A (Long) Tale of Two Leaders: Charting the Spatial and Sectoral Roles of the West and China in Shaping Past, Present and Future Economic Globalization(s)

Globalization has run into two intersected momentous shifts over the past decade. One is an accelerating retreat in the Western-led economic globalization. The other is the continued surge of China as a leader of alternative economic globalization, via the Belt and Road Initiative. These two powerful trends are complicated by COVID-19 and the Ukraine war with their disruptions of global geopolitics, plus a potential technological decoupling between China and the United States as great-power rivals. This unprecedented combination of challenges and crises occasions a fresh analysis of the roles of the West versus China in shaping economic globalization past and present. Against the state-centric approach to globalization, I develop a historically-informed framework to couple spatial and sectoral analyses of the trajectories of economic globalization shaped by the West and China. I first examine the cross-regional dimensions of economic globalization across Eurasia featuring China's primary role in driving the China-Europe Freight Train. I then explore China's exceptional strength in delivering overseas infrastructure projects, as embodied by the China-Laos Railway, relative to the West's sectoral advantages bearing on economic globalization. Lastly, I summarily discuss the past and present roles of the West versus China in producing new divergence in future economic globalization.

A tale of two recoveries: uncovering the imbalance between state-driven production and private consumption in post-pandemic Wuhan, China

The world's first epicentre of Covid-19 that contained the virus early and recovered quickly, Wuhan, the capital city of China's Hubei province, offers a rare case for examining the effective but unbalanced role of the Chinese state in recovering a post-Covid city against a continued zero-Covid policy. Due to institutional inertia in policy-making, Wuhan has experienced a two-track recovery of (i) rapid GDP growth from infrastructure investment fuelled by government stimuli and large state-owned enterprises, and (ii) a weak recovery for small private businesses and grassroots consumption. Combining analyses of city-level data and survey/interview information, this paper examines the unbalanced role of the Chinese state in producing Wuhan's uneven two-track economic recovery and its implications for recalibrating the roles of the central versus local governments and empowering the latter to rebalance from production to consumption and to improve livelihood.