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Rising opposition to globalization and free trade threatens to roll back the progress made in today’s global financial system, said delegates at a forum in Shanghai over the weekend.
Gathering economic experts from China and abroad, the Globalization Vs De-globalization forum came in the wake of US reports that the Trump administration is considering slapping a 20-percent tariff on foreign steel products.
That has worried big steel exporter China, a country whose army of cheap laborers has been accused of helping reduce employment opportunities in the US and other Western countries.
US President Donald Trump is the poster boy for rising trade protectionism.
However, Donald Trump’s opposition to globalization is futile, many believe. The US leader has promised to bring jobs back to America, “but those jobs are already gone,” according to Liu Ningrong, deputy director of Hong Kong University Space.
It is inevitable that globalization leads to an international division of labor based on economic principles, Liu said at the forum.
He compared the return of trade protectionism in America to a similar movement there before the Great Depression, and said these policies did not work.
For the past several decades, China has been receiving jobs outsourced by globalization as a low-cost manufacturer.
With wages rising in China, it is natural that simple, low-wage economic activities will now flow to other developing economies, said Professor Jerry Friedman from Harvard University.
Li Xin, managing director of Chinese financial news organization Caixin, put the current anti-free trade sentiment down to “public outcry that the benefits of globalization are not equally distributed.”
(CGTN)
