Wang Huiyao: Good evening and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the CCG multimedia center, thank you for being with us for this dialogue with Thomas Friedman, presented by the Center for China and Globalization. It’s really a great honor for me to welcome Thomas Friedman and all of you to be here to watch and listen to us tonight.

As we all know，Thomas is a renowned international journalist with the New York Times and we’re very pleased to have him with us here tonight. He has also written seven books, which are all New York Times best sellers, including From Beirut to Jerusalem, The World is Flat, The Perspective of “Lexus” and “Olive Tree”, Longitudes and Attitudes, The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded and most recently, Thank you for being late. I remembered in 2017, Thomas actually came to CCG and did a great talk on his latest book, which drew large crowds in China. Tom is also a world-renowned reporter, a weekly columnist for the New York Times and the recipient of the 3 Pulitzer Prizes.

From technology to environment, from the Middle East to China-US relations, Tom has written a very influential and impactful column that we’ve been reading from time to time. Tom is also a great friend of China and a great personal friend of mine as well. I knew Tom before through his book, but we actually met for the first time when I was a visiting fellow at the Brookings in 2010, you came to one of my presentation discussions  at Brookings . You also invited myself and Dr. Miao to visit your office in downtown D.C. and not to mention the many times that we saw you in China. Your book the World is Flat actually has been recommended by the then party secretary, Wang Yang, in Chongqing and is one of the best sellers in China.

I was also quite impressed that in October 2012, when you wrote a column called “China needs its own dream” before our 18th party Congress proposed it. So it’s fascinating to see how you follow China closely. You know that we are now in a very turbulent time as we have a pandemic that has swept all over the world. We have globalization and deglobalization and the two biggest economies, the US and China, are in a hard position so we are now trying to figure out what’s next.

I remember last November, you attended one of our webinars during the China and Globalization Forum and I also saw you at the China Development Forum, in which you held a 5-minute talk. Tonight, we actually have more time and we would like to have an in-depth discussion with you about your views and exchanges. This session is part of the “CCG China and the World” webinar series that were launched in 2020 in an effort to engage eminent scholars, experts, government advisers, advocate and business leaders to talk about China and globalization as well as its trend, development and challenges. So perhaps, Tom, you would like to say hi to our audience and then we’ll follow up into the questions and discussions.

Thomas Friedman: Thank you very much for having me. I have so many fond memories of visiting your center in Beijing. I have given book talks there and have hosted you in my office. We always have free and frank discussions from which I learn and benefit. I’m looking forward to being with you today and engaging with your broader audience in China.

Wang Huiyao: Thank you. So, Thomas, you’re famous, and you’ve actually become an icon and symbol of globalization movement because of your famous book The World is Flat, which is a long-time bestseller in China and has influenced many people. In that book, you talked about globalization and the three phases – the country, the company and then individuals. So the countries have competed for thousands of years, making the world flat. The company has great roles to play too and now in the 2000s, we are experiencing the internet revolution as individuals and today, we also see how globalization gets more challenges now. Now we have a lot of deglobalization going on, with the rise of populism. So what’s your take now on globalization? How do we look at the new trend that globalization has led us to?

Thomas Friedman: That’s a good place to start. Whenever I do webinars like this, often the first question people have is: is the world still flat? And I always start to laugh a little and I say, wait a minute, I’m sitting in my office in Bethesda, Maryland, and my friend Henry is sitting in his office in Beijing. We’re having a conversation as two individuals, as if we are sitting across the desk from each other. Is the world still flat? Are you crazy? It’s like flatter than ever. Henry, always remember, when I wrote The World is Flat in 2004, Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was still a sound, the Cloud was still in the sky. 4G was like a parking place, big data was a rap star and Skype was a typo, a typographical error.

All of those things came after I wrote The World is Flat. So the world today, actually, is flatter than ever. We have never connected more different nodes than we have today. We’ve never greased the connection, sped up the connection between those nodes more than we have today. But we’ve also done a third thing. We’ve actually removed a lot of the buffers that manage to flow between those nodes. So think of this, between December 2019 and March 2020, just as Coronavirus was emerging, there were 3,200 direct flights from China to America and there were 50 direct flights from Wuhan to America. Most Americans had never even heard of Wuhan. And think about what’s going on in the Suez Canal today – there’s a ship stuck in the Suez Canal and there is some company in Europe or maybe in China, or maybe a company in Europe waiting for its supply from China because of just-in-time inventory delivery. When we take the buffers out, the system just gets faster and faster.

The world isn’t just flat now. It’s fragile. It’s fragile because when you connect so many nodes, and then you speed up the connection between those nodes and you take the buffers out, you get fragility. Because now I can transmit instability from my node to your node faster than ever. So yes, globalization, ever since when I wrote The World is Flat, many people wrote books to say it’s not flat, it’s spiky, it’s lumpy, it’s curved or it’s bumpy. All those books are wrong. The world is flatter than ever.