Now is not the time to turn our backs

It is curiously absent from politicians' speeches - but this is an issue of vital importance to the ordinary people of the world

Hardly anything was said about globalization and the country's future role in the world in the two rounds of debate in the US presidential election.

It appears that if there was anything the two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, could agree upon, it was to avoid showing any interest in such topics as globalization and free trade, for whatever purposes.

The politicians of a country which once claimed to be leader of globalization - implicitly a market economy on a global scale - have backpedaled to such an extent as to seem ready to overturn all the major free trade treaties signed or proposed with other countries.

As traditional champions of free trade, the Economist magazine and Financial Times newspaper both lament this, suggesting that if both candidates are serious about what they said in their debates, the next US administration could be a setback for globalization.

But presenting globalization as a simple, open and shut case cannot really help. Globalization's biggest problem is not that there are things it could have done better - if only there could be better management and collaboration among nations, such as adding jobs, reducing poverty, and mending inequality.

On a wider scale, globalization has a bad, and potentially dangerous, side. Preaching about it by not looking at its dark side is not a smart thing to do.

One can say there is good globalization and bad globalization. In fact, there is a competition between the good one and the bad one.

There are signs that, with politicians eager to please their begrudging constituencies and court rising populism, good globalization is on retreat, while the bad one is making strikes.

While world trade has not shown much of an increase and poor countries haven't got as many opportunities as they could have, the globalization of terror and criminal networks is growing.

Wars, breakdown of order, and poverty are turning the international refugee crisis into an unstoppable trend. It is not far-fetched to imagine it might spread to cover most of the African continent sooner or later, now that people, with the help of human trafficking groups and smartphone technology, can make their way across the Sahara in families and in teams.

How can information be gathered and efforts be shared on a global scale, when dangerous forces and shady businesses are taking advantage of different countries' legal loopholes and politicians' lack of guts to face them?

And don't forget the financial frauds flourishing through ever-developing internet technology, taking advantage of mismatches in different countries' judicial and regulatory systems. It is the poor people and regular wage-earners, like many Chinese, who are going to be the biggest losers

Talking about regulatory systems, countries have to ask themselves what to do about perhaps the largest monster lurking in the legal twilight - the financial capital that never ceases traveling round the world's major markets and can play havoc on anyone, if not all, when conditions allow.

What can be done to prevent this enormous force from doing damage? Governments still don't seem to have a clue. The International Monetary Fund says no country is capable of acting alone in regulating it. But how can there be effective regulation at all? It is a goal that looks farther away now that politicians are all distancing themselves from the very idea of globalization.

The same concern can also apply to climate change. Will politicians retreat from the treaties that their countries have signed, just to try to make their constituency feel happy? If not, will they abide by the terms? How will it be monitored? And how will abuse be prevented, for example, by rich countries not paying their dues and pursuing disguised trade protectionism?

All the above-mentioned concerns cannot be addressed unless practices are adopted by different governments. Indeed, any level of global governance cannot become a reality unless trust is built among governments and good globalization becomes strong.

Attempts to somehow cut global systems into small circles, whether by building border walls or by setting up political blocs, will not work because they simply do not match how fast and widely bad globalization can grow.

Building collective solutions to bad globalization is far from an elitist dream, but an imperative to protect ordinary people and let small businesses prosper.

For the next few years, however, it seems the process of doing so will be slowed down by a new crop of uninterested politicians.

The author is an editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact the writer at edzhang@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 10/14/2016 page13)