Source: https://research.gavekal.com/article/the-revenge-of-the-ottoman-empire/
My highlights:
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Back in 2017, the value of Chinese exports to Asean economies amounted to 60% of China’s exports to the US. Today, China’s exports to Southeast Asia stand at roughly 120% of China’s exports to the US.
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…from the early 2000s, global economic activity was massively boosted, not just by connecting China to the rest of the world, but also by connecting Chinese cities to each other, with all the associated construction of rail, air, road, telecommunications and power links this involved.
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key income “thresholds’’. For example, if the average income in a country is below US$1,000, nobody owns a television; when incomes move above US$1,000, almost everybody buys one. For smartphones, the level seems to be around US$2,500. For the automobile industry, the critical level seems to be US$10,000 a year. For university education, the level is US$15,000 and above. For financial products like life insurance, brokerage accounts and mutual funds, the level seems to be US$30,000.
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Today, the notion that the world is deglobalizing would seem laughable to anyone living in Dubai, Singapore, São Paulo or Mumbai. Rather, the world is going through a new wave of globalization, which is different from its predecessors. For the first time since Columbus sailed to the Americas (as Churchill said, “Christoper Columbus was the world’s first socialist: he didn’t know where he was going, he didn’t know where he was, and he did it all at taxpayers’ expense”), the world is experiencing a wave of globalization which does not require Western financiers, Western engineers, Western modes of transportation, Western currencies or Western technologies.