an introduction to an informative essay about globalization in china

The impact of Globalization on the China Essay

Introduction.

One of the significant traits of the 21st century is the increasing internationalization of trade, production, investment, finance, technology, communication, politics, society, and almost any conceivable sphere. The world is shrinking towards a truly global village. Does globalization lead to equality as anticipated or brings about grave inequalities in its wake? The neoliberal ideology and the Washington consensus hold that globalization with its free trade and market competition is inbuilt to foster economic growth. However, there is enough disturbing evidence that points toward discontents and impoverishment as impacts of globalization.

The work of Professor Joseph Stiglitz Globalization and Its Discontents (2001) is a powerful critique of globalization and all its attendant consequences. He outlines the origins of IMF and the World Bank in the opening chapter, The Promise of Global Institutions . The IMF and the World Bank have their roots in 1944 in the Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The Allies laid out their plans for a new international economic world order to prevent the recurrence of a globally devastating depression. Adhering to a new post-Depression Keynesian philosophy, the architects of the new system created the IMF to maintain economic stability by helping countries avert crises and the World Bank to induce economic development in poor countries through targeted loans and grants. WTO, which came to existence in 1994 had its precursor in the Bretton Woods era GATT with a mandate to make available a level playing field for the rich and the poor nations (Stiglitz 11). The question is how far have these financial bodies fulfilled the ambitious mandates they set out to achieve? According to Nafeez M. Ahmed of Institute for Policy Research and Development, UK, “… the world capitalist economy has created a phenomenon that can be accurately described as the globalization of insecurity, by firstly generating conflict thus destabilizing nations and communities, and secondly escalating impoverishment, disease, and deprivation” (2004).

Globalization and China

Despite many historical antecedents to our current understanding of growth in China and its causes, the current growth will be traced back to the early 1980s, as the ideological between the superpowers was concluding after more than four decades of bitter ideological conflict and the eventual supremacy of democracy and neoliberalism as the dominant principles of the New World Order. Seeking to explore the Chinese growth and globalization phenomenon by looking back over the past twenty-odd years, this essay will analyze the important antecedents to Chinese growth today.

Neoliberalism and China

Globalization, as it exists today, rests largely on the shoulders of neoliberal economics and the global entrenchment of capitalism as the dominant economic system in the world. Neo-liberalism, the belief in laissez-faire economics, was best articulated by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States in the 1980s. US President Ronald Regan famously remarked, “government was not the solution but the problem” (Hobsbawm 1994). Neo-liberals put all of their faith in the distributive capabilities of the invisible hand of the free market, and believe that business was inherently good and that government was bad. The government was longer interested in the provision of welfare but existed to stimulate the capitalist economic market. The United States under Ronald Reagan was thus described as the “greatest of the neo-liberal regimes” (Hobsbawm 1994). Accordingly,

The essence of neo-liberalism, its pure form, is a more or less thoroughgoing adherence, in rhetoric if not in practice, to the virtues of a market economy, and, by extension, a market-oriented society. While some neo-liberals appear to assume that one can construct any kind of ‘society’ on any kind of economy, the position taken here is that the economy, the state, and civil society are, in fact, inextricably interrelated (Coburn, 2000).

Effects of globalization

The proponents of globalization do not find any problems with globalization per se. However, they would prefer appropriate governance for managing globalization. No one can deny that the availability of huge capital required for investment in China has done wonders in the forms of modernization of technology, raising productivity, accelerating growth, and creating employment. This is of course not to rule out the havoc capital can play upon China, for example in Mexico there was a rapid destabilizing reversal of capital flows. In the highly integrated market of today, such impacts can lead to spillover effects with adverse consequences for other nations (Michael Camdessus, 1996).

The cause of success or failure in globalization is seen in privatization-driven policies. They have received much criticism in China in terms of ineffective management of corporate ventures, lack of proper resources management, and political interventions. Most cases of privatization failures are linked to poor contract design, opaque processes with heavy state involvement, lack of re-regulation, and a poor corporate governance framework. (Gopal 2007:158).

