"The Coronavirus: Death of Globalization or a Rebirth?" by Amir Taheri From The Gatestone Institute

The Coronavirus: Death of Globalization or a Rebirth?

by Amir Taheri  •  March 22nd 

• China has contributed to almost two decades of low inflation and economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in all continents. At the same time China has started to develop an appetite for playing big power.
• The European colonial powers of the Berlin Conference combined their quest for security abroad with democratization at home. In China today, we witness a different configuration. Regarding almost all its neighbors, with the possible exception of Pakistan, as unreliable if not hostile, China is, in fact, fomenting insecurity through its aggressive power projection. This aggressive option is highlighted with ambitious plans for developing a 19th century style blue-water naval power capable of challenging the United States in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
• China's feeling of insecurity abroad is combined with President Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian style at home. Chinese friends who had welcomed Xi's rise to power as a promise of liberalization now regret what they call "our childish illusions".
• [T]he optimism that we noted in our latest trip to the People's Republic in 2014 now seems a distant dream.

(Image source: iStock)

Is this the end of globalization? That is the question we were supposed to debate at a colloquium in Paris this week before we were all ordered by the government to "confine" ourselves to our dwellings at least for the next 15 days. The concept of globalization attained wide circulation when cheap goods made by cheap labor in China started to flood world markets from Tokyo to Timbuktu. Thus, if globalization is to end, it is only fair that it should also come to a close with a Chinese fanfare in the form of the coronavirus.

Before globalization whatever happened in China reached the rest of the world as a distant echo. The Opium Wars, the black series of famines, the atrocities committed by various foreign occupiers, the civil war, the Korean War, the annexation of Tibet and East Turkestan, the deaths of millions of people under Mao Zedong were all perceived as exotic events in a remote fantasyland that affected the rest of the world only incidentally.

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