Yang Hanyi：After decades of economic globalization, we have become, at least China and the United States has become so tightly and almost intrinsically bound with each other. And I have one question, which is that since the rich and powerful- we know that the benefits of globalization have gone disproportionately to the rich and powerful- and since they are the ones that have been tremendously benefited from globalization, why should they support those political forces advocating for decoupling? If they don't support those forces and how could decoupling effort ever be successful?

Stiglitz: That's a very interesting question. I think what has happened in the United States is that the corporate interests that were very much behind the globalization as it occurred beginning in 1980 have become disillusioned with the way things have turned out. And I think they've gotten disillusioned partly because they thought there was a gold mine in China. They thought that a huge market of 1.3 billion people was going to generate huge amounts of profits. And it turned out to be not so. They've gotten a lot of profits, but those profits have declined. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. The first is wages in China have gone up. So it's not the source of cheap labor that it was before, that's why they're going to other countries where labor is cheaper. So they've learned how to outsource, but China is not viewed in that way as the source of profits as it was before. Secondly, some of the American corporations made profits out of ignoring environmental and other standards. And China now is being much better with environmental standards. And so they're looking for other places where they can abuse environmental standards. Hopefully they won't find any, but but that's... The third is that China has been very successful in developing its own companies. The auto industry, you have a very successful auto (industry). I drive a Volvo which is owned by a Chinese company. The reality is that China has made enormous progress, and competition inside of China, from Chinese companies is very intense. The direct answer to your question is the corporate agenda for a linkage has been very strongly weakened. They complain a lot about the theft of intellectual property or restrictions on expansion in certain markets. But I think the underlying complaint is really that it's not being the source of profits that it once was hoped to be.

Zhang Weiwei: As we all agree, perhaps China is one of the few major beneficiaries of globalization. Even today, most Chinese support globalization. From my point of view, US corporations have also on the whole benefitted a lot from globalization. But I think due to what you have mentioned in your book, the political system, political institutional issues, gridlocks, whatever, somehow the interests have not been fairly distributed, at least part of it is redistributed across American society for the ordinary people. That's why a lot of people have grievances against globalization.

And I was wondering, at this time there is this tech war, trade war between China and United States. We saw the restriction on Huawei, Tiktok, and Ant Group. I wonder whether there is also what I call an extension of what you have described as power, economic power, US corporations supported by US government vis-a-vis the Chinese companies. I think there is an element of that. They are afraid of what we call the free and fair competition.

Stiglitz: I think clearly companies have always turned to governments for help. The joke is they believe in competition, but in other sectors, not their own, and for other people, the same thing. I always noticed businessmen were always against subsidies except in their own sector. Free market is something that applies to other people, but not to myself. Every company always says I'm in a special circumstance where I need assistance, protection, competition will be destructive, unfair. So that's the nature and you just have get used to it. That's the reality, but public policy should be very much not to allow large corporations to use the power of government to advance their interests.That's not what government is supposed to be doing.

I think there is still a need for multilateralism. Economists have made a strong argument that the real benefits of trade are global, and regional trade agreement don't resolve that.You can get what my colleague Jagdish Bhagwati refers to "Spaghetti Bowl" of complications of overlapping trade agreements with different provisions. To me, I think the biggest challange is the following. After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the end of the cold war officially, Francis Fukiyama wrote this very influential book called The End of History, and it's sort of pollyannaish fantasy that we will all wind up as liberal democracies and free market economies.One of the arguments for trade liberalization was that it would hurry on the day of End of History where everybody  is a liberal democracy and a free-market economy. That fantasy, nobody believes in that any more. We're not converging to the same political and economic system, we're likely to have, going forward, different parts of the world working on different systems. That has very important implications, because the rules of game are easy to write if everybody is in the same economic system. But when there are different economic systems, writing what might be called fair, reasonable rules are really difficult.

The challenge is going to be, once you regonize that trade is not going to be necessarily leading into the convergence, there's going to be different politcal and economic systems，how do we take advantage of the gains to trade; how do we organize a world where we have to cooperate on climate change, on pandemics, on global prosperity, on assitance to poor countries, so many areas that we have to cooperate. How do we get that cooperation, and at the same time, recognize, we will be arguing for very different political and economic systems?

We will be, in that sense, I don't want to say, competitors, but there are very different visions that we will be putting forward for the direction of society. We don't have to lecture each other, but we have very diffrent views. And the question is, how in that kind of world do we live peacefully together, cooperate in the many many areas that we have to cooperate, if we're going to succeed in living a prosperous life without conflict and within our planetary boundaries?

Zhang Weiwei: Having heard this very open-minded, thought-provoking statement from Professor Stiglitz, I think, ideally, Professor Stiglitz, you have to become the US president. That will bring so much welfare and benefit to mankind. Come back to Kris's question concerning globalization, I agree that there will be readjustment for understandable reasons. Regionalization will become stronger, perhaps there will be a kind of European integration, Asian integration, North American integration. And there's a new element, because China now is, by purchasing power (parity), already the largest economy, with 130 countries as its largest trading partner, China is advocating what we call a new type of globalization based on the key message of what we call "discussing together, building together, and benefitting together" as characterized by this Belt & Road Initiative, which is the largest scale... I hope really it's open to all countries, it's a platform- at the moment the world's largest platform- for a new type of globalization based on mutual benefit. Some US companies have already joined in, European companies are now joining in, but this is a grand project. We need some grand projects for mankind. Hopefully most countries will benefit from it.

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