At Davos, Singapore’s Tharman calls for US-China rivalry to ‘benefit’ world

Competition between the United States and China could help drive global progress, but only if both powers exercise restraint in sensitive areas such as nuclear technology and artificial intelligence, Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam has said. Speaking at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, Tharman stressed that broad innovation benefits could come from rivalry between the two superpowers. He added that innovations born of competition could lead to “mass flourishing” if the gains were shared widely. “They will compete furiously in new technologies, and for economic supremacy that will not be without benefit for the world.” He added that both superpowers had to recognise that accommodation and flexible cooperation would serve the national interests of both parties. Tharman warned against silent acceptance of diminishing norms and trust in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, noting that the world was now a multipolar one. “It will be tempting to think that things have to get worse before they can get better before we can reboot. But unfortunately, the danger with that is that things may not just get worse, but you might have a self-reinforcing decline into disorder,” he said. He urged nations to stick to the rules and norms that had been established by institutions such as the UN. Questions over the organisation’s future arose after the US, its main architect and biggest financial contributor, turned its back on it. Tharman acknowledged that the UN was being disregarded in the short term, but noted that most countries still believed in international law. He urged nations to build plurilateralism and unite in common interests in sectors such as artificial intelligence, trade and investment and climate change, to shore up these institutions. But he acknowledged that this would be an uphill battle, as international rules and standards in many sectors such as the digital economy had not yet been formed. “I would say we’ve got to go about this with some conviction … It’s not just because we’ve got our backs against the wall, we’re actually trying to build something which is needed and doesn’t yet exist,” he said. To build resilient international alliances, states would have to work on domestic policies revolving around employment, upskilling, creating opportunities for public-private partnerships and inviting investments, Tharman said. “We have to pay more attention to those who lose out, and not just to the aggregate and overall prosperity … If someone or a community is displaced, address it quickly,” he said. “It is significant that people who trust each other at home in their own countries have greater interest and faith in cooperation internationally. If you want to build a decent world order, it has to start at home.” Fellow panellist Chuck Robbins, chief executive of Cisco, said transparency was essential to rebuilding multilateral trust, particularly as technology advanced rapidly. Countries needed to be on “moral high ground” and be open when interacting with other states, Robbins said. “We realised things that are completely unchecked can have super negative outcomes, and so I think AI is another great example of where we should be working more closely together,” he said. Speaking at a panel on jobs later on Wednesday, Tharman posited that there was scope for “decanting of production to other parts of the developing world” as China addressed its domestic over-production of manufacturing relative to its consumption. Tharman, who co-chairs the World Bank Group’s High-Level Advisory Council on Jobs, highlighted the green transition as an opportunity for job creation in the developing world since Africa and South Asia were rich in solar, wind, hydro and thermal energy and should be sites for energy production globally. He noted that studies showed that the job multipliers derived from US$1 of investment in renewable energy were at least three times higher than in fossil fuels. “This is not an ideological question. It’s not a question of the fossil fuel industry versus the renewable industry. It’s just a question of economics. Where can we generate the most jobs?” Tharman said. “And this is a real opportunity that didn’t exist at the time that East Asia took off – the opportunity of creating jobs; unskilled, semi-skilled and high-skilled through the renewable transition.” Tharman also urged countries to reduce binary education systems which stratified those who excelled academically and those who took the vocational path. “There is a hierarchy all over the world between those who excel at the academic stream and those who are sort of doing the technical and vocational path, but that’s because we haven’t provided enough pathways to excellence and mastery within the technical and vocational and applied stream,” he said. “So reduce that binary and that social hierarchy that currently exists, frankly, across the world, but especially in Asia.”

At Davos, Singapore’s Tharman calls for US-China rivalry to ‘benefit’ world

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The city state’s president urges nations to build resilient global alliances and, at a separate panel, calls for ways to boost job creation

The city state’s president urges nations to build resilient global alliances and, at a separate panel, calls for ways to boost job creation