Tokyo, 18 November – Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, says that Beijing is well on its way to building a separate system of Chinese technology—its own standards, infrastructure, and supply chains—to compete with the West. In his speech, “The End of the American Order,” Bremmer argues that this is the single most consequential geopolitical decision taken by any nation—and the greatest threat to globalization—in the last three decades.
Bremmer delivered his remarks at Eurasia Group's third annual
GZERO Summit in Tokyo, Japan.
Here are his key arguments:
- The greatest source of US-China conflict comes from technology, an area where China is a global power. This “tech cold war” will affect every region of the world. China's technological development poses a foundational challenge to the values on which global stability and prosperity depend.
- We need global leadership to create an organization that can establish ground rules for our digital world, the data and artificial intelligence that fuel it, and its future development. This will be the technology equivalent to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body responsible for objectively assessing the world's vulnerability and responses to climate change.
- The world also needs a digital WTO, a World Data Organization. As with the World Trade Organization, this would unite governments that believe in online openness and transparency in an organization that China will ultimately have an economic and security incentive to want to join, especially if it's the only way Beijing can secure access to developed markets.
- The so-called “Green New Deal” now being debated in the US assumes that Americans can solve their own climate problems. They can't. China is now the world's #1 carbon-emitter, by a wide margin, and China shares an interest with the rest of the world in fighting climate change. What we need instead is a “Green Marshall Plan,” a mainly Western-funded project that includes the best ideas of private sector thinkers and state-funded scientists from the West and China on how best to make the policy changes and invent the technologies to clean the world's air and water and limit the damage inflicted by climate change.
Full text of Bremmer's speech available here. Watch the speech here.
Eurasia Group's 2019 GZERO Summit featured panel discussions on the political, economic, and technological challenges of a world with declining US leadership – and no other country stepping up to take its place.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave a video address and said, “I am pleased that the GZERO Summit is being held again this year on such a grand scale. I have high hopes that discussions rich in insights and wisdom, shining a light on our unpredictable world, will unfold.”
Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Hiroshi Kajiyama, and Minister for Economic Revitalization Yasutoshi Nishimura also gave remarks.
Speakers included GZERO Summit co-chair and Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) Chairman Hiroaki Nakanishi; Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike; former Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd; Koichiro Kimura, Chairman of PwC Japan Group; Kathy Matsui, Vice Chair of Goldman Sachs Japan; and many more.
The 2019 GZERO Summit is sponsored by PwC Japan Group, LNG Canada, the Government of British Columbia, Teck Resources Ltd, and DMG Mori. Partners: Japan Business Federation (Keidanren), Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Japan, Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry – Japan, Business Council of Canada. Media partners: Yomiuri Shimbun, Caixin Global, SmartNews and The Straits Times.
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Eurasia Group is the world's leading global political risk research and consulting firm. By providing information and insight on how political developments move markets, we help clients anticipate and respond to instability and opportunities everywhere they invest or do business. Our expertise includes developed and developing countries in every region of the world, specific economic sectors, and the business and investment playing fields of the future. With our best-in-class advisory and consulting offerings and GZERO Media, the Eurasia Group umbrella provides the marketplace with a complete political risk solution. Headquartered in New York, we have offices in Washington DC, London, San Francisco, Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Tokyo, as well as on-the-ground experts and resources in more than a hundred countries. "Politics first” grounds our work: Politics is the lens through which we view the world, and we are committed to analysis that is free of political bias and the influence of private interests.
