Diplomacy, trade, and human civilization

When Venetian traders Marco Polo and his family travelled to China in the years following 1260 and exchanged gifts and messages from Roman Catholic Pope Gregory of Piacenza with Emperor Kubilai Khan, they conducted the first diplomatic exchange between Europeans and Kubilai Khan (Polo 1958, pp. vii– xxxix, 1– 14). Trade and diplomacy are amongst the oldest practices of how we as humans have engaged and interacted with others who are unfamiliar, who are outside our family or tribal group, who are farther away than next door. Trade and diplomacy have evolved together over thousands of years of developing human civilization. As international trade has become more important relative to overall global economic activity, a specialized focus on trade has emerged within the practice of diplomacy. Today, new technologies and new forms of trade have created a need for new approaches to diplomacy and to trade diplomacy in particular.

Over the seven decades since the end of the Second World War, the international trading system and the diplomacy that has facilitated it is widely credited with fuelling an era of unprecedented global economic growth and development. But as the foregoing chapters have suggested, both the trading system and global economic growth face new and daunting challenges. The international system has experienced significant technological transformations in how diplomacy is done, which have affected the core diplomatic processes of representation and communication, the ways in which diplomats negotiate agreements and resolve disputes and crises. The rise of digital diplomacy (see below) is a prime example.

The relative power of different types of actors in diplomacy has changed, as non-state actors such as multilateral institutions, large civil society organizations, and global firms have emerged alongside the governments of states in the diplomatic arena. Place branding, the promotion of states and regions as destinations for international trade, investment, and tourism by governments, often in partnership with private actors, has been recognized as a diplomatic activity in itself, even as migration, the cross-border movement of human labour, has become a more contentious issue with which diplomats must contend.

Tomorrow's workforce: humans and machines collaborating?

Beyond the evolution of cross-border flows of goods, services, labour, capital, data, information, and knowledge, advances in technology are changing the broader structure of the global economy and of capitalism itself. The impact of these changes is affecting the nature and structure of production and work, of what we consume, and of how a capitalist global economy mobilizes to face existential challenges like the climate crisis. Thinking about the impact of technological change on the broader global economy and on the future of capitalism is important for the argument of this book. How we think about and understand the global economy and capitalism, and our expectations for the future that are based on those understandings, affect what policies we choose and how we advocate for them. Our expectations for capitalism's future also affect how we approach and implement the diplomacy that will be required to make our future policy choices succeed.

The single greatest impact of changing technologies upon the global economy is on work, the workplace, and workers. The nature of work in the industrial world has been changing since the 1990s in ways going substantially beyond the offshoring of jobs and tasks owing to the emergence of global value chains under Globalization 2.0. The domestic transformation of the workplace in industrial countries has been equally broad. Increasingly, the production model of firms employing workers for whole careers and providing advancement, benefits, and job security has been replaced by outsourcing of components and processes and the casualization of the production process through use of contract, part-time, and temporary workers (Harvey 1990, pp. 150– 55). Workers responded to this disaggregation of production processes and corporate workforces by marketing themselves and their services to prospective buyers in a newly defined ‘gig economy’. The emergence of the gig economy coincided with the arrival of the internet, enabling workers to connect with customers on a scale hitherto impossible. Entrepreneurs created online platforms permitting purveyors of everything from homemade crafts (Etsy) to services like ride sharing (Uber, Lyft) and food delivery from restaurants (Grubhub, Doordash) to sell to customers efficiently and safely.

Globalization and trade from cross-border sales to global value chains

A woman in Dusseldorf suffering from pain in her hip is x-rayed in a local hospital. Her x-ray is read and interpreted online by a specialist in Bangalore, who recommends her for hip replacement surgery. Prior to her surgery, her replacement hip joint is custom ‘printed’ in Dusseldorf on a 3-D printer manufactured in Toronto and operated remotely by a technician in Los Angeles. Her surgeon in Dusseldorf who installs the replacement hip, born in Damascus, received his medical training at a university in Shanghai and now works in Germany on a refugee visa.

This tale of numerous intermediate and component goods, services, labour, data, and information crossing borders in different ways to deliver a hightechnology medical service needed by one individual is not a narrative of traditional international trade, any more than the complex web of regulations and international agreements governing each element of the service delivered is a product of traditional diplomacy. Trade and the diplomacy that facilitates it are already different today in many areas. They will continue to change in the future.

As technologies have emerged and evolved over the past two and a half centuries, the way that products are designed, produced, and marketed has changed, the way that goods are bought and sold has changed. The part that international trade plays in that process has changed as well. Let us begin by examining how new technologies have changed how, and for whom, goods and services are produced. The first round of globalization, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, saw the transformation of the first industrial revolution's technologies of mass production and mechanization into a boom in international trade according to the model expected by the classical political economy theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Producers increasingly produced and exported surpluses of goods (and later services) that used factors of production – labour, land, capital, knowhow – that existed in relative abundance where they were located. Hence their costs to produce these goods and services were relatively low.

