China has rejected globalism, while the west is in denial about it, according to Canadian philosopher and essayist John Ralston Saul.
'China made that very clear in the last five-year plan - in the five equilibriums. The instructions are to favour the humanist internal Confucian side over the globalist side,' Saul told business leaders attending a breakfast session of the 2007 Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival at the Foreign Correspondents' Club.
'They've said the direction they don't want to go in. They haven't figured out how to do it but the west has no idea that globalism has already been put aside by China.
'[The Chinese are] doing something else. They may be signing international treaties but those are fixed bilateral international treaties - not globalism. They're 19th century-style treaties.
'When you look at what the Chinese are saying, there is a fascinating debate going on. It's one of the most interesting debates in the world: 'How are we going to deal with the fact we've done extremely well in a certain sense creating wealth for quite a few people but it's created this imbalance, as in India, a lot in instability'.'
Saul, author in 2005 of The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, said globalisation as conceived in the 1950s and '60s and put in place in the '70s and '80s and early '90s began to cease to exist around 1995.
'We've been in an interim period since 1995 ... a vacuum filled with confusion with all sorts of forces at work and we don't actually know what the next period is going to look like. If we're lucky it will be a regionalist period. If we are unlucky it could be much more unpleasant than that.'