Unlike the West, China used globalization to benefit its people

Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.

If you compare China and the United States, both countries reaped immense wealth during the globalization boom from the late 1980s, yet only one country saw that wealth uplifted its broader population. China’s GDP grew 10 times, and its median income grew about eight times. America’s GDP grew four or five times, but from a much larger base. Yet, what is peculiar is that the American median income has been dropping and dropping. Where has all the money gone?

This says Dr. Eric Xun Li, a Chinese venture capitalist and political scientist who often criticizes Western liberal democracy, and praises the Chinese meritocratic system and political leadership. Dr. Li’s unique economic insights and critiques of globalist capitalism gives an interesting insight into the way China’s experience with globalization is viewed within China, and why they perceive Western nations as doomed.

China implemented a different form of globalization than the Western globalist model from the mid-1980s onward. It respects national sovereignty, strongly supports traditional values, strictly controls free speech but embraces the existing pluralism within the Chinese culture. China’s globalization protects China and Chinese interests. The Chinese government uses an active redistribution policy that benefits the population to a greater extent.

This contrasts with the U.S.-led globalism based on liberal democracy, which does not respect traditional values and religious principles, but rather pushes a hedonist, materialist propaganda based on a globalist market capitalism. In the West, the economic gains from globalism are largely accumulated in billionaire’s accounts outside the reach of taxation and redistribution.

The billionaire elite has benefited enormously from the lack of redistribution of wealth when jobs and opportunities were outsourced to China and low-cost countries in the late 1980s onward. Western globalism protects the Western billionaire class and elite interests at the expense of the Western population. While Chinese globalization has lifted its population out of poverty, Western borderless globalism has produced wealth for the top billionaire elite.

Noteworthy, President Trump seeks to diminish precisely the globalist structures of liberal democracy: open borders and lack of national sovereignty that have led to the rise of the billionaire class. His aim is to reindustrialize America, attract innovation and investments, bring back traditional Western values and a healthy capitalism that does not only benefit the rich.

“For a quarter century I have pointed out the destructive effect of moving American investment and jobs to China. Offshoring served the interests of corporate executives and shareholders. The lower labour costs raised profits and, thereby, executive bonuses and the prices of the stocks, resulting in capital gains for shareholders. The American manufacturing workforce was devastated, as was the tax base of cities, states, and the federal government,” writes Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, undersecretary of treasury in the Reagan administration and a regular contributor to The Herland Report.

This is also what I point out in my book “Trump, The Battle for America” 2025 Edition: Over 90% of the U.S. media is owned by only six corporations with widespread interest in the development of a globalist, transnational capitalist system that profits from lack of national sovereignty. The globalist business model is dependent on weak nation states that easily may be overrun by global corporations that crush the middle class and local businesses. Western countries are experiencing massive internal dissatisfaction due to the disproportionate distribution of benefits from globalism. Significant parts of the population are left worse off.

China’s alternative model strongly retains political authority as remaining firmly above capital. It is a state-driven system that has shopped ideas from the historic Western capitalist model and infused it into the Chinese communist model (Deng Xiao Ping’s brilliant stroke). This model is in stark contrast to Western liberal democracies in which billionaire capital owners now exert enormous influence over politicians, elections and almost completely control the political system.

China’s success, according to Dr. Li, stems from not conforming to the Western global liberal order, which breaks from traditional morality and family structures. China distinctly keeps its traditional value system instead of choosing Western hedonism, nihilism and legalization of selfishness and greed. China is the world’s largest trading nation and the main trading partner for over 115 countries, and has lifted approximately 800 million people out of poverty through economic development based on this “communist state-run capitalist model.”

In China, globalization prizes national sovereignty, has strict control over its borders, its cultural integrity and industrial development. China is for the Chinese, without mass immigration. The aim is to use globalization to strengthen Chinese culture, its Chinese population and values by focusing on international trade for the benefit of the growth of China.