The experience of China in globalization has gone on to improve over the years. During the initial globalizing days, there was a crucial doctrinal difference between China and the IMF, about the appropriate roles of the state and the private sector, the need for fiscal equilibrium, and the virtues of deregulation. According to the official UN view, the lesser the role of the state, the better are the gains derived from privatization. This view holds that when the state dominates the economy, resources are often misallocated. However, the governments have an important role to play as a facilitator of economic activities rather than occupying the position of private entrepreneurs’. In the case of China change in policies and performance can be attributed to two factors: the changing role of the state and the globalization of the international capital markets. Since the late 80s, China has witnessed drastic shift in the orientation of economic policy. The reform results were dramatic. Meanwhile, inflation declined and currently experiencing growth. On the external side, however, the region’s current account deficit has narrowed creating and economic giant. This was due in part to the relative weakness of domestic saving at a time of sharply increasing investment, including imports of capital goods needed for industrial modernization, which were facilitated by the increased access to international capital markets” (Michael Camdessus, 1996).

WTO and China

The matching of china into WTO opened new doors for growth and economic labialization. China has become the center of the world for services and external trade. Goods from China are available in the third world at a cheaper price than there before. This is because China is a developing country with a strong labor force that managed to produce goods at a cheaper price and currently they are a major international player in the trade and production of goods and services. They have diversified from the traditional form of production into the new modern technology. This has been made possible because of joining WTO. The country has also changed perceptions on how they treat foreign companies and this has made them a major direct investment country for multinationals. WTO made china open up most of its industries to be accessed by market players and this has lead to the increased growth that is being experienced currently. China started experiencing growth in the year 2000 at a faster rate than what they were experiencing initially. This is due to the growth of information technology, economic restructuring as demanded by WTO, and great growth opportunities brought by redistribution of wealth across the world due to multinationals. There is an improvement in economic growth since currently, the country is growing at the rate of 22%. Therefore WTO has brought the following positive economic effect. Increased economic growth, there is an increase in wages and salaries which are compensation to the members and this began in the year 1978. That’s when growth started being experienced in China. As growth has been experienced in china there has been increased investment geared to consumption and export. Below is a graph showing the growth of china between the years 1975 and 2008.

Globalization and democratic environment in China

There will be no growth without politics. Politics determine the direction of the country in terms of democratic growth. The benefit of a democratic environment in china has been experienced through the growth of democratic space and this has influenced economic growth at the same time. This can be observed because it can be noted that China has cooperated with United Nations as well as the United States and WTO. If one wants to have a look at the impact of democratic space in china one should be wise enough to look at the growth as influenced by organizations as WTO, United Nations, UNEP, and many organizations. Most Chinese non-governmental organizations have received donations from this organization and this has helped them improve their lives. You look at the unemployment rate, they are coming down for example, in the year 2003, the employment rate was 4.3 and it changes to 4.2 in the year 2004. Below is a graph showing the employment rate and their changes.

The graph above shows the level of unemployment and the rate of unemployment. As the graph indicates there is an upward trend in growth that is reducing the unemployment level as well as the rate of unemployment in china. This is because the growth has been influenced by foreign capital inflow to the country.

Globalization and outsourcing

One of the positive effects of globalization to the public of china is the issue of outsourcing. The western countries have fewer laborers as compared to china. Therefore the Chinese have provided laborers for some sectors to the west industries. This earns the employees help in generating foreign income which has helped in spurring growth for the country.

Current economic growth

The current economic growth being experienced in China is due to globalization. Globalization has provided the market for Chinese growth, provided jobs to the Chinese people, and helped in influencing foreign inflow of income thus helping in economic growth. China is currently viewed by many nations as one of the best and stable economies in the world. This is because:

• Of increased market prices for goods manufactured in china,
• Increased industrial growth and agricultural development.
• Stable market prices for goods and services
• Reduction in export and increase of imports
• Increase in foreign direct investment

It can be summarized that in the long term as well as medium-term china has experienced growth that has never been experienced before.

Globalization and Chinese’s agriculture

Industrialization provides a philosophical change where people develop a different attitude towards their perception of nature. Intensified agriculture can be said to be operating as a cultural-ecological system because as a result of improved technology in agriculture, the available crop production resources are now utilized well without damage or wastage (Cowdrey, Albert E 1996).

This shows that sustainable land use should not target preserving and maintaining the ecological stand for occupation and improvement but also as developing the community and environment. This will enable it to adopt the increase and also maintenance of the options present or available as well as in the face of a natural and social world in an unending conversion.

