President Xi seems to share concerns about the excessive power of platform firms, he is not justifying China’s crackdowns on the basis that the United States has engaged in similar actions.

Finally, on some global challenges, the two sides are largely in agreement. Both China and the West recognize the threats posed by the climate crisis and global pandemics. Even though they may disagree on the best strategies to adopt in response and on how to distribute the burden, these challenges provide opportunities for collaboration. Yet this insight is not easy to reconcile with the more conflictual narratives that are increasingly gaining hold on both sides. Ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2021, US Climate Envoy John Kerry tried to frame the climate crisis through the lens of the global threats narrative instead of the geoeconomic one when he declared that “climate is not ideological. It’s not partisan, it’s not a geostrategic weapon or tool. … It’s a global, not bilateral, challenge” (Buckley and Friedman 2021 ). Yet Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi responded that cooperation on climate could not be separated from the overall environment of US–China relations. “The United States hopes to transform cooperation into an ‘oasis’ in Sino-US relations,” he said, “but if the ‘oasis’ is surrounded by ‘deserts,’ the ‘oasis’ will sooner or later be deserted” (Lelyveld 2021 ).

The United States is not the only side that is trying to manage the tension between different narratives. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has attempted to avoid taking sides. Instead, it has tried to balance its relationship with Russia (in which the two are brothers-in-arms and friends-without-limits in the narrative against Western hegemony) with its desire for continued economic integration with the West (as per the win–win establishment narrative) while building its own resilience and pursuing targeted decoupling (as per the geoeconomic and against Western hegemony narratives). China recognizes that it has much to gain from a continuation of the establishment approach to economic interdependence, provided that the rules are interpreted broadly enough to allow China to maintain its own development model. We can also see companies attempting to balance their economic interest in remaining in certain markets with growing concerns about how geopolitical tensions and value conflicts might require them to exit those markets suddenly, as hundreds of Western companies did after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In recent years, events such as the US–China trade war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have prompted commentators to proclaim the “end of globalization.” While these pronouncements are often made more for rhetorical flourish than for literal truth, they reflect an important phenomenon, namely, the fact that views about globalization—as captured in competing narratives—have been undergoing more profound change in recent years than in any other period since the end of the Cold War, when the economic establishment’s win–win narrative became preeminent.

As a result, globalization is not ending, but it is certainly changing. Responding to the populist backlash against globalization and motivated by growing security and environmental concerns, Western governments are seeking to strike a new balance between the efficiency gains that can be achieved through trade and investment liberalization, on the one hand, and the values of equality, security, resilience, and sustainability, on the other hand. The Chinese government is navigating very similar challenges, all while trying to find its footing as a leading economic and geopolitical power amidst growing skepticism and hostility from the West.

The relationship between China and the West will play a central role in shaping the future of globalization, but the relationship is highly complex, and its future development is deeply uncertain: possible future scenarios range from a political rapprochement and stronger cooperation on issues of common concern to radical economic and technological decoupling and even potential military confrontation. Understanding the main narratives about economic globalization in the West and China is a good way of starting to understand this complexity and beginning to think through how different narratives might intersect and interact in shaping the future of international economic relations.

As we argue in Six Faces of Globalization , when dealing with complex and contested issues, it is crucial to explore multiple perspectives. No single narrative can capture the multifaceted nature of such issues, and no perspective is neutral. Each narrative distills a certain set of experiences and tells part of the story; none tells the whole. Every narrative embodies value judgements about what merits our attention and how we should evaluate what we see; none is value free. You do not have to agree with every narrative—you may consider some to be wrong, empirically or normatively. But considering multiple narratives in a structured way helps everyone to be conscious of how their approach fits within the broader context and what they might be missing about what others are seeing and valuing.

Psychologists have recognized that complicating narratives by seeking to understand complex situations from multiple perspectives can help to move us past our tendency toward binary thinking and polarized disputes (Grant 2021 ; Coleman 2021 ; see also Ripley 2021 ). As relations between the West and China become more highly charged, and as the global challenges we all face become more pressing, the multi-perspective approach that we adopt and advocate for here becomes ever more important.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for many conversations and exchanges that helped us develop the ideas presented in this essay. The commentators on our 2022 Global Law and Strategy Annual Lecture at Renmin University of China on December 16, 2021, organized and moderated by Yang Liu, provided extremely valuable input on Chinese narratives about economic globalization. Our conversation with Kaiser Kuo on the Sinica Podcast on January 13, 2022 encouraged us to sharpen our thinking about China’s role in the Western narratives. We would also like to thank Karen Alter, Jane Golley, Ben Herscovitch, Larry Hong, Lai Huaxia, Wang Jiangyu, Shi Jingxia, Dirk van der Kley, Sienna Liu, Ignacio de la Rasil, Shen Wei, Ken Yang, Chen Yifeng, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments on our book and/or this article. At the same time, we are solely responsible for the views expressed in the essay.

The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.

Declarations

The authors have not disclosed any competing interests.

1 In studies of peace and conflict, psychologists have found that leaders who demonstrate low levels of integrative complexity (i.e., the ability to see complex issues from multiple perspectives and integrate these into a more coherent whole) are less likely than their peers to produce negotiated outcomes and more likely to oversee violent eruptions. By contrast, leaders who are better able to understand the perspectives and priorities of different sides are more likely to find trade-offs and creative solutions that meet each side’s core concerns. See: Guttieri et al. ( 1995 ), Suedfeld and Tetlock ( 1977 ), Suedfeld et al. ( 1977 ).

2 For a similar theoretical approach, see Halliday and Shaffer ( 2015 ).

3 For the flying geese paradigm of development, see Akamatsu ( 1962 ). On China as the flying dragon, see Lin ( 2011 ).

4 For commentators on the “China threat theory”, see Xiang ( 2019 ), Liu ( 2018 ), Shi ( 2012 ), Lu ( 2013 ), Hu ( 2018 ), Xu ( 2019 ) and Yu ( 2018 ).

5 On big security, see Hu ( 2016 ) and People’s Daily ( 2019 ).

6 On self-reliance and mastering core technologies, Wang and Zhou ( 2018 ),CRI Online ( 2018 ).

7 See, for example, Yao ( 2019 ); Zeng ( 2019 ). See also Gewirtz ( 2020 ).

8 For Xi’s quote, see Xinhua ( 2021 ).

9 Including a discussion of a report prepared by China’s Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security that analyzes what would happen if the US, Europe, and Japan were to react to a Taiwan emergency by imposing economic sanctions on China like they did against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. This observation was also presciently made by Taisu Zhang on Twitter: “I think it’s pretty obvious Western countries are (partially) treating the current conflict and ensuing sanctions as a trial run for measures they might take against China in the future…. I mean, they’d be crazy not to, and Beijing would be crazy to not perceive it as such.” See Zhang ( 2022 ).

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