New Humanism and Global Governance

The following sections are included:

• About the Editors
• Contents
• Introduction: New Humanism and Global Governance

In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for developing domestic think tanks that have international influence and reputation.

China’s think tanks have gained strong momentum in recent years — not least highlighted at the recent world summit of think tanks held in Beijing, addressed by Prime Minister Li Keqiang. Yet, Chinese entities are still lagging behind their fellow peer organizations in Western countries in terms of in-depth analysis, scope, independence and funding. To go global, institutions must build an international horizon and amass broad expertise, specialize in national, regional and international affairs, and stimulate international debates. They should also set tangible goals and encourage branding, publications and media relations. The Internet should be considered as a mandatory tool for publicizing research projects and results…

Humanism as a philosophy takes humanity as the foundation of value configuration; it places paramount value on human beings as its point of departure. Humanism in this broad sense hardly needs to be promoted today. As Charles Taylor has famously characterized, we live in a “secular age.” In today’s disenchanted world, humanity is already placed at the center, for better or for worse. We live a new era, however. A new era calls for a new form of humanism. In this chapter, I first argue that, as we develop a new humanism that promotes well-being, prosperity and harmony for all, two defining themes must be integrated into such a new philosophy. The first theme is that this new humanism must reflect our response to the challenge of the Anthropocene. A new humanism is already outdated if it fails to understand fully and to address effectively today’s environmental challenges. The second theme is that it must have cultural roots. A humanism, even though with a universal character, is without vitality if it is cut off from cultural traditions. Then, I present a Confucian perspective on a new humanism that would integrate the two essential themes…

It was a great honor and pleasure for me having been invited to present a keynote address at the opening of the important, annual Institute for Public Policy (IPP) World Forum…

The events of the past few months starting with the British vote to depart from the European Unions (Brexit), the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States and a few other smaller events started the widespread debate about globalization and the world order. Spreading like a wildfire in Europe and elsewhere, the two separate camps of “De-globalization” and “Re-globalization” are at odds with each other with little predictability about their future outcome…

History suddenly shifted its gear in the past two years and has come to a stage where many events, some of them previously unthinkable, took place one after another. The rise of ISIS, the repeated terrorist attacks in Europe, the challenge of the refugee crisis, the eye-catching performances of the right-wing parties in European elections, the Ukraine crisis, the British decision to exit Europe Union, the rise of Donald Trump as the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in America, the victory of the coalition in Japanese politics with a majority in the Diet that supports the amendment of the Constitution, the tensions in the South China Sea and the rise of nationalism in many countries — the intensities by which these events astonished us have been unprecedented…

Within the current discussions as we shift from Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is timely to consider what approaches facilitate sustainable development. This is a practitioner chapter that discusses professional engagement in the field of culture and sustainable development. It canvasses the challenges encountered in current development models and the innovations introduced in our approach to sustainable development. The chapter uses a case study to demonstrate that culture is essential for sustainable development and has a transformative role as both an enabler and driver in the economy. A sustainable economy is diverse, has low inequality and provides a society with economic, social and cultural prosperity…

This chapter is about the role that experts and expertise play in the economic “governance” of advanced capitalist economies, particularly during periods of crisis. Market economies require governance in order to function effectively. That is, they require mechanisms that coordinate activity among economic actors in ways that facilitate positive outcomes and mitigate negative ones. Much has been written about what these mechanisms are. Adam Smith argued that wealthy nations were governed not only by the pursuit of self-interest, but also sympathy for others — moral sentiments. Emile Durkheim recognized that social solidarity was necessary to prevent market exchange from deteriorating into self-interested chaos. Karl Polanyi showed that the development of capitalism required a double movement whereby the state had to develop in lockstep with the market in order to prevent capitalism from self-destructing. Douglass North maintained that market efficiency required stable and transparent property rights, and Eleanor Ostrom showed that property rights were the key to preventing tragedies of the commons (Durkheim, 1933; North, 1991; Ostrom, 1990; Polanyi, 1944; Smith, 1977, 2013)…

This chapter examines copreneurship as a form of entrepreneurship within the partnership of small family businesses, in connection with economic sustainable development in globalized economies in Taiwan. Global economic fluctuation and recession since the preceding decades’ global economic restructuring and late 1990s’ financial crisis brought about the increasing deregulation and privatization in the labor market, which has resulted in increasing insecurity in the work organization and employment relations. Under the prolonged global recessions, scholars have recently found an upsurge in entrepreneurship around the world (Xavier et al., 2012). Entrepreneurship research has never been so vital since its emergence in early 1990s…

The basic political actor in today’s world is the sovereign state. The prerequisite to enduring sustainable order, stability, development and growth is an efficient, functioning and effective state. But the state is both more legitimate and more effective in its elemental tasks when it is democratic, inclusive and organized on principles and structures of good governance. Many of these can be informed by international debate and best practice. But no system of governance will survive, let alone thrive, if it is a foreign import. Instead it must connect to and build on local traditions, belief systems and governance practices. At the same time, isolation and disengagement from global norms is no more an option in today’s world than is delinking from the global economy or rejecting globalization…

Unlike the U.S., China remains a labor-abundant country and clearly has no comparative advantage in the production of either capital-intensive or technology-intensive products. Nevertheless, China has a huge trade surplus with the U.S., not only in labor-intensive products, but also in high-tech products. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2011), in 2010 the U.S. had a $94 billion trade deficit with China in advanced technology products. Take, for example, that trendiest of high-tech gadgets, the iPhone: all iPhones sold in the U.S. market are actually imported from China. That one product accounted for $1.9 billion of the 2009 U.S. trade deficit in bilateral trade (Xing and Detert, 2010). The prevailing pattern of China-U.S. trade in hightech products seems to contradict classic comparative advantage theory, which would predict that China would import high-tech products from the U.S. and not vice versa…

Conventionally, the informal sector is regarded as a hub for the poor who need work but could not find formal employment. It is a residual sector, a refugee for the vulnerable. More recently, however, it seems to be attracting the skilled, people with business assets and even risk-takers. For such people, the informal sector may be their first preference: their optimal choice, rather than a second best to formal employment. In China, the trend of informal employment (IE) therefore has been to increase rather than enter an expected decline. Among policymakers, there are now both positive and negative views of this trend. Some in Shanghai have openly welcomed the emerging of IE; its mayor published an article regarding the IE as the “cradle of a new type of economic organizations” (Chen, 1999). Conversely, others continue to advocate reducing the size of informal sector. The International Labor Organization (ILO), for example, still expresses the view that informality is the trap for the vulnerable…

Aristotle is often thought of as the first, in the Western tradition, to think systematically about politics (1998). What is perhaps most innovative about his Politics is not his division of polities into categories based on who exercises rule (the one, few, many), as this distinction was found within Herodotus and Plato. Rather, he sub-divided these further, looking at the various ways that deviant forms of rule functioned and how they could be remedied. Remarkably, the remedies in oligarchies could be found in democracies, similarly deviant forms of rule. What is of most interest for the chapter is that more than two millennia later, it is not clear what Aristotle’s preferred form was. Indeed, Eugene Garver suggests that Aristotle seems to entertain plural concepts of political good but a singular one of the ethical good (2011). This puts him at odds with the overwhelming majority of stated and unstated positions of Western liberal scholarship which tends to think democracy as the most (and often only) legitimate form of organizing a polity, while it insists on the need to consider competing ethical positions as (equally) legitimate…

In December 2015, Yu Keping, a well-respected high-ranking Chinese official-turned political scientist, currently Dean of the School of Government and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovation at Peking University, invented and popularized an interesting metaphor to capture the sweeping prevalence and alarming nature of corruption in China’s political system. This is what Yu said, “If a number of officials are corrupted, they must lack political belief or suffer other personal faults. If flocks of officials are corrupted, something must be wrong with the system. It is much like a fishpond. If a few fish died, something might be wrong with the fish. If flocks of fish perished, something must be wrong with water in the pond”…

The 1989 World Bank Study “Sub-Saharan Africa — From Crisis to Sustainable Growth” defined governance as “the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs” (World Bank, 1989). The Bank’s 1992 publication, Governance and Development, further defined governance as “the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development” (World Bank, 1992). The Bank identified three distinct forms of governance: (1) the form of political regime; (2) the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development and (3) the capacity of governments to design, formulate, and implement policies and discharge functions (World Bank, 1994)…

The following section is included:

• Index