For China to be able to produce food that will assist the country to experience faster economic growth, the use of land must be sustainable. That is involving social-economic and ecological options that will assist in reducing susceptibility and increasing options for the use of land. The country needs to adopt high technology in the use of land to improve productivity. Apart from the use of technology, crop rotation has been adapted as a viable way of improving production but it is implemented with the assistance of government-trained agriculture officers. (Cowdrey, Albert E 1996).

The use of technology and crop rotation is intended to improve production as well as make life more comfortable for the people of China. It also ensures that there is enough food for the people of China. Applicable technology involves the use of the machine, the use of irrigation in arid and semi-arid areas as well as encouraging large-scale farming for economies of scale. Agriculture in China has been made impossible because of global warming which has reduced food production thus leading to increased food prices. This is observed by the increase in food prices although the government has subsidies some farms from some farming activities as well as increased drought-resistant food crops to increase production of food.

In the era that we are today, technology has been found not only including research, design, and crafts but also it is said to be a multifaceted communal project involving maintenance, marketing, labor, management, manufacturing, and finance. As a result of industrialization through technology, in the broadest sense, it improves our abilities to change the world, since research clearly shows that a higher percentage of the world’s economy depends on agriculture (Cowdrey, Albert E 1996).

As a result of the introduction of technology, the naturally available resources can now be completely utilized. Examples include; the introduction of machines that can be used in irrigation to ensure better utilization of water whereby water can be drawn from rivers and spread to larger farms by the use of water pipes.

However, intensive agriculture and industrialization also have some things to do with demography. Though in this type of agriculture especially the large scale one is adversely affected by increased land pressure due to the rapidly growing population, there are advantages on both sides, that is, to the agricultural sector and the local people or residents whereby, the agricultural sector benefits from the availability of labor whereas the local people benefit from employment when they are picked by the farmers and given different responsibilities hence it becomes of great importance to the community by providing employment opportunities.

Social relations have some significance in the agricultural sector whereby it ensures collective responsibilities in resource management. Better relationships between different people or countries high standards of farming hence steady food supply. For example, China is one of the most industrialized countries and also densely populated thus making it enjoy good farming technologies and reliable labor supply, for this matter, the international community has established a good relationship with China by amending its grain policy to enable the international community access China’s grain market (Berry, Wendell 1998).

Culture as a factor also has something to do with intensive agriculture whereby the environment to where the type of agriculture is done should be favorable. The community should embrace it no matter what so long as it is of importance. For instance, the United States of America amended its policies which were barriers in 1990. Intensive agriculture as well depends on the way it is carried out, either large scale or small, and also the types of inputs.

Inflation is one of the problems or negative effects that china has experienced due to globalization. There has been a flow of capital into China from the west and this capital was coming from companies that are currently experiencing financial crisis making them spread the crisis to China.

Runaway Inflation which is caused by oil prices has caused food prices to go up and other consumable goods have become very expensive although the government has responded with the increased supply of food to try to reduce the shortage and ensure prices are affordable to the community. It has been complicated further by climatic changes. It is feared that global warming has had a negative impact on the production of food which has contributed to runaway inflation. Inflation in China is causing a lot of problems since life is becoming difficult for the citizens of the country. For the first time in ten years, consumer price index was at 5.6% which was higher than what the government has anticipated in the year.

Inflation in other parts of the world complicates strategies to be adopted by the Chinese government to fight run-away inflation. For example, if the government wanted to fight food prices, the option of reducing the prices of food was imported from foreign countries but it is not possible since inflation has taken a toll in most countries. For example, inflation in the United States has affected the dollar which is accepted in the national currency meaning that even imports to China will be expensive.

The government has responded with a monetary policy to ease inflation and increase economic development as well as increase employment opportunities for the citizens of the country. Using the producer price index in china which has been on the increase the government has predicted the future consumer price index through the use of these statistics a monetary policy has been designed to reduce dependence on outside importations. This has helped to create a balance in economic growth as well as inflationary tendencies and this is how they have managed to maintain their growth at 22%. The financial crisis which began as a subprime crisis in the united states has had a negative impact and added to inflation in the economy of China. The Chinese economy has been affected due to the devaluation of the dollar, strong economic growth in India, an increase in oil prices between the month of august and November 2008, the increase in food prices, and the collapse of major international banks. These factors although not directly involved they are the main causes of inflation in China.

