16 April 2025 – [TALK] Reducing Collateral Damage from US Deglobalization Tantrums

[TALK] Reducing Collateral Damage from US Deglobalization Tantrums.

DETAILS

Date: Wednesday, 16 April, 2025, 3-4.30pm
Time: 3.00 – 4.30pm
Venue: Penang Institute, Conference Hall.
Speaker: Prof. Woo Wing Thye
Moderator: Dato’ Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Registration Link:
(For Physical Attendance): https://bit.ly/Dato-Woo

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Penang-born Woo Wing Thye is Distinguished Fellow at the Penang Institute, and was its executive director from 2012 – 2013. He is also University Chair Professor at the China Economy Research Institute of Liaoning University; Vice-President for Asia at UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network; Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California Davis; and Research Professor at Sunway University, among other positions.Since 2001, Wing Woo has been the convener of the Asian Economic Panel (AEP), a forum of about 80 specialists on Asian economies; editor of Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies; Associate Editor of Journal of Asian Economics; President of the Chinese Economists Association of North America (CEANA) (2002); and President of the Chinese Economists Society (CES) (2016). At Sunway University, he was Founding President of the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia, 2014-2022; Founding Director of the Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development, 2016-2022; and member of the Board of Directors, 2015-2022.Following undergraduate study in economics and engineering at Swarthmore College, he took an MA in economics at Yale. Prof Woo acquired an MA and PhD at Harvard University (1982).

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Dato’ Dr Ooi Kee Beng (黄基明博士) has been studying the process of nation-building in Asia and analyzing Malaysian politics over the last three decades. He was appointed Executive Director of Penang Institute in 2017.

He received his Ph.D. in Sinology from Stockholm University, Sweden. Before returning to the region, he worked at Ericsson Electronics in Sweden for 22 years during the heyday of that company’s mobile phone era, while studying in Stockholm University. Courses that he taught at Stockholm included Chinese History, Chinese Philosophy and General Knowledge of China. His major academic interests were in Language Philosophy and Ancient Chinese Political and Strategic Thinking

He joined Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (now ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute) in 2004, becoming its Deputy Director from 2011 to 2017.

He writes regular opinion pieces for regional and global mass media on Malaysian matters and regional matters. These have been compiled in seven separate volumes. Many of these works can be accessed at (www.wikibeng.com). He was Visiting Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong (2009-2012); Adjunct Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Southeast Asian Studies (2009-2011); He is the Founder-Editor of Penang Monthly and ISSUES (Penang Institute) and ISEAS Perspective (ISEAS). He is also Series Editor for Trends in Southeast Asia (ISEAS).

EVENT SUMMARY

Prominent economist Professor Woo Wing Thye spoke to a packed conference hall at the Penang Institute on the afternoon of 16 April, 2025, on the topic ‘Reducing Collateral Damage from US Deglobalization Tantrums’.

Contextualising US President Donald Trump’s announcement on 2 April – an event the latter pronounced to be ‘Liberation Day’ – Woo explained the historical background, political-economic rationale, global significance and possible aftermaths of Trump’s tariff “tantrums”.

Warning of a global downward spiral of nationalist deglobalization and increased mutual hostility if governments submitted to reactionary and populist impulses, Woo said a critical distinction must be made and maintained between the three underlying rivalries that drive the competition between the US and China: the rivalry over global trade, for technological supremacy, and for geo-strategic dominance.

The key means to achieve this distinction, and thereby keeping US-China tensions below critical level, is the establishment by the world’s ‘Middle Powers’ such as ASEAN, East Asian countries, and the European Union, of “guardrails” to prevent the three types of competition from merging and escalating from proxy wars into a full-blown collision between the two superpowers.
In other words, geo-strategic competition, technology competition, and trade competition should be prevented from both intensifying and feeding off of each other – and this can be done, Woo proposed, by the Middle Powers’ creation of an Atlantic–Pacific Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Partnership (APSP).

The APSP should, in turn, create:
(i) free trade area to which all countries are welcome to join, aimed at creating as big an integrated market as possible, hence preserving the multilateral World Trade Organization system as much as possible.
(ii) a nonpartisan peace caucus in the United Nations to act as a group of neutral buffer states between the US and Chinese spheres of influence; and
(iii) an SDG-guided development agency whose richer members help the poorer members to achieve their climate change and developmental goals with technical and financial aid – aid that would also act as offsets to disuading poor countries from joining either sphere of influence of the two rival powers.

EVENT HIGHLIGHTS