MORE CADILLACS IN CHINA.

A year ago, the world was gearing up for a bad trade year. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, participants in the 2017 annual January gabfest of the elites of state interventionism were on the alert for “the intellectual crisis of globalization.” With Donald Trump set to move into the White House, a preDavos note from a Forum staffer warned of “the triumph of nationalist nihilism over cosmopolitan idealism.”

Whatever that means, it didn’t happen. Also caught offguard were international trade experts who were expecting 2017 would be a rerun of 2016, when world merchandise trade growth flattened to 1.3 per cent. But as 2017 progressed, trade expanded at an estimated rate of almost four per cent, a new high new since the 2008 financial crisis. The World Trade Organization projects another four-per-cent-plus year for 2018. Globalization isn’t dead yet, and shows no signs of abating. Take the auto industry. General Motors reported last week that it sold 175,489 Cadillacs in China during 2017, a gain of 51 per cent over 2016, compared with slow Cadillac sales in the United States of 156,440. At the beginning of 2017, talk of trade wars with China and new regulations led forecasters to expect a GM sales slowdown. Instead, total GM China sales jumped four per cent to more than four-million vehicles. By comparison, GM sold 232,057 retail vehicles in Canada.

Fears of a great nationalist retrenchment and the decline of globalization appear to have been grossly over-anticipated internationally. Brexit has been portrayed as the beginning of the end of growth and prosperity in an increasingly inwardlooking United Kingdom. But as the Dow Jones soared to record highs in the first days of 2018, so did London’s Financial Times Stock Exchange index, which at 7,700 is now 35 per cent above its 2016 Brexit-vote lows. Fears of a Brexit catastrophe

GLOBALIZATION ISN’T DEAD — AND IT SHOWS NO SIGNS OF ABATING.

have disappeared, talks continue, solutions are emerging. Share prices are soaring in Japan.

In other news, the Financial Times reports that French President Emmanuel Macron is off to China this week, accompanied by Airbus executives who propose an “industrial partnership” with China over aircraft production. Airbus would increase its production of A320 single-aisle aircraft in China, providing China agrees to buy the Airbus’s double-deck widebody A380 aircraft. While such a deal would fall short of being market-driven globalization, it is another indicator that international trade and investment — the hallmarks of globalization — remain the key to economic growth.

American political leaders may continue to rant at the forces of globalization as job killers and the cause of ruinous trade deficits, but the economic logic for global trade, grounded in free-market principles, cannot be ignored. The United States and its corporations did not become global institutions by narrowly focusing on building Fords in America for Americans.

The power of globalization is likely to bulldoze nationalist nihilism angst at the 2018 Davos meeting later this month. The world’s nations appear to be shying away from extreme self-involvement. The U.S. may rattle trade swords and wave fingers over nuclear buttons, but these developments seem like local ideological skirmishes rather than the beginning of a new trade-crimping Cold War.

The role of China may be decisive, especially if the Communist leadership follows some of the paths laid out by Chinese President Xi Jinping in his famous marathon October speech at the Communist Party’s national convention. The speech prints out at 60 pages of warmed- over communist claptrap on the need to preserve the “historic mission” of upholding the “scientific truth of Marxism-Leninism” and to never forget how the party toppled “the three mountains of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.”

But all that, Xi implies, is China’s inner history of the past 100 years. In the future, the new China “must actively participate in and promote economic globalization, develop an open economy of higher standards and continue to increase China’s economic power and composite strength.”

The use of the words “economic power” might seem alarming to those who see trade as a proxy for international military conflict. But Xi’s overall message is not a belligerent call to war. On the contrary: “The world is undergoing major developments, transformation, and adjustment, but peace and development remain the call of our day. The trends of global multi- polarity, economic globalization, IT application, and cultural diversity are surging forward; changes in the global governance system and the international order are speeding up; countries are becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent; relative international forces are becoming more balanced; and peace and development remain irreversible trends.”

Another section of the speech follows the same themes. “We should stick together through thick and thin, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, and make economic globalization more open, inclusive, and balanced so that its benefits are shared by all. We should respect the diversity of civilizations. In handling relations among civilizations, let us replace estrangement with exchange, clashes with mutual learning, and superiority with coexistence.”

History will judge whether these fine sentiments are political hogwash masking a new aggression that reaches beyond economics. But Xi’s Little Red Book on China suggests, as do the current international trends in trade and investment, that free-market globalization is here to stay along with Cadillacs in China.