Sinoglobalisation: is it merely a rhetoric or a reality that will determine the future?

Abstract

Following globalisation and Americanisation, a specific form of Chinese‘sinoglobalisation’ has been unfolding in the early 21st century. This article aims to draw attention toeconomic aspects of sinoglobalisation; namely to the way China’s attitude to globalisation haschanged as a result of the liberalisation of regulations, the growth of its economic power and theopening up of its foreign policy/economy. Despite its belated engagement in globalisation, and the legacies of an autocratic ideology, China has adapted at a faster speed than the USA (at the cost ofmany undesirable side effects) and has become a conscious shaper of globalisation. The concentration of its tangible and intangible assets has provided the means for China to create an independent globalisation strategy.

China has caught up with the US in foreign trade, in economic performance and in ICT research results. In addition, key features of economic globalisation such as international mergers, acquisitions and uniformisation, or the bi-directional movement of capital can be observed in its network of relations. China’s ambitions ‘on the world stage’ are surprising in several respects. Its gigantic infrastructural network of transport, telecommunications and energy have played a special role in the development of sinoglobalisation. Maritime and transcontinental transport developments, the positions it has occupied to varying degrees in the chain of strategic ports, ranging from South-East Asia to the shores of Western Europe, have all paved the way for its topworld power status, as does the enforcement of its own technical standards in the foreign territories it serves.

Scenarios about the long-term consequences of the 2020 pandemic do not offer promising short-term forecasts for China. On the other hand, China seems to be one of the countries that will be the least affected by the global disaster in the 2020s. This is guaranteed by the radical modernization of its economic structure, the reduction of its dependence on exports, the continuation of the previously rapid growth of household consumption and the huge profits flowing in from the multitude of developing countries that are under its patronage.