Concluding Remarks

Globalization has been propelled by capitalism and the internationalization of the capitalist economic system. The main effect of globalization on china is the spread of neo-liberalism and the entrenchment of some capitalism– some would say the sole – viable economic system for the China economy. This essay has traced the antecedents to the current wave of globalization in china with an emphasis on key events associated with the arrival of neoliberalism in the 1980s, followed by Communist collapse and the emergence of authoritarian capitalism in China. Enthusiastically promoted by the Reagan and Thatcher regimes in America and Britain, neo-liberalism was given a huge boost following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Entrenched as the dominant economic ideology across china, neo-liberalism is the underlying force behind the current wave of globalization. Despite numerous detractors on all corners of the globe, globalization remains an important force in modern society and a key component of continued and sustained economic growth on a global scale (Harvey 2007).

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Bibliography

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Tracing the history of modern globalisation in China

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• Research impact

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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Introduction: China and Globalization

• Published: September 2009
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The opening of China with foreign investment, trade, and culture in 1979 produced dismay among Chinese leaders and citizens. Many Chinese citizens and leaders expressed concern about a return to foreign domination over China. The Chinese state opened the foreign trade, investment, and cultural flows in order to promote national advancement without sacrificing China’s economic and political sovereignty. As China moved from a period of economic closure in 1976 to the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment in 2003, the issue of how to manage the transplantation of foreign corporations and their business institutions became increasingly acute. This opening to foreign capital emphasized the impact of foreign investors on China’s domestic reforms, but such an understanding threatens to overshadow the role of domestic actors in the process. This book makes three principal contributions to the analysis of China and its political economy. In addition, it draws from two main types of sources: relevant laws and policies in China and data collected from interviews about foreign business operations, Chinese reactions to foreign businesses, and foreign and Chinese understandings of the process of transplanting institutions to China.

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World History Project - 1750 to the Present

Course: world history project - 1750 to the present   >   unit 9.

• READ: International Institutions

READ: Rise of China

• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Global China into the 21st Century
• WATCH: Global China into the 21st Century
• READ: Hua Guofeng (Graphic Biography)
• READ: Goods Across the World
• READ: WTO Resistance
• Economic Interactions in an Age of Intense Globalization

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• What were some of the important developments in the economy of the People’s Republic of China in the years shortly after its 1949 founding?
• What led to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and what were some of the results?
• What were some of the important aspects of the post-Mao policies under Deng Xiaoping?
• Alongside the increasing national wealth of the People’s Republic of China that Elshaikh outlines, what are some of the downsides of this economic growth?
• Can you connect aspects of China’s rise to the requirements of “neoliberal” policies that Elshaikh introduces in her essay on “International Institutions”?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• When we consider the “rise of China,” what parts of the story might be lost when we only look at economic growth? Elshaikh hints at these when she mentions growing inequality, environmental degradation, the persecution of minorities in China, and other factors. What happens when we tell the story of post-Mao China without mention of the 1989 protests and crackdown in Tiananmen Square, or 2019 events in Hong Kong?
• In terms of the “communities” frame narrative, how important do you think it is to a country’s sense of community to be wealthy and powerful on the world stage? How might increasing national wealth like that of the People’s Republic of China in recent decades change the ways people within the country view themselves and their national bonds?
• Deng Xiaoping referred to post-Mao reforms as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Based on the evidence in this reading, is this just capitalism under one-party rule? Why or why not?

Rise of China

Introduction, china after world war ii, changing directions, china and the global economy, want to join the conversation.

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Navigating complexity: globalization narratives in China and the West

• Original Paper
• Open access
• Published: 10 January 2023
• Volume 4 , pages 351–366, ( 2022 )

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• Anthea Roberts 1 &
• Nicolas Lamp   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6000-691X 2  

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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.

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1 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. Footnote 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. Footnote 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.

2 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.

2.1 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.

2.2 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.

2.3 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.

2.4 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.

2.5 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.

3 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.

3.1 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. Footnote 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.

3.2 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. Footnote 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.” Footnote 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.” Footnote 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. Footnote 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. Footnote 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 ). Footnote 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.

3.3 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.

3.4 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.

4 Conclusion

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.

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 ).

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Xi’s quote, see Xinhua ( 2021 ).

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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.

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Roberts, A., Lamp, N. Navigating complexity: globalization narratives in China and the West. China Int Strategy Rev. 4 , 351–366 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-022-00113-2

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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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