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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)

  • Xiangming Chen ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 30, 2022
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Abstract

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.


Corresponding author: Xiangming Chen, Urban Studies, International Studies, Sociology, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA; and School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I thank Zayde Antrim, Jonathan Elukin, Maximilian Mayer, Curtis Stone ‘10, Ivan Su ‘16, Jiaming Sun, Qiyu Tu and two reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. The revisions also benefited from the feedback received on my presentations and remarks at a series of events and workshops at the University of Oslo (UiO), the Center for Development and the Environment (UiO), the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and the ASIANET 2022 conference in Oslo and Trondheim, Norway, the Belt and Road Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and the University of Bonn, Germany, during June 2022. I am grateful to the organizers and audiences for their feedback. The research undergirding this article is supported by the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professorship Fund at Trinity College, Connecticut, USA.

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Received: 2022-01-02
Accepted: 2022-08-29
Published Online: 2022-09-30

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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