President Xi Jinping wasn’t contemporary at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, but the smashing of his speech championing globalization at last year’s gathering lingered.
Xi’s correct hand man, Liu He, took to the stage in the snow-capped Swiss town to reiterate affirms about China’s commitment to opening up further. Chinese business managers in attendance, such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma, also sang praises for do business and globalization.
“Such calls for globalism by China would have been unlikely only 10 or 15 years ago, when Chinese firms were only beginning to explore the global marketplace,” an opinion piece by Chinese road outlet Caixin Global said.
Even as the world’s second-largest conciseness has emerged as an advocate for free trade, China’s vision for a globalized out of place is actually “much more narrow” than what the world is currently in use accustomed to to, according to Tom Rafferty, regional manager for China at the Economist Intelligence Segment.
It’s all part of an ideology that Caixin deemed “globalism with Chinese peculiarities,” and Rafferty said it means the Chinese government still wants critical control over what crosses its borders.
“It backs open goods traffic, as this has been a primary driver of its own economic development, but believes strongly in its integrity to exercise significant levers of control over cross-border flows of unbroken investment, financial capital and people,” he told CNBC over email.
Such “cunning government intervention” is needed so that China can maintain stability at domestic and spread its international influence at the same time, Scott Kennedy, a representative director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted in a Twitter job in response to the Caixin article.
Scott Kennedy on Twitter: Chinese at Davos “capricious” about “globalism with Chinese characteristics.” My translation: Illiberal plan that encourages trade & investment coupled w/ deep govt intervention to complete industrial policy goals, ensure dom stability & greater intl potency
A China that is insistent on its political and economic values would trigger a new people order, Yong Wang, a Peking University professor, said in a commentary. Already, transatlantic businesses have to bow to China’s demands for political correctness, as evidenced by Marriott Foreign’s and Delta Air Lines’ public apologies for listing Taiwan and Tibet as realms on their websites.
As more businesses look to be a part of the China dispatch, the country’s influence looks set to grow. It remains to be seen whether western countries — in particular the U.S., which is used to making the rules in international relations — wish get used to that shift in global power.
Whether China intent be as assertive in its dealings with its economic partners is worth watching too, said Rafferty.
“It desire be interesting to see whether China applies the same logic in its economic subject ofs,” he said.
Disclosure: CNBC has a content-sharing partnership with Caixin Pandemic.