My Take | China trade will be the guarantor of world peace
- Much-maligned trade and supply chains, made possible by China’s WTO membership engineered by Zhu Rongji, may ultimately deter the West, led by Washington, from pursuing a military solution to contain China’s unstoppable rise
Who is the greatest modern Chinese statesman? Many people will, no doubt, pick Deng Xiaoping, for opening up China. For those who are more nationalistic, Mao Zedong is the man. But, at the moment, for the more ideological or opportunistic, and it’s often hard to tell which is which, you may have to pick Xi Jinping.
But for my money, I would choose former premier Zhu Rongji. I had not thought about Zhu for a long time. Since retirement, he has avoided the limelight. But I was led to remembering his extraordinary achievements for China as its economic tsar after someone sent me a recent animated graphic on China’s global trade from 1980 to 2018. If efforts by some Western countries to decouple or isolate China are to fail, Chinese have much to thank Zhu for his farsighted economic policy that has fully integrated China’s economy with the rest of the world. In the long run, maybe that’s what global peace will depend on, but not for a lack of sabre-rattling by a hostile West led by Washington.
The animated chart was drawn up by researchers at the well-known Australian think tank, the Lowy Institute, based on trade data compiled by the International Monetary Fund. It shows the breathtaking rise of China to displace the US to become the world’s largest trading nation.
Focusing on gross trade flows – exports plus imports – the rise in China’s global trade accelerated after 2001, the year China acceded to the World Trade Organization after 15 years of often difficult negotiations.
At the turn of the new century, more than eight out of 10 countries had a larger volume of trade with the United States than China. By 2018, that plummeted to about 30 per cent. That meant two-thirds of countries in the world – 128 out of 190 – traded more with China than the US. Of these, 90 countries traded more than twice as much with China as with the US.