Outside InThe end of globalisation? Chinese companies haven’t heard about it

Stephen King, the tousled imagineer whose day job is senior economic adviser to HSBC, swept through Hong Kong this week with a new book and a predictably grabbing message: the West’s 70-year love affair with globalisation and free trade is under threat as “localism” infects the politics of Europe and the United States.

Grave New World: The End of Globalisation, the Return of History plays brazenly on two of the 20th century’s most powerful and traumatising novels – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1932 and George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984. It plays games with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?”. Its swashbuckling swoops through centuries of history beguile and mesmerise as he fights to persuade us that globalisation is in peril.

He is impressive, entertaining and probably wrong. But then as I sit cocooned in Hong Kong, one of the world’s most globalised economies, I am sure King would tell me I have been lulled into complacency because I am wearing the wrong kind of glasses.

King’s book is nevertheless nothing if not timely. Popular localist politics have thrust earthquakes through the US, Britain and many of Europe’s economies, and in some places undermined confidence in the benefits that international trade and business globalisation have brought. They have lifted to power or prominence a number of wholly improbable new political leaders. They have created an obvious and urgent need to audit afresh what globalisation and liberal trade have delivered over the past 70 years.

Shame on us in business that we have for so long been so complacently confident in the powerful net benefits of liberal trade and investment and global dispersal of manufacturing that we have dangerously neglected to pay attention to those who have lost out in the process. Shame, too, on governments that have failed to notice or speak up for the casualties and failed to develop strategies that could protect them, pick them up and prepare them to cope successfully in a globalised world where we are all exposed to international competition.

King is right to home in on the West’s “souring love affair with globalisation”, among politicians at least, just as Karl Marx and Charles Dickens were right to home in on the dreadful human impact of the early Industrial Revolution. But just as Marx was wrong in predicting the imminent overthrow of global capitalism, so, too, is King in saying that the trade freedom and globalised production chains built over the past 70 years are about to be unravelled. Fortunately, businesses and governments still have the capacity to learn lessons from mistakes and correct them.