Introduction to the Handbook on China and Globalization

Abstract

The world economy’s performance in 2017 was widely believed to be better than that of the previous year. But even as the global economy shows all the signs of a full recovery, anti-globalization and trade protectionism are two major threats causing widespread concern and which have the potential to damage the development of world economy and trade. Britain’s exit from the European Union, America’s sudden withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and repeated challenges to the world’s multilateral trade system and threats to leave the World Trade Organization (WTO) add new uncertainties for the cooperation among the major powers to resolve global issues and future globalization development. Over the last two years voices for de-globalization and anti-globalization could be heard from many parts of the world, not only in some developing countries but also some developed ones. As Joseph Stiglitz, American economist, professor at Columbia University, and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, put it in 2017: