Source: Yuyuan Tan Tian
On January 17, President Xi Jinping again delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum. This speech is of far-reaching significance.
The metaphor of a "boat" illustrates the storms facing the world:
In the midst of a global crisis, countries are not in more than 190 small boats, but in a big boat with a shared destiny. Small boats can't withstand the wind and waves, and the giant ships can withstand the terrifying waves.
In the past year, the haze of the epidemic that hindered the global economy has not only not dissipated, but has become more serious.
Some unexpected challenges highlight the difficulty of global economic flows. Earlier last year, the Changshi ran aground on the Suez Canal, becoming a blood clot in the main artery of global trade and heralding pressure on global supply chains.
However, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that global world merchandise trade will grow by 22.4% in 2021, even higher than before the COVID-19 outbreak.
The dilemma and change correspond to the AB side of the world economy in 2021. Where does the world economy, which develops in contradictions, eventually go?
To answer this question, Lord Tan also wants to start from the story of a ship.
This is the heat map of the Asia-Europe route in the fourth quarter of 2021 provided by shipping big data company Yi Hailan.
Heat map of the Asia-Europe route for the fourth quarter of 2021
The red color of the entire Asia-Europe route is enough to show how high the heat value is, and the story of the ship that happened on this route last year also has ups and downs.
Lord Tan first found a person who was familiar with this route, Li Liang.
Li Liang is the first mate on the Scorpio of China COSCO Shipping Group Co., Ltd., and the route of the Scorpio is very similar to the red line on the heat map.
Route map of the Scorpio
Li Liang has spent most of the past year at sea.
"Our boats running the European line have increased from the previous 13,000 container load to the current 20,000 containers, departing at full capacity each time. This year, shipping has also become unusually busy. ”
COSCO SHIPPING, to which the "Scorpio" belongs, ranks first in the world in terms of comprehensive capacity.
These are actually the B-sides of the "Scorpio" experience in 2021. Side A is the crisis.
It should be known that COSCO SHIPPING caught up with the worst cargo ship stranding accident in the history of the Suez Canal in 2021, and was one of the three shipping companies most affected at that time.
Eight COSCO SHIPPING vessels, including the Scorpio, waited for four days on this major artery of world trade.
The encounter with this big blockage was when Li Liang went to sea for the second time in 2021.
At that time, Li Liang was faced with only two not-so-good alternatives — either to pay an additional $480,000 in fuel costs, to bypass the Cape of Good Hope, and spend more than 10 days on the ship; or to wait in place, but to do so, Li Liang did not know at the time whether the supplies on the ship could survive navigation.
In the same situation as the Scorpio, there were 422 ships at the time. They carry 26 million tons of cargo, radiating all over the world, but they are crammed across the Suez Canal and unable to move.
In this blockage, 22% of the world's containers and 13% of global trade were pressed the pause button. For every hour of disruption of the Suez Canal, losses increase by more than $400 million; for each week of disruption, global trade growth decreases by 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points...
Global shipping and trade, both are choked in the throat. Everything seems to return to the early days of the outbreak, the suspension of navigation and port suspension, which also infinitely magnifies the problem of tight global supply chains.
The congestion of the Suez Canal once sent the world into panic, and Radio France International commented that the consequences of the suspension were catastrophic
However, looking back by the end of 2021, the Suez Canal has ushered in a congested B-side, and its turnover has reached an all-time high in the year, reaching $6.3 billion, an increase of 12.8% over 2020.
Shipping companies, the Suez Canal, experienced a major blockage of global trade at the beginning of the year, but at the end of the year, they ushered in the dividends brought by global economic flows. The world always develops in a movement of contradictions, and without contradictions there is no world. An accident made us see the inevitable trend even more.
The importance of global connectivity has never been more prominent.
With the dredging of the Suez Canal, in 2021, the world will reopen the shipping lanes connecting each other, and also open a "new navigation era" for international freight in the post-epidemic era.
By July 2021, more than 80% of the goods in global trade will be completed by sea, and the proportion of goods imported and exported by sea in China's foreign trade will reach 94.8%.
Correspondingly, global trade will grow more than 20% positively in 2021.
A boat that flows up dredges the way for the global movement of goods.
