For a long time, globalization has contributed to the prosperity of the world. As a beneficiary of economic globalization, China promises to steadfastly champion it in the future.
Since China’s reform and opening-up kicked off, it has established a complete industrial system and formulated effective policies on politics, economy, science and technology, foreign trade, education, and environmental protection. This has secured its economic and social development and helped foster a huge primary market. Pretty well-prepared, China joined the WTO in 2001.
Through continued improvement of its own opening-up policies, China has successfully participated in the division of labor and cooperation in the world economy, which increased the speed of its own development. Today, China is deeply integrated into the world economy, and its relations with the world economy has also undergone structural changes.
In July, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released a report titled China and the World: Inside the Dynamics of a Changing Relationship. Focusing on three of the eight dimensions, MGI has analyzed the mutual exposure of China and the rest of the world on trade, technology, and capital. From 2000 to 2017, the world’s exposure to China has increased on all three with the aggregate index rising from 0.4 in 2000 to 1.2 in 2017, while China’s to the world has fallen.
This stems from China’s huge market. According to the World Bank, China accounted for 31 percent of global household consumption growth between 2010 and 2017. In addition, China is the world’s largest market for cars, alcohol, mobile phones and commodities of many other categories, accounting for about 30 percent of global consumption. By 2030, Chinese consumption could grow by as much as US $6 trillion, which is almost the equivalent of the United States and Western Europe combined, and from which the rest of the world will benefit. By shifting its focus to higher-valued industries, China will import more labor-intensive goods from emerging economies and more high-quality goods from developed economies, helping those economies create more jobs.
The size of the Chinese economy is also huge, and almost every industry in the world depends on China to some extent. According to the report, of the 20 Chinese sectors examined, 17 account for more than 20 percent of global consumption. China’s share of global consumption of services is also rising.
On the surface, economic globalization is the extensive and frequent flow of goods, capital, information, and human resources across the world, but in essence, the dominant force of this flow is scientific and technological progress and innovation. With the leading 5G technology and the development of hi-tech industries such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, China has long been deeply integrated into the global technology chain, and occupies a considerable share of global imports and exports. China has already adopted global standards for more than 90 percent of 81 technologies in the 11 sectors analyzed in the McKinsey report. The technology chain is one of the most complex value chains, and so requires the cooperation of all parties in particular. To this end, China has stepped up IPR protection and actively participated in fair cooperation in the global technology field.
As China has gained from the world economic system, it will surely be more open to the outside world and deliver the benefits of development to peoples across the world. For example, on the basis of the Foreign Investment Law, China will formulate detailed implementation rules to make the foreign investment environment more open, transparent, and predictable.
China’s development practices prove that globalization improves economic efficiency through effective division of labor. In the future, as President Xi Jinping announced at the G20 Osaka summit, China will further open its market, strive for high-quality development, and make unremitting efforts to create a better future for the world economy.
The world economy will uphold the multilateral trading system and the development space of emerging markets and developing countries by deepening cooperation on innovation, climate change, energy, education, and environment, promote reform of the global governance system, and achieve sustainable growth of the global economy.
