More cooperation, less barriers

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By Shen Dingli (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-15 16:47

The decision by the Obama administration to impose heavy import tariffs on Chinese tires revealed the contradiction in games among different nations amid globalization.

For a long time, people have been singing praises to globalization. Indeed, productivity factors flew among different countries in order to seek the best resource combination under globalization. The confrontation between capitalist and socialist camps after World War II, however, not only hindered large-scale worldwide economic cooperation, but also deepened the ideological confrontation between them, which was in the interest of none.

The post-Cold War era saw the surge of a new round of globalization. China, with the world's largest population, became a more and more attractive destination for foreign investment as it boasts a large and cheap labor force, which is its main advantage. In seeking higher profit, the surplus capital in developed countries were flowing to underdeveloped countries, such as China, forming an unprecedented transnational integration of capital and labor. In this regard, the economic globalization can undoubtedly play a positive role in mitigating traditional world political barriers, enhancing cooperation and improving international relations.

China is one beneficiary of the economic globalization process, during which more jobs are provided for its people and more fiscal taxes brought to its government in addition to social stability and national development, which have enhanced the governing Party's performance. For the developed countries such as the US, importing large quantities of cheap but good-quality Chinese products lowered the living cost of its people, especially those middle- and low-income groups. Furthermore, the US investors, who benefited from the Chinese market, become a positive driving force for stabilizing Sino-US economic and trade ties.

Although globalization seems irreversible, not every country can really benefit from it, and neither can every group in the beneficiary countries benefit. It is obvious that the large-scale economic development, since China adopted the policy of reform and opening-up, has imposed some serious threat to its domestic environmental and ecological protection. The degree of environmental destruction in the past three decades has surpassed the total damage in the past few hundred years. China's over-emphasis on improving the investment environment and negligence in the matter of requiring investors to be heedful of environmental protection should be blamed for the destruction. The responsibility is to be assumed by the manufacturing country the investors are stationed in and directly harm the local people's environment and health. The outcome is beyond the objectives of our reform and opening-up policy and engaging in international cooperation. In the early stage of reform and opening-up, China could not impose its own high environmental standards on producers as Western countries did, because the country not only had to compete with developed countries in prices for the same kind of products, but also had to compete with other underdeveloped countries in labor cost in the age of globalization.

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