These two maps are a comparison of the heat of the trans-Pacific route before and after the epidemic.
Thermal comparison of trans-Pacific routes in 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2021
Looking at this set of comparison charts, it can be divided into two layers.
The first layer, the red whole is in encryption. Thanks to the ships, the global economy has not only not broken under the epidemic, but has become a closer line.
Understanding this connection, Tan found Zhu Min, who had served at the International Monetary Fund.
During his tenure, Zhu Min did a great research called the relevance of the world. Specifically, it depends on how the world is connected, in addition to the connection of trade, there are also the connection of services, the connection of people, the connection of knowledge, the connection of capital, and the connection of information.
Together, these connections add a lot of resilience and resilience to the global network that Scorpio travels.
Looking at Scorpio's stopover route, the Port of Singapore's container throughput in the first five months of 2021 increased by 4.6% compared to the same period in 2020 and by 3.9% compared to the same period in 2019 before the outbreak.
The Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands maintained 100% normal operation, with a total cargo throughput of 231.6 million tons in the first six months of 2021, an increase of 5.8% year-on-year.
Connecting these ports together gives you another picture.
The cars carried on the Scorpio are products of China's export growth of more than 100% in 2021.
It is the automobile product, many technologies are developed in Germany, then produced and processed in China, and then sold in Singapore.
Wherever the ship goes, it is the main arteries of the world economy that are intertwined.
Motivation helps it move forward, and resistance makes it strong. Behind the strong rebound is the source of new impetus for economic globalization.
On the second level, zooming in on the increasingly red area on the far left of the heat map will reveal that routes between China and Southeast Asia have become more dense.
Correspondingly, vessel activity in China and Southeast Asia increased significantly compared with the same period last year. It was also the year that China became ASEAN's largest global trading partner.
Thermal comparison of China and Southeast Asia routes in 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2021
"Communication" is the result, "connection" is the path, and the two ends of the path are the global division of labor and industrial complementarity. The close neighbors of China and ASEAN are particularly typical.
A few years ago, China's domestic car brand Geely acquired The Malaysian Proton Motor, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. Today, Proton has exceeded 100,000 sales for three consecutive years.
It should be known that the total population of Malaysia is only more than 32 million people, and Proton's monthly sales have reached tens of thousands of orders of magnitude, in addition to the Malaysian market, Proton also radiates to neighboring countries, such as Thailand and the Philippines.
The RCEP, which has just taken effect more than two weeks ago, is another upgrade to regional economic integration, and the network connecting China and Southeast Asia is becoming more free and smooth.
Liu Hongzhong, a professor at Shanghai University of Foreign Chinese, who specializes in the global economic value chain, told Tan:
"The security of global value chains is not in how quickly they return and how quickly new producers emerge, but in whether trade with partners can be made freer and more convenient. In today's world where industries are already deeply integrated, even the largest economies do not have the ability to be self-sufficient, producing all key components, precision materials and mastering technical know-how. ”
Contrary to the aggregation effect of RCEP, some countries in the Pacific engage in protectionism, unilateralism, vain attempts to be self-sufficient, and also impose tariffs on many products, blocking the flow of goods, and trying to promote the return of industrial chains.
However, the deepening of the red heat map between China and the United States is the best response to the "countercurrent".
According to data provided by COSCO SHIPPING, in 2021, China's container exports to the United States set a record, an increase of 13.9% over 2020 and an increase of 17.5% over 2019 before the epidemic.
Correspondingly, in 2021, Sino-US trade volume increased by 28.7% year-on-year, surging to $755.645 billion. It should be known that when the trade war began in 2018, the trade volume between China and the United States has reached $633.52 billion.
Obviously, no "small courtyard wall" can stop globalization, and no "small circle" can stop globalization.
From ship to port, the dots are connected into a line, drawing a cross-section for observing the global economy.
The following three charts show a cross-section of the global route heat map that has remained unchanged over the past three years. The reddest area on the heat map has always been China's coastal ports.
Thermal comparison of China's coastal port routes in 2019, 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021
China has always been an important source of power for smooth global economic flows under the epidemic.
The biggest variable over the past three years has always been the pandemic.
