In this new world order, which can be described as national market liberalism, China stands as the gravity well of a shifting international system:
Partial market liberalisation was a key success of China’s Deng Xiaoping era, which preserved party control even as the Soviet system collapsed under technological stagnation. This served as the crucial catalyst for a structural reversal of the Industrial Revolution’s “Great Divergence”. This paradigm shift, led by China and mirrored across India, Indonesia, and beyond, is restoring global income and power distributions toward a centre of gravity closer to pre-1800 Eurasia.
Consequently, the arc of 21st-century political economy suggests that the era of “neoliberal globalisation” has already ended, replaced by a more mercantilist, geopolitically conditioned order defined by persistently tense Sino-US relations. China has become Asia’s inescapable gravity well. Just as a physical gravity well bends spacetime to pull nearby objects into its orbit, China’s massive economic and technological weight now dictates the trajectory of regional production. While Beijing masters a model of “imperial cohesion” and widespread industrial AI integration to manage internal pressures, the US is increasingly “America First”, leery of being heavily, expensively engaged in far-flung foreign lands. This shift has transformed global alliances into transactional service contracts and civilisational defence pacts. The result is a world drifting away from universalist governance toward consolidated, great-power spheres of influence, all of which are increasingly anchored in China’s immense productive and technological capacity.
