Pandemic ....
When people travel, they bring all sorts of luggage, including pathogens.
Thus was the great era of exploration also the dismal era of genocide.
Explorers to the New World brought a panoply of diseases like smallpox and measles new to the indigenous communities.
The colonial invaders subjected the Americas to war and slavery.
But it was those diseases that were largely responsible for a catastrophic reduction in populations up and down the Americas.
As many as 56 million people, or 10 % of the world population at the time, died by the beginning of the 1600s.
The mortality rate for the indigenous communities was an astonishing 90 %.
In exchange, the explorers returned to their native countries with syphilis, a horrible disease, but it didn’t radically depopulate Europe.
Pandemics are closely associated with the movement of traders and soldiers.
Roman soldiers returning from Mesopotamia were responsible for plague that ravaged the empire in the second century AD.
Just one of several pandemics that helped end Rome’s global dominance.
The bubonic plague of the fourteenth century began in China and reached Europe via merchant ships carrying flea-infested rats.
In the modern era, soldiers returning home from fighting in World War I spread the Spanish flu, killing up to 50 million people.
That pandemic was one of the factors behind the collapse of the first wave of modern globalization.
Prior to outbreak of World War I 1914, the world had never been more tightly connected with steamships, trains, and telegraph.
Trade as a proportion of GDP stood at 14% on the eve of the first war.
The devastation of World War I followed by flu epidemic dealt a heavy blow to world trade and economic integration.
Global economic depression 1920s, the rise of nationalism, and second world war ensured by 1945 that trade GDP dropped to 5 %.
Modern globalization is made possible by modern medicine.
A couple of pandemics have broken out since 1945, but they haven’t disrupted the global circulatory system.
In the ancient Akkadian language, the word for epidemic disease meant 'certain death'.
Only recently have medical professionals been able to handle outbreaks of disease on such a scale.
Thanks to a second wave of globalization, trade would rise again to the levels it registered in 1914 by the late 1980s.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a third wave of globalization removed more barriers to the movement of goods and money.
Even China, a nominally Communist country, joined the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001.
China's own version of globalization - the Belt and Road initiative - placed China at center of a network of trade and finance.
"The coronavirus, by itself, will not put an end to this most recent wave of globalization.
Like the flu pandemic of 1918, it could contribute to a trend of greater fragmentation.
Or, by serving as a reminder of how the health of humanity has been mutually dependent across borders for millennia.
The latest outbreak could prompt a rethinking of how the world works together.
Things Fall Apart?
China will prove pivotal in determining which direction the world heads.
At the moment, economic pundits in the West are exhibiting a degree of schadenfreude at Beijing’s difficulties.
The new coronavirus - will end up being the final curtain on China’s nearly 30 year role as the world’s leading manufacturer?
The global assembly line was already shifting away from Chinese sources as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
The pandemic only reinforces this trend.
China could still come out a winner in all of this.
It could invest its surplus capital into an even greater push toward higher value-added production, particularly in the digital sphere.
This shift could facilitate a major reduction in the country’s carbon footprint as well.
Much depends on the U.S.-China relationship.
Long before the coronavirus crisis, the U.S. policy elite had already moved away from supporting engagement with China.
China was already prepared for disengagement.
It had laid the groundwork for an alternative globalization, financed by the country’s considerable trade surpluses.
Many countries in China’s vicinity opted to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative.
They receive financing from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
China and the US are heading in different directions.
Global solutions to what are increasingly global problems such as climate change and pandemics will be difficult.
Because of the corona virus, China has rediscovered how dependent it is on the rest of the world.
We buy Chinese products, to supply Chinese consumers, to provide raw materials for Chinese business, to service Chinese tourists.
China’s projected growth rate for 2020 has been revised down from 6 percent to 5 percent, but it might drop even further.
The Chinese economy is fragile with overcapacity in manufacturing sectors, real-estate bubbles, high rates of debt, and growing inequality.
With the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing was hoping it could grow its way out of these problems.
That strategy depends on a number of unknown variables, which in the short term include the persistence of the pandemic.
And the results of the upcoming presidential election in the United States.
The corona virus is a wake-up call for both Beijing and Washington.
The new status quo of a revived Cold War between the two hegemons is unworkable.
Globalization has been challenged before by financial crises, pandemics like the Hong Kong Flu, even the specter of Y2K.
This time around ...
Failure of the global community to establish new rules of the road is creating a perfect storm of international dysfunction.
If something with a relatively low mortality rate like the corona virus can do such a number on the global economy ...
Perhaps the patient was already suffering from some pretty dire underlying conditions.
The Spanish flu helped herald the collapse of the first wave of modern globalization. A century later, could the coronavirus do the same?
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