Because of the epidemic, the port of Los Angeles, the largest port in the United States, has an average berth time of 25 days, and the number of ships waiting outside the port exceeds 100; the efficiency of dock operations in major ports in Europe has declined sharply due to labor shortages and port capacity limitations, and the berthing time is generally 2-3 weeks.
The stagnant ships and containers on the other side of the Pacific Ocean did not appear in China, where the "blood exchange capacity" was strong.
In Shanghai, Ningbo Zhoushan and other international ports, under the multiple challenges of the epidemic and extreme weather, the normal waiting time is only 2-3 days.
"China's ports have a high degree of digitalization, and many unmanned transport trucks can be seen in important Chinese ports such as Shanghai Yangshan Port and Ningbo Zhoushan Port, and the unloading boom is also fully automated, and ports with a high degree of digitization like this are already very common in China."
Talking about Chinese ports with Tan, Tao Yonghong, dean of the Deep Blue Research Institute of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, who has been focusing on comprehensive research on the shipbuilding industry for many years, said a sentence "very remarkable".
Container data is more intuitive:
It takes an average of 27 seconds to lift a container in Asian ports, compared to 76 seconds in North America; it takes two hours for ships to unload at anchorages in Northeast Asia and 24 hours in North America.
This set of data has also become china's basis for promoting a smooth global cycle: the fast turnover of ports is due to the latest port technology and infrastructure, which can accommodate the largest container ships, which in turn will attract more ships to dock.
The heat map of the routes around China's ports is just rightly red.
The basis of "blood exchange" is "hematopoiesis".
Under the epidemic, traditional manufacturing exporters such as Vietnam and India have had to continue to stop work and production, and the world is pinning its hopes on China, which has the most complete industrial chain.
The world's factory never sleeps.
In 2021, China's foreign trade scale exceeded 6 trillion US dollars for the first time, and the increase in foreign trade reached 1.4 trillion US dollars, understanding the significance behind this increase, you can look at the sum of The increases in China's foreign trade in the past 9 years (2012-2020) - 691.5 billion US dollars.
The export increase in 2021 in 1 year exceeds the sum of the increases in the previous 9 years.
Behind the data riding the dust, China has something to create, and powerful to build. In addition to exporting more mechanical and electrical products, mobile phones, automobiles, and even the tools that assist the world's import and export - ships, most of them are also made in China.
In the past few days, the China Shipbuilding Industry Association has announced three major indicators of the shipbuilding industry, three global firsts, which still belong to China.
China's shipbuilding completions from January to November alone reached 35.88 million dwt, accounting for 45.5% of the world's total.
Remember the Scorpio mentioned earlier? The energy consumption level of this ship is much lower than that of container ships of the same class on the market, and the energy efficiency index is about 50% lower than the benchmark value, and even meets the international emission standards ten years later.
China is advancing in the logic of historical progress and developing in the tide of the development of the times.
"Scorpio" is a sample of China's manufacturing industry, and it is also a label for China's high-quality development of green and innovative. High-quality development is also achieving mutual achievements with China's internal and external cycles.
Manufacturing has given China the power source of "selling the world", and China's super-large domestic demand market and economic strength have also given China a turn to "buy the world".
In 2021, China's import and export scale exceeded the historical record of 6 trillion yuan, and there are also medals of merit for imports.
Zhu Min, now the dean of the National Institute of Financial Research at Tsinghua University, told Tan:
"China, which has reached a per capita GDP of $12,000, is moving towards a high-income stage, with a middle-class population of 400 million people, and the demand is strong, as evidenced by China becoming the first country in the world to host an import expo."
China has become a navigator in the wave of global uncertainty, and has also provided a beacon for the "giant ship" composed of countries around the world.
In the face of changes in the wind and clouds, the "giant ship" needs to be firm in its course and be in the same boat with wind and rain.
Five years ago, China's top leaders appeared for the first time as the "most important guest" on the podium at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum, conveying to the world their understanding and firm support for economic globalization.
At that time, President Xi Jinping made an analogy with the audience: you can't retreat to the harbor as soon as you encounter wind and waves, you can never reach the other shore.
Five years later, President Xi Jinping returned to the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum as the first speaker and issued a statement that penetrated history:
Economic globalization is the trend of the times. When the river rushes to the sea, it will always encounter a countercurrent, but any countercurrent cannot stop the river from going east.