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The Twilight of the Liberal World Order

In an article "The Twilight of the Liberal World Order" (24 January, 2017), a brief for the Brookings Institution, Robert Kagan hits the nail on the head. What matters most is not ISIS. It's the inflexion point of a possible collapse of the liberal world order that has defined global peace and stability since the Second World War.

There is popular anger that American largess as guarantor of the liberal world order has been taken advantage of by "Others". The Trump Presidency shows every sign of abdicating from America's global responsibilities unless compensated by calculated, short-term transactions.

This is feeding the inevitable revisionism of dissatisfied rising powers, which, together with huge historical grievances, are re-asserting themselves to modify the US-dominated world order to suit their own world view and national interests.

All these hark back to the unstable world order prevalent in the late 19th century, eventually leading to two World Wars.

Kagan rightly points out that US global military dominance is best suited to maintain global security. Neither China nor Russia can be a credible substitute.

However, military coercion cannot overturn what may, after all, be the changing tide of history as Western power and influence are beginning to give way to the rising East.

China has been embedded firmly in the world economic order underpinned by the United States. While America is now backing off, China wants to uphold the status quo. From WTO rules to climate change, it seems that most of the world feel unsettled by America's change of course and begin to think that China may be a force for good.

China in the 21st century is no longer the weak China of previous centuries. It is the world's second largest economy, soon to become the largest as the productivity and ingenuity of a fifth of mankind continue to be unleashed.

China's global strength is not the military. Or economic size. It's her economic connectivity. From mobile phones, cars and household goods, almost everything has China embedded, even if the final product is not marked "Made in China". That's why six of the top eight container ports around the world are in China, including Hong Kong. This "centrality" cannot be reversed easily as no other developing country has the manufacturing scale, capacity and global connectivity.

Global connectivity is very much at the heart of the Zeitgeist of the times defined by the world's Fourth Industrial Revolution. Driven by a combination of technologies and powerful integrated cross-border platforms, it is upending business models, labor markets, socio-political matrix, and is reshaping economic, social, cultural, and human environments.

Nothing illustrates the power of internet-economics better than President Trump’s apparent agreement that Jack Ma’s Alibaba internet-driven global business empire could help create a million American jobs by selling US goods and services to China and the rest of Asia, Trump’s China-bashing and protectionist rhetoric notwithstanding.

China is in no position to replace the United States as the guarantor of a new global order. Nor does she wish to do so, knowing her own many limitations. However, a reformed, rising, and more assertive China is sufficient to challenge an American-First world order.

Russia under Putin is also playing her cards deftly. While the United States looked powerless with the Syrian crisis, Russia is now seen as a more effective problem-solver.

The growing global gravitas of these rising powers cannot be deterred by relying only on brute American military dominance.

As President Trump focuses on America First, prioritizing American jobs, profits, and the military, it begs the question whether the world is not being driven towards another historical inflexion point of global instability.

China's view of President Trump's provocations

My exclusive radio interview on News Hour with BBC World Service on 20 January, 2017. 

Download 20thJan2017APLeung_Newshour_BBC_WSRadio

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung's swansong Policy Address and implications for the next administration

My live TV interview on 18 January, 2017 on Channel NewsAsia, Singapore's premier TV news channel and part of MediaCorp, Singapore's largest broadcaster of regional renown. 

Download CNA_S_18Jan2017_ANDREW LEUNG

Rapidly growing digital economy set to give China 415m jobs, account for nearly half of GDP

According to a report dated 11 January, 2017 in the South China Morning Post, technology will swallow up repetitive predictable jobs but on balance create far more opportunities, based on findings of BCG and AliResearch studies. 

"Germany offers a good parallel experience. The BCG study found drones and automation would remove 610,000 factory floor jobs in Germany but by 2025 advances in technology would lead to 960,000 new opportunities in information technology and communications."

"As machines become smarter, people are able to work no matter where they are in a more flexible way via the internet. AliResearch, a think tank affiliated with e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, predicted that about 400 million people in China would be self-employed through online platforms, waving goodbye to the traditional eight-hour working mode by 2036."

