By LUKE BARRAS-HILL

Friday, 4 December 2020 18:38

“We are entering into a new era of globalisation,” said Tse, pointing to the fact that demand centres were previously centred in the West, with manufacturing and supply in the East.

“That in a simple sense was globalisation 1.0. That came to a bit of an abrupt ending because of the policies taken by the Trump administration and internal change taking place within Asia and particularly China. China is no longer just a supply centre; it is both a supply centre and demand centre because of the rise of China’s middle classes.‘’

“Chinese middle classes have become a major consumption centre. Globalisation 2.0 is another manifestation of the dual circulation that the Chinese government talk about. You have internal circulation – internal supply and demand in China or Asia and external trade internationally, which will continue. This will signify the next generation of globalisation as we see it.”

China finalised its five-year plan, setting China’s economic and social policy vision for 2021-2025, at the 20 October Chinese Communist Party 19th Central Committee.

“China has come out from the pandemic in the first quarter with containment of the virus and is undergoing a reasonably strong economic recovery, [but] not uniformly across all sectors,” observed Tse. “Retail, travel and tourism is now doing better. It is still not back to its peak times, but nonetheless better than the very bad times of the pandemic.