The novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19) that broke out in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 has spread from neighboring Asian countries to European countries, the United States, and emerging countries since March 2020. The globalization of t...
The novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19) that broke out in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 has spread from neighboring Asian countries to European countries, the United States, and emerging countries since March 2020. The globalization of the economy, which has accelerated over the last few decades, now faces historic crises due to constriction on people’s mobility, severance of production networks, and loss of consumption. Incidentally, globalization has brought economic development to Asia and especially China. China now reigns as the second-largest economy globally and has launched its own hegemonic foreign policy, which poses a growing threat to the United States. To counter the threat, since July 2018, U.S. President Trump (who took office in 2017) has imposed additional tariffs on imports from China, which has led to a trade war. The two countries have waged this war with policy strategies that extend from reducing the US trade deficit to those restricting and regulating technology in ways that infringe on America’s national security. President Trump and his administration’s tariff policies toward China create barriers to international trade and aim to remove the US from the global production network of Chinese ICT companies. These policies also seriously threaten the global acceleration of economic globalization that has continued since the 1990s. The current COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbates the situation. Currently, the China-centric global production network needs significant changes to cope with infectious diseases and finds itself caught between the US and China in a hegemonic war. Within this backdrop, we confirm the developmental mechanisms of Asia that have led to China’s development over the past half-century. It then discusses the characteristics and challenges of the “One Belt One Road” Initiative as China's foreign policy and examines the impact on China and the country’s responses to both the US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, it explores prospects for the "One Belt One Road" Initiative and the structural changes in the global after COVID-19.