The costs of inaction

A dystopian vision of the future of world foresees the devastation of the environment and economy caused by some combination of war and the climate crisis that has resulted from continued high levels of greenhouse gas emissions and rising global temperatures. At the pessimistic extreme, humans will fail to direct the technology revolution to avert or mitigate the impact of climate change sufficiently fast to prevent the onset of ecological catastrophe. In such circumstances widespread conflict and war over resources will result in the collapse of the global economy as it has become familiar since the nineteenth century, and possibly even human civilization as we think of it today. Under those conditions, trade and commerce would be subordinated entirely to the ends of those who hold political and military power in their zones of influence, and the capacity of diplomacy to limit conflict would be sharply limited.

Even if we manage to avert the worst effects of failing to address the climate crisis, the failure of our states and societies to make policy and engage in effective diplomacy will expose society to major risks resulting from our inability to manage the evolution of AI and automation and their impact on the global economy. Our failure to address the climate crisis will postpone the advent of an age of abundance, if it does not preclude it altogether. Many resources are likely to become more scarce. Agricultural output, for example, will be restricted by reduced arable land owing to adverse weather and flooding, higher feed costs for livestock, and lower seafood stocks owing to acidification and pollution of the oceans. Competition between states and between global firms for access to resources is likely to encourage governments to raise trade barriers and limit trade to within blocs dominated by single powerful states, as occurred in the 1930s. Webb (2019) argues that the global economy is already at risk of being redivided into two trading and economic spheres: the West versus China and its client states. Trade and resource wars between blocs would bear a significantly heightened risk of erupting into military conflict.

Analysis in this chapter supports an overall trend of decline in the percentage of polluted days since 2012. Yet, stricter and more centralized policy enforcement measures do not have truly significant, across-the-board effects in reducing pollution in China, and the fall in PM2.5 concentration has not translated into significant and sustained health benefits. The chapter also examines the success and failure of the government in tracking the ongoing targets it set for achieving final policy goals, paying special attention to the following issue areas: reduction of toxic emissions, attacking water pollution, energy, and industrial restructuring, policy coordination, public participation, and the use of market mechanisms. The mixed outcome in addressing air pollution highlights the constraints and flaws of China’s environmental governance model. It also suggests that decades of reform and opening up have not fundamentally changed the impromptu, non-participatory, unaccountable, and mobilizational policy process, which often leads to undesirable and unintended policy outcomes.

This chapter looks at China’s environmental crisis and its impacts on public health. In examining the health impacts of air pollution, it highlights ambient PM.25 as the number one killer of all the risk factors for pollution-related mortality in China. Besides air pollution, water and soil pollution also has a significant and independent effect on people’s health. The health impact of pollution is further complicated by exposure to heavy metals such as arsenic and lead. The posited health effects of air, water, and soil pollution are epitomized in the phenomenon of cancer villages. Additional links between the environment and health, including trash and public health, pollution and mental health, pollution and sperm quality, and pollution and antibiotic resistance, are also examined.

When Xi Jinping took the helm in 2012, one of his major concerns was how to connect the wheel to the rudder: eliciting compliance from lower levels.Unlike previous party leaders, Xi rapidly recentralized his political power to a level that rivals Mao’s. The recreation of the Maoist bandwagon polity reshaped the institutional contours of policy implementation. Pollution control was a key element of this shift. The central leaders pushed for the enactment of three pollution-related action plans. With the elevation and embedding of environmental health issues, the power and prestige of central environmental protection agencies have been strengthened.Policy implementation has also been facilitated by the introduction of new policy instruments and mechanisms aimed at improving accountability and policy coordination. Still, many of the inherent policy implementation problems continue to be left untouched. They include upward accountability, lack of public participation, conflict between functional departments and territorial governments, and the central state’s inability to effectively monitor and evaluate bureaucratic performance.

The book concludes with a summary on how the environmental health crisis is undermining China’s international ascendance, as well as implications for China’s political development. It contends that the crisis and government response reveal a Chinese state whose political system is both resilient and fragile, and that the China model does not constitute a viable alternative to liberal democracy.

This chapter explains why environmental health issues carry profound implications for China’s future and how they threaten to severely weaken the nation’s economic growth, undermine its sociopolitical stability, and complicate China’s foreign relations.Environmental health issues not only exact a significant economic toll but also have profound sociopolitical implications. With the growing public attention on air quality, pollution has increasingly become a political issue that tests the Chinese government’s ruling capacity. The environmental health problems, in conjunction with other mounting domestic challenges, will constrain Chinese leaders’ ability to mobilize the resources and internal support necessary for China to play a global leadership role.

The introduction proposes environmental health challenges as an obstacle to China’s global leadership. Following a discussion of the unique features of environmental health problems in China, it explains why social response to the crisis is embedded in a political milieu dramatically different from the Mao era. It also touches upon issues of state response, including the challenges of policy implementation. Furthermore, it explains why the discussion fits squarely within the debate over Chinese state’s capacity to revamp itself and the prospect for China’s global leadership. It ends with a discussion of the analytical framework and organization of the book.