Transcription
[Music]
Today, I'm actually going to be talking about globalization, and I want to start by asking all of you a question: Is globalization good or bad?
I've been talking to a lot of you during the conference today, and many of you who responded to my question told me that you think globalization is good. When I was a university student in Canada in the 1990s, I was often told that actually globalization is bad. Globalization was responsible for the exploitation of workers in developing countries—bad. Globalization was responsible for loss of jobs and outsourcing of those jobs in developed countries—bad again.
Globalization was also responsible for the Americanization of global culture: Big Macs, bottles of Coca-Cola, and everywhere you go, Justin Bieber on the radio. Now, I have something to admit: actually, Justin Bieber is Canadian, so I have to take some responsibility for that myself. But everything else you can blame on America.
So, globalization is neither good nor bad, in fact, but it is here to stay. The main reason why it's not going away is that there are still several billion people who have yet to join the global party. So, globalization will continue, but it's going to be different for all of you than it was for me.
Um, I don't know if anybody can actually claim to be an expert in globalization. I spend a lot of time reading, writing, thinking, teaching, and speaking about globalization and macroeconomics. So, I can actually tell you that there is no commonly accepted definition for what globalization really means.
But as somebody who has lived and worked abroad in three different countries from the one in which I grew up, I can tell you that globalization has had a beneficial effect on my life and my career, and I believe that it's going to have a beneficial effect on all of you as well.
Today, I'm going to talk about how that is going to affect you, how that's going to affect all of us here in China, and how that's going to affect the world. I'm going to use a simple model. Okay, I'll call this model globalization 1.0, globalization 2.0, and globalization 3.0.
I'll tell you a little bit more about what those mean in a moment, but for now, just remember: globalization 1.0 happened hundreds of years ago. Globalization 2.0 is relatively more recent—the last 60 years or so—that's globalization 2.0, all the way up to the present day.
And globalization 3.0, we've actually yet to begin, but we can see it over there on the horizon, and it's going to happen right here in China first. So, I'll come back to that in a moment, but for now, I'd just like to tell you a short story.
Okay, the year is 1990. I am a university student in my hometown, Victoria, British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada. That's us up there on the left, kind of in the middle of North America.
I've been keeping an eye, as a university student, on what's going to affect my future, what kind of job I'm going to be able to do, and what should I focus my studies on. Well, I've been watching a particular country across the Pacific. All of my classmates know that this country is going to become number one in the world. Its companies are already expanding around the world, its investors are buying up real estate and properties in the world's major cities, its individual investors are buying up real estate in some of the richest neighborhoods, and they're even buying luxury art by Picasso and Monet.
Wow, that sounds pretty good! I guess I'd better think about going there, and to get started, I'm going to study the language. So, in fact, I was one of the first students to take that country's notoriously difficult language proficiency test the first time it was offered in Vancouver in 1991.
Now, at the same time, a lot of people looked on at this country with worry. They wondered what this country would actually do when it became king of the world. The country I'm talking about is, of course, Japan. I think some of you thought I was going to say China. Well, China's time has yet to come, but it's easy to forget that in the 1980s up to the early 1990s, Japan was actually the country that everybody wanted and everybody thought was going to become the number one country in the world.
That didn't happen, and I'll tell you about the reason for that in a moment. Suffice it to say, China is going to become the number one country. China's investors are going around the world to buy up properties, to buy companies, to buy famous artworks, and people are studying Mandarin and they're even taking its foreign language proficiency test.
Does this sound familiar to all of you? Well, it's exactly like what we thought about Japan in the 1990s. But I don't believe that China is going to collapse like Japan did. In fact, in one of my books, I made a prediction that China will become number one in the world by 2018.
Okay, still three years to go. Okay, you guys better work hard. Don't work too hard though, you know, President Xi Jinping told you not long ago to take it easy, right?
So, whatever happens, whenever China does become number one, I have some bad news as well. No matter how long it's going to be number one—30 or 40 years from now—another country is going to come along and take that number one position. That country is India, which will have a population of 1.7 billion people in 2060.
So, that's my first message about globalization that I want to share with you: globalization comes in waves, and those waves repeat, and they happen again. Change is a constant in our world, and nothing lasts forever.
So, back to today. At the moment, we're in the age of Western globalization, or we might again say American globalization. I think we all know what that means. We've seen it.
During one of the breaks, I was just outside, and I went and got a cup of Starbucks coffee. I could have just as easily had a meal at KFC. I could have seen a movie down the hall; there's a huge cinema chain there. And even if I wanted to, there was music playing in the background. I think it was "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen. That's actually another Canadian singer. I don't know what's up with that, but there's a lot of Canadian pop singers. That's our current export to the world.
Maybe Canada, nevertheless, is just one part of globalization. The United States is another part, Europe is another part, but in general, we can say the current age of globalization is being defined by the West.
Now, just to take a step back into history, it wasn't always the West. Globalization hundreds of years ago was defined not by the West, but actually by two different countries. One of those countries was China, and the other country was actually a group of countries in Europe—the exploration countries such as Portugal, Spain, and France, and so on.
That's Admiral Zheng He, who explored the maritime Silk Roads in the Ming Dynasty. His ships were actually enormous compared to anything that the European powers had. The technology of Zheng He was far in advance on those ships.
So, it would be interesting to say, you know, what would actually happen if Christopher Columbus on the right and Zheng He had actually met? You know, maybe somebody should do a video game about that. They can PK each other, right?
Um, but globalization 1.0 ended with the devastating world wars that happened in the 20th century and was replaced by globalization 2.0, which started after the recovery from the Second World War around 1950 and has continued until today.
