A dangerous mentality is spreading internationally: that of separation and of a new ‘cold war’. Which is the opposite of what should happen in globalisation.
We are not economists but we practice, every day, in the complexity of planetary reality. We need a new realism and, in perspective, new political visions.
Xinhua questioned some experts to show how ‘decoupling’ from China is a completely short-sighted idea. The numbers speak for themselves: China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, in actual terms, increased by 17.4 per cent year-on-year to 723.31 billion yuan in the first six months of this year. In US dollar terms, the inflow increased by 21.8% from a year ago to $112.35 billion. In the second quarter, 91% of foreign-invested companies maintained or expanded their operations in China.
We have already noted how dangerous it is to consider China an ‘enemy’ and not a ‘strategic competitor’. Today the debate is aggressive on both sides, but paths for dialogue are possible and desirable. The problem is that the current globalisation model is no longer ‘politically sustainable’. Among other things, with all the limitations of the Chinese system, the West has not been able – over the past thirty years – to define shared rules for the architecture of the world that was being formed.
We are convinced that globalisation can have a sustainable future by becoming progressively ‘glocalisation’: regionalising international relations and responses to the de-generational mega-crisis (first of all, the climatic one) we are experiencing; opening up ‘variable geometry’ dialogues between the great regions of the planet; bringing systems closer together to make supply chains increasingly resilient; looking more and more at cities and territories, and their governance also through new technologies, to improve glocal sustainability; including all the major players in ‘strategic dialogues’ of ‘cooperative competition’.
