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Editor's note: Dr. John Gong is a professor at the University of International Business and Economics and a research fellow at the Academy of China Open Economy Studies at UIBE, and Now he is also a columnist for TMTPost.

The naysayers of globalization have finally found an excuse – COVID-19 – as purportedly solid proof of the inherent pitfalls of globalization, as if this pandemic would not have touched their backyard without their country being touched by globalization.

But the fact of the matter is that they have been opposed to globalization all along way before COVID-19 ran amok these days. When U.S. President Donald Trump declared in that famous speech at the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2019, “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots”, the fate of those “patriots” – patriots as famously referred to by Samuel Johnson – is pretty much sealed.

The naysayers of globalization are saying that globalization is largely responsible for a handful of cases in the city of Wuhan in China turning into a worldwide pandemic. Some even fabricated fake news that the Chinese government discontinued all domestic flights in and out of Wuhan as part of the lockdown but intentionally not international flights. But they don’t tell people that there was no globalization in the mid-14th century when the Black Death wiped out one third of the European population, nor there was hardly any globalization in 1918 and 1919 when the Spanish flu killed 30-70 million people worldwide.

The naysayers of globalization are warning that globalization has resulted in a supply chain network too much concentrated in China that is susceptible to shocks of a pandemic nature. But now they are all reticent facing the reality that China remains to be the bastion of the world’s manufacturing factory, particularly for mission critical medical supplies, and that China now is not even among the world’s top ten countries in terms of infection numbers, even though China has the world’s largest population with 1.4 billion people.

The naysayers of globalization are calling for “economic sovereignty” that prescribes autarky in supplies of an ever-expanding list of goodies that concerns so-called national economic security, including not only masks, PPEs, and other medical supplies that are critical for fighting this vicious virus, but also canvass, hats, boots or anything that are needed for a foot soldier in a war. But they don’t give a damn about what many small-population countries would do if every country in the world goes down that path.

The naysayers of globalization would like to put an ideological stamp on every container crossing the sea as if competition in the global market can be won by reciting some obscure constitutional amendments of a country thousands of miles away. But then they don’t talk about free market and free trade anymore when their own oil rigs are faltering financially one after another in the wake of oil prices hovering around $20 a barrel.

Globalization has brought about a fortune to the world, period. In the last thirty years, most countries have indisputably benefited immensely from globalization in terms of more exports, more jobs, more income, and more GDP. With globalization, goods, including immediate and final goods, are more likely to be shipped around to seek global efficiencies, and people also travel more. This creates economic opportunities in countries that are not resource-rich or have extensive manufacturing. At least it beefs up tourism. Everyone gets to make a buck, and everyone’s life gets better.

But like any game there will be winners and losers. In the game of globalization, while the winners are the majority, especially in emerging-market countries, the few losers are mostly those in the developed world whose jobs are gone because they can’t compete. That doesn’t mean that these people do not need help; they do, but certainly not in the form of turning the clock back to the time before the First World War.

Like any beneficial social and economic objective, globalization as in its current stage is not perfect with plenty of room for improvement. Yes, we need to address a list of issues manifested in this outbreak, the issue of establishing robust and resilient global supply networks, the issue of quick global virus mitigation and containment response through the coordination of the WHO, the issue of helping countries with inadequate and fragile medical infrastructures, and etc. The list goes on. But deglobalization is certainly not the solution. When a doctor tries to cure a COVID-19 patient, he does everything he can to save his life, with medicine, ventilator and eventually ECMO. But the doctor never kills a patient to kill a virus.

Unfortunately deglobalization does appear to be a major political banner in some countries, at least in the United States. President Trump’s “America First” motto and his declaration about the future belonging to the “patriots” pits squarely the liberal global economic order that the U.S. itself established after the World War II against the U.S. domestic partisan politics based on protectionism and localism. Trump’s courting of losers of globalization as his political base essentially hijacks America’s political leadership in world governance.

From the developing world’s perspective, deglobalization is also something that regions already boiled in religious and political wars and instabilities cannot afford to be attuned to, because of the risks of even more wars and instabilities.

As early as 2010, Evan E. Hillebrand issued the dire warning in a paper published in “Global Economy Journal” that “While a retreat into protectionism may improve income equality in some countries, it will reduce incomes of both the poor and the rich and poverty headcounts will be increased. In addition, political instability will rise in a majority of countries and the probability of interstate war will increase.”

Let’s honestly admit that globalization has its problems that we need to address, problems nevertheless that are all addressable. The world needs to move onto the phase two of the globalization process, which I call “reglobalization,” such that when the next pandemic comes, say in a hundred years, we will have even less infection and casualty.

(This article do not represent the editorial policy of TMTPost but rather views of the columnist. Anyone willing to contribtute and have specific expertise, please contact us at: english@tmtpost.com)

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