“We Must Stop War by Trade!”, Jack Ma, Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, screamed to the audience. In the hotspot, I directly experienced his enthusiastic presentation. The venue was B20 Summit, which has been held in Hangzhou. Ma’s message was the climax during the gala dinner exclusively for the B20 community on day 1 of the summit.
Since the last year during Turkish presidency of G20/B20, I’ve been a member of the latter’s community. To be honest, I’m not fully involved in its discussion process, because I already know the following fact: “The Chinese mainland government will stick to its intention, even though it is advised differently by others.” However, the atmosphere per se you can experience only in such a genuine global event as B20 summit is extremely important for me, as a strategic and risk scenario maker based on global trends. Even though western media never refer to the public the words, “possible breakout of a war in the very near future”, I also heard that, for example, during the last year’s B20 summit in Ankara, Turkey. And this year, Jack Ma, an icon of Chinese digital economy, underlined the same words. I can’t help asking myself whom PRC will fight against then.
Having said that, I must say I was still frustrated to listen to what was discussed in panels of B20 summit in Hangzhou. The items the panelists picked up sounded rather technical, and they just repeated the magic word, “innovation”. Other than the Turkish presidency, the Chinese didn’t stick to their preference to SME expressis verbis. Instead of doing so, the Chinese presidency relied on digitalization by presenting its ideas such as “B20 brain platform” and “eWTP(=world trade platform). The former was proposed by Baidu, another giant in the Chinese internet, and is said to be made of network of world-class artificial intelligence. Once the AI network will be realized, the world’s political and economic leadership will be simply able to ask the network how to tackle global issues, according to the explanation by Li Yanhong, Chairman & CEO of Baidu.
The latter was energetically put on the table by Jack Ma. “By making such a digital platform as eWTP, the world leadership should prioritize SME to boost the global economy”, he said. Nevertheless, he seemed to be unsuccessful so far, while he could get support only from a few small countries in this regard.
Beyond these rather “technical” items, the political leaders, who showed up on the day 1 of B20 summit in Hangzhou, voiced in unison the need of “inclusiveness”. They screamed that the global community has, as a matter of fact at this stage, only one option: giving all the humankind tickets to actively participate in on-going fight against doomed economy. In short, the strategy repeatedly presented by the panelists and political leaders is quite simple as follows: “Let short cut be given to all the parts of the global economy and society, so that the world won’t lose its continuous economic momentum”.
Well, I’m myself extremely pessimistic vis-à-vis such a strategy. Since it’s not the human being but the sun that really matters. Any technical agendas such as we’ve heard in western-dominated B20 community won’t work and help us a lot, because they can’t stop accelerated irregularity of solar activities since 2012. The “X-Day” will come soon. Whether we should get back to an old recipe “war” at that moment or not, is the real question we should discuss right now. But there’s nobody in B20 or even G20 who’s dare to directly mention this core issue. Let’s see how the world new order will be accordingly changed in a dramatic manner after the “X-Day”, while all of us won’t be well prepared for that. Stay tuned.