Here, technology also played a role in globalization, but this time it was not shipping. This time it was actually communications technology—some technology that was very new at the time. You had television, you had radio, and in more advanced ways, such as mobile phones, you had things like email, which literally changed the nature of trade and made it much more efficient.
So, a lot of new technology and communication really defined this second era of globalization 2.0. As I mentioned earlier, Japan also featured heavily in globalization 2.0. Its economy, what we call the bubble economy, rose to precipitous heights in the 1980s, but in fact, that wasn't sustainable. The bubble burst, and so Japan, like other countries had before it, suffered a financial crisis, and it did not recover. In some ways, it has still not recovered today.
So, the center of globalization shifted back towards the United States. That brings us to globalization 3.0, which is where we are almost at today and where we're going tomorrow.
Technology here is also defining what globalization 3.0 is, but it's not just one technology. It's actually the convergence of all technologies. You have transportation technologies, you have communication technologies, you have information technologies—all of those are converging to make a world and world trade that is ever more efficient.
We finally achieved a globalized society that is connected, and it's also multilateral because in this next phase of globalization, it's going to be increasingly difficult to say who's the capital of the world. It won't be New York as the figurative capital city, or London, or Tokyo, or even Shanghai.
In fact, there are going to be multiple business capitals around the world. In fact, you could say even that place no longer matters in this new form of globalization. It's actually all defined by the technology.
So, place will no longer be an important factor, and technology will begin to define how globalization progresses, increasing the convergence of those technologies.
So, back to the world and what China's place in that new globalization 3.0 is going to be. We already have some signs of what this is going to look like.
Um, we can call these signs reverse globalization and sinification. Reverse globalization first is a changing of the direction of globalization. Okay, if you think about it, for all of us here in China, globalization actually has been coming from the West to the East, from outside in.
But very soon, and for the first time in centuries, the force of globalization is going to start going out. It's going to change direction. It's going to reverse direction and start going from East to West. But we're not there yet, and we still have some time to go.
So, China at this moment is going through a phase that I call East for East. It's building products and services and ideas for China. It's creating new social networks such as QQ and WeChat and Weibo, which are growing very, very rapidly and now number in the hundreds of millions of users.
Technology made by Chinese for China. You can look at Chinese culture. Um, anybody see any Western movies recently? You might have seen, for example, in the latest Transformers, there was Tianjin and Chongqing. All of those were filming locations in China. That was to attract Chinese audiences to Western movies.
And you also saw things like Big Bang Theory doing Chinese product placement—Shuang milk in Big Bang Theory. Anybody remember that? It might have seemed a little odd, but the producers of Big Bang Theory knew that its show was enormously popular with Chinese audiences, so that was done to attract Chinese and to monetize the Chinese viewers.
So, examples of what I call the sinification of culture are everywhere, and gradually that's going to start reversing so that China will begin to define culture for the world.
Um, let me give you an example of what that might look like. We can take the high-speed rail trains, and China's high-speed rail is one of the best in the world. It's the fastest, it's the biggest network, and as a result of that, China has actually attained a superior amount of technology, which is allowing it now to begin for the first time selling this technology abroad.
So, next time you're riding on the gaotie from one place to another, think about the fact that China has become a world leader where once Japan was a world leader and Europe was a world leader in high-speed trains. Now it is China, and that technology is increasingly being exported to the rest of the world.
So, in this world, that will begin to look increasingly Chinese, but not exclusively Chinese. We're going to start to see a mix. We're going to see elements of Chinese culture, elements of Chinese technology, and certainly Chinese people who are now traveling abroad in greater numbers than ever before. They're studying abroad in greater numbers than ever before, and that is creating an enormous exchange of ideas.
So, the world will be influenced by China. I have no doubt of that. That will be one of the defining characteristics of globalization 3.0, and I call that sinification.
And the flow of globalization is going to be reversing, going from East to West. That's also going to be a part of globalization 3.0. All of us have to be prepared for this time when sinification and reverse globalization become a dominant part of the globalization landscape.
Now, what should all of us do to actually prepare for this and to benefit from this? Well, I'd just like to offer you three simple ideas.
The first I've alluded to already in this presentation: you should learn more about history because globalization actually, in some ways, is predictable. It's happened before, and it will happen again. It never happens the same way exactly in one place to the other, but we can notice it happens.
And so, studying history and understanding history will help you to understand what's going to happen in globalization next.
Second, what you should do with globalization is to try to figure out—excuse me—you want to see how other people live around the world. Travel, learn other cultures, learn a language, try to understand what it's like in other places.
Because, as I said, globalization is not going to be uniquely Chinese. There'll be lots of influences, but we're going to be living in a multipolar world. We're going to be living in a world that has mega cities everywhere. It won't just be Shanghai and Tokyo; it'll be Jakarta, it'll be other cities in Africa like Johannesburg.
It'll be in places that you haven't really thought about before, but each of those is going to be a global hub because remember, place doesn't matter. You can be anywhere using the internet to do anything anytime you want. So, get used to that. Learn about it today.
And finally, I'd like all of you to think about the idea that globalization does not have to be a zero-sum game. Globalization does not have to occur at the expense of other countries. We can learn to work better together.
And I'd like to live in a world where the benefits are shared among a wider range of people, where globalization is no longer seen as bad as it was when I was a university student, but is enormously seen as good.
And a society that is open, multilateral, and has more abundance than ever before in history—that is the future I see for globalization. That's the future I want. That's the future I hope you want. That's why I'm in China.
Thank you.
[Applause]