Chapter 1: World Disputes and China’s Strategic Options in the Context of the Globalization Crisis — A General Review of the International Strategic Situation and China’s National Security in 2016

The world is complex in that it contains a multitude of parallel trends as well as a myriad of competing trends and that some great trends can suddenly emerge without being fully recognized. When the international financial crisis that originated in the United States (U.S.) swept across the world in 2008, the international community was neither aware that de-globalization was rapidly gaining momentum nor did it predict an imminent and unprecedented globalization crisis. In 2016, the financial crisis, with eight years of infiltration, spread from the economic arena to the social arena and finally gave rise to a series of political crises in a number of Western countries and emerging market countries. It was then people suddenly realized that the trend of de-globalization, or anti-globalization, starting as trickles, has turned into great torrents, that it has set off political divisions and conflicts within the major world powers that have favored globalization such as the U.S., Great Britain, France and Germany, that it has caused serious economic and political disputes among Western countries, and that it has aggravated the strategic competition and conflicts among major world powers. With the arrival of 2017, the tempestuous storm of de-globalization and the accompanying sudden changes in world politics set us wondering at the fact that our familiar post-Cold War era is coming rapidly to an end and that a disturbing new era with great uncertainty is dawning.