"Hao Jian, the chief consultant at China’s major online recruiting firm Zhaopin.com, said he had witnessed the same trend as people no longer needed to be employed by a certain company; they could simply find project-based work opportunities online."

“The demand for part-time jobs enjoyed the most rapid growth - 113 per cent year-on-year [last year] compared with the other 60 job categories Zhaopin has,” he said."

"The report cited a World Bank report which estimated 55 to 77 per cent of China’s low-skilled workforce could be replaced by technology, while employees had to cultivate skills and know-how that would not be easily replaced by digital technologies."

Indeed, the same phenomenon is hitting the entire world. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, robotics and artificial intelligence may eliminate half of total paid employment. Click here. It’s not just manufacturing jobs. Many middle- and high-skilled jobs, including those in data collection and processing, are susceptible to automation. 

The McKinsey report says it will take 20 to 40 years for half of today’s work activities to be automated. And new jobs will be created in the process. In any case, the coming shift is of a similar order of magnitude to the shift away from agriculture that occurred in developed countries in the 20^th century.

A brave new word unfolds rapidly in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Nothing will ever stay the same again.   

The changing narrative of China's environmental story

The following two articles in China Dialogue, a China ecological forum, illustrate how the usually gloomy narrative is quietly changing -

2016: The changing narratives of China’s environmental story - 

"In July, a team of British and Chinese scientists published the results of their research in Nature Geoscience that said they believed that China's coal consumption had peaked around 2014 and that China's economic growth had, in fact, already decoupled from coal consumption".

"In 2016, with the ongoing reform of local government performance evaluation systems, many provinces such as Jiangxi and Anhui began to compile a "natural resources balance sheet" and to carry out "natural resources audits for departing officials", incorporating natural resources protection into performance indicators for local officials. ..... The game between China's central and local authorities over  environmental governance may remain, but the narrative of "local government neglecting environmental protection" could be quietly changing."

"In November 2014, the joint statement on tackling climate change made by President Xi Jinping and President Obama alerted the world that the pattern of mutual accusations between China and the US had become a thing of the past in international climate politics. In the statement, China, for the first time, released a timetable to peak carbon emissions".

"The most dramatic event of 2016 occurred in November following the US presidential election, when Donald Trump, a man who does not believe in climate change and who has threatened to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency, was elected president. The world began calling for China to lead the international climate process. This would have been unimaginable just three year's ago".

China raises its low carbon ambitions in new 2020 targets

"..... the Strategic Energy Action Plan (2014-2020), which, at the time of its publication was already considered ambitious in curbing coal consumption and CO2 emissions beyond international expectations".

"However, this time round, policymakers seem even more determined to squeeze out coal’s share in the country’s energy mix, lowering its 2020 percentage in primary energy consumption from 62% to 58%".

"The country is also aiming higher for renewables: installed capacity of wind energy and solar energy should reach “more than 210GW” and “more than 110GW”, respectively, by 2020; higher than what was declared at the end of 2014".

However, locational overcapacity remains a key challenge as a great deal of installed capacity has not been effectively utilized for lack of sufficient smart grids. -

"A combination of transmission bottlenecks and market set-up has prevented large chunks of renewable electricity from reaching the grid. In 2015, 15% of China’s wind energy was wasted, a record high. Based on the Energy 13FYP, the problem seems to have pressed policymakers to put more emphasis on reining in curtailment, as opposed to further expansion of installed capacity. It has also prompted them to plan more new renewable electricity capacity in China’s eastern regions, where electricity demand is concentrated, reducing the need to transmit renewable energy across the country."

Nevertheless, warts and all, there is now clear evidence that the tide of China's ecology is beginning to turn. 

China's dramatic transformation: a bird's eye view of Past and Present

Breathtaking video documentaries  -

The Living Past - National Geographic's aerial view captures China's ancient traditions and some remote, inspirational heritage sites, showing how an ethnic-diverse 1.4 billion people struggle to survive in seemingly-impossible topography in marching forward in the 21st century. 

China from Above - A bird's eye view of China's immense diversity 

CCTV quick bird's eye view of 20 provinces - What China is now