OPINION:
A Chinese proverb runs: “Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom.” Xi Jinping, president of the world’s most populous nation, told the annual World Economic Forum last week at Davos what they longed to hear: Globalization lives. But taking Mr. Xi’s words at face value suggests that neither doubts nor wisdom ran deep in Davos. That doesn’t bode particularly well for the international order.
Though a first-time guest among the liberal/cum/progressive A-listers who yearn for a planet without borders, Mr. Xi addressed them with the hearty reassurance of a salesman: “No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” Mr. Xi says. “Some people blame economic globalization for what has gone wrong in our world. It is true that economic globalization has created new problems, but this is no justification to write off economic globalization altogether.”
It was a not-so-subtle advisory to stay the course and ignore the rising complaints that the interconnected world of the 21st century is siphoning jobs and wealth away from the families and the traditional societies of the United States and Europe. China has been the primary beneficiary of this drain of the West, ensuring that its participation in globalization is only economic. The unique culture of China is protected by harsh censorship.
President Trump leads the resistance, arguing that globalization is at odds with his vow to make America great again. He made China’s huge trade imbalance with the United States, which swelled to $367 billion in 2015, a recurring complaint during his campaign. A trade war is already being waged — by China. Beijing’s suppression of the value of its currency and its demand that companies getting access to Chinese markets give up their proprietary secrets puts global competitors at a clear disadvantage. Mr. Trump doesn’t necessarily write off economic globalization. He just wants a fair deal for the American people.
Globalization in theory embraces the free flow of ideas, money, goods and people. The trouble lies in its real-world application. The result is that the benefits flow to China. The big thinkers in Davos forget that while Mr. Trump promotes the building of “a big, beautiful wall,” the Chinese did it many centuries ago. The walls erected now are less imposing but equally effective — government censorship of the domestic internet, registration of apps, and construction of a string of military bases across the South China Sea that could strangle Asian trade.
The globalists carry on their search for a way to make their policies more appealing to the middle class. “It needs to be granular, it needs to be regional, it needs to be focused on what will people get out of it and it probably means more redistribution than we have in place at the moment,” says International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagard. More social welfare might do it. Several European nations are experimenting with universal basic income, a guaranteed government check for everyone regardless of need. In one of his last acts as president, Barack Obama did his part for income redistribution, writing a $500 million check to the U.N. Green Climate Fund to be used to propagate the faith.
Mr. Xi urges the Davos crowd toward the cliff and Mr. Trump moves on a more promising path — cutting taxes and snipping burdensome regulations to fire up the great American economic engine. Like his Chinese counterpart, he grasps the flaws of globalization. Unlike that counterpart, Mr. Trump is not too polite to talk about the deep doubts that are the beginning of deep wisdom.
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