Data has proven that China is stabilizer of globalization. The WTO on April 8 said that world trade is expected to fall between 13 percent and 32 percent in 2020. The drop will mainly come from the US, whose imports declined 20.5 percent in April from January while exports fell 28.1 percent in the same period. But China's imports and exports in the first five months of 2020 have maintained a slight year-on-year dip of 4.9 percent. Meanwhile, exports in May increased 1.4 percent. China has become ballast stone of world trade.
The pandemic has wreaked havoc with global governance, plunging the world into further anarchy with fundamental changes. The world is witnessing the emergence of a new world where global governance in particular public health governance including crisis management is in disarray. The major power cooperation essential to the provision of global commons in support of a functional global governance system is fading fast as a result of intensifying geopolitical entanglements. The pandemic served as a catalyst escalating fragmentation and anarchy of global governance and post-pandemic governance will probably be more rather than less anarchic. Let us take a look into the post-pandemic world.
Covid-19 has been wreaking havoc with global governance and globalization, upending the world and making it adrift in a sea of changes. Thomas Friedman suggested that the world may be divided into a before and after the watershed Covid-19 pandemic, quite succinctly summing up the huge impact the pandemic has brought to global governance system. In other words, we are witnessing the emergence of a new world where global governance - in particular public health governance, including crisis management - is in disarray.
Despite the postponement from the normal time-frame in early March due to the novel coronavirus, China was able to hold the annual meetings of its legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), and its consultative body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), at the end of May, as one of the first countries which have succeeded in getting back to something of a “new normal” after the coronavirus outbreak. The meetings give an opportunity for the government and legislators to chart the pathway forward after the major disruption caused by the epidemic.
Global re-orientation to online formats caused by the pandemic will continue and gets in an irreversible course in the post-pandemic era. What is effectively working online is unlikely to return offline. A significant part of the retail businesses will go online and stay there because consumers will be convinced that they can purchase without going physically to the shops. Our transition to the digital age has accelerated enormously. What would be realized in decades is happening in months.
Many international observers have been shocked when they look at the US and see, in the midst of the greatest pandemic since last century, dumbfounding acts: university students romping on the beaches, demonstrators at state capitols without masks demanding an end to quarantine measures, and fake social media campaigns warning about the dangers of being vaccinated. Is this a society gone mad and plunging toward its own destruction?