China’s belt and road can take its cues from the world’s first model of globalisation
Juan José Morales and Peter Gordon go back in history to find thriving trade of global scope that is radically different from today’s, apart from the fabled Silk Road
International politics, even more than nature, abhors a vacuum. And with America’s apparently headlong withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and metaphorically – if not yet physically – walling itself from Latin America, it is hardly surprising that Chinese-led alternatives were broached at the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima. “As Trump talks wall, China builds bridges to Latin America,” went the Associated Press headline.
Right on the heels of President Xi Jinping’s ( 習近平 ) sojourn in Peru, he met Spain’s deputy prime minister, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, on a stopover in the Canary Islands. They discussed the possibility of joint projects in Latin America: the two countries are very much “in tune” on this subject, she said.
What Hong Kong has to learn from the rise and fall of Manila
One would need a long memory for this rapport between China and the Spanish-speaking world to sound familiar, but the world has in fact seen this before. If the American-led globalisation is indeed on the wane, then what replaces it may well be something akin to the world of the 16th-18th centuries, during which international trade was very much configured on precisely this China-Spain-America triangle.
Hong Kong is situated perfectly to take a key and – should it make an effort – primary role in the re-emergence of the ‘Silver Way’
The advent of globalisation can be precisely dated to 1565: in that year, Spanish navigator Andrés de Urdaneta discovered how to sail east, i.e. back, from Asia to Mexico. Within a decade, this route developed into the “Manila Galleon” trade with regular sailings between Acapulco and Manila. American silver was exchanged for Chinese silks and ultimately products from throughout Asia.
This “Silver Way”, as we have called it, provided the key elements of what we now call globalisation: bi-directional trade routes of global scope and integration of world financial markets through the medium of silver. There were corresponding human and cultural exchanges, with tens of thousands of Asians emigrating to the Americas; Mexico, arguably history’s first “world city”, had a Chinatown in the early 1600s. The Spanish milled dollar, dating from the 1730s, was the first global currency.
How to save globalisation from its demise
