U.K.’S MAY TALKS TRUTH ON TRADE.

THERESA MAY HARDLY NEEDS LESSONS FROM CHINA ON TRADE

Two different leaders from two of the world’s most influential economic powers took to their respective podiums Tuesday and declared their support for a freer world in trade, greater openness and embracing the gifts of globalization. One of them was China’s president and Communist Party secretary, Xi Jinping. The other was Britain’s free-market Conservative prime minister, Theresa May. Predictably, most media reports treated the communist with less skepticism.

“Xi Jinping delivers robust defence of globalisation at Davos,” went a Financial Times headline. CNBC reported that Xi’s speech to the global luminaries gathered in Switzerland — the first time a Chinese leader has attended the World Economic Forum — delivered an “attack on the anti-globalization rhetoric that has led to the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the Brexit vote in Britain.” Xi “Seizes Role as Leader on Globalization,” went another headline.

While Xi was in the shadow of the Alps proclaiming China the supposed leading light for world freedom, May was 1,000 kilometres away at London’s Lancaster House delivering her long-awaited manifesto for a no-nonsense Brexit — the project held up as apparently one of the great paroxysms of anti-globalization that so troubles the communist leader. In this speech the Financial Times saw a “diminished Britain,” dismissing May’s promising mere “run-of-the-mill free trade agreements” as “unambitious.” Bloomberg’s editorialists gave May backhanded credit for providing “a clearer understanding of the enormous hazards Britain faces.”

Well, yes, bold gambits usually require taking more risk than the status quo. But the importance of May’s speech, in which she clarified once and for all that Britain would choose its own path of self-determined trade, free of European Union laws, regulations and its walled-off customs union, was a far more articulate and credible defence of free markets and global openness than the hollow and implausible sermonizing of Xi. The Davos forum is, of course, the fashionable gala for fashionable thinkers. It’s where U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden and IMF director Christine Lagarde can discuss child poverty with pop star Shakira, clean water with Matt Damon, and inequality with Black Eyed Pea Will.I.Am. And the fashionable thing is to think Britons small-minded and fearful for having rejected the EU and choosing instead to turn inwards.

Even before Xi piled in on the Brexit-bashing, the narrative never made sense. It is true that many Brits who voted “leave” had grown fed up with leaving U.K. border controls at the mercy of the EU’s immigration policies — including a lot of left-wing Labour voters who broke with their party and chose Brexit. But anyone who bothered to listen to the more articulate, rational Conservative leavers heard nothing like a Trumpian ultimatum for less international trade and freedom, but a longing for more of it. It was the EU’s closedshop customs union, with its high tariff walls to any nation outside the eurozone, its prohibition against members striking their own trade deals, and its centralized micromanagement that helped persuade so many Conservatives the wider world might offer more opportunity, freedom and growth than a perpetuity frozen in the officious embrace of the most meddlesome seven per cent of the global body politic. It had not escaped their notice that the contribution of trade to the U.K. GDP has fairly stagnated since they joined the EU.

In her London speech on Tuesday, May laid out the most compelling case yet for a better, freer Britain after Brexit — “A great, global trading nation” that “reaches beyond the borders of Europe” and “goes out into the world to build relationships with old friends and new allies alike.”

Life in the EU, May clarified, was hardly open; it was restrictive, coming “at the expense of our global ties and of a bolder embrace of free trade with the wider world.” The EU’s strong “supranationalist institutions,” and that it “bends toward uniformity, not flexibility” to cope with competing interests, had stifled a U.K. that cherished accountability and innovation. The EU’s “vice-like grip” to prevent diversity, she warned, could “end up crushing into tiny pieces” the very values it claimed to protect. May made it clear Britain wanted free trade with Europe; it would benefit both parties, if the Europeans weren’t too vindictive over Brexit to allow it. But not by submitting to European conformity. It was time, May said, for Britain to trade freely with non-Europeans, too. Some “anti-globalization” spasm this is turning out to be.

May hardly needs lessons from China on trade. Those journalists in Davos didn’t report how business leaders reacted when Xi assured them China is a “wide open” economy, but they must know better. Barriers against foreign investment and opaque, even arbitrary investment rules have become a top complaint from multinational businesses trying to operate in China. The president prefers pushing his state-run champions to aggressively elbow into foreign free markets, and harassing western tech makers, while countenancing corporate piracy, to entrench China’s tech dominance. His “China Dream” policy is anti-diversity, glorifying racial supremacy to overcome foreign “hostile forces.”

Perhaps when Xi speaks of “globalization” and “free trade” what he means is China having freer access to rest of the world, and not the other way around. Yet there’s no doubt that when May speaks of such things, she actually means them. There is a noticeable absurdity to presuming a small island nation that thrived for centuries in pioneering global trade was suddenly opting to shut itself off to the world. That did little to stop the Davos-man intellectual class from presuming just that. When Theresa May shows up there Thursday to tell them her piece on Brexit, we’ll see if they’re as open-minded as they think they are.