Homecoming

CHAPTER 1

One World, Two Systems


Years ago, during a reporting trip to Beijing following the 2008 financial crisis, I interviewed the CEO of a major European clean-energy company that was a market leader in China at the time. I asked the executive how he saw business going forward, and he said he felt optimistic the company would be in fourth place within the next five years. I was startled. Why was falling from pole position to fourth place good news? And how could he be so precise about the future? Because, as the CEO told me, this is what Communist Party leaders had told him would happen as local competitors moved into the market.

A few years later, in 2013, I was in China again. I happened to be there right as the Edward Snowden story was breaking and as the world was digesting the whistleblower s leaks of National Security Agency material that showed that the United States, the United Kingdom, and various other liberal democracies were regularly gathering surveillance data on citizens, often with the help of private technology and telecom firms. The American public in particular had been shocked or, as Claude Rains s character says in the movie Casablanca, shocked, shocked to learn that the U.S. government and the private sector had shared such information.

During one of my interviews in Beijing, I broached the topic with a People s Liberation Army general with whom I was discussing the potential for conflict between the two countries. At the time, the United States chief foreign policy problems were still in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. But I had been struck on another visit, to the U.S. Navy s Indo-Pacific Command headquarters in Honolulu, by a heat map showing the locations of past, present, and possible future geopolitical conflicts. The red portions were moving inexorably from the Middle East to South Asia to the South China Sea, which is where the problems of the future seemed to lie. This struck me as

Rana Foroohar

Fascinating . . . Powerful . . . [A] valuable [contribution] to the understanding of the trends toward regionalization. Foreign Affairs

Foroohar s work here is equal parts journalism and visioning, offering a host of case studies of how we might produce and consume differently while simultaneously painting a picture of a more resilient and rooted economy. . . . As [Homecoming] spells out in vivid detail, we have our work cut out for us to bring the economy home. The American Prospect

In this deeply reported book, Foroohar offers a mix of lively on-the-ground tales and stimulating macroanalysis to explain how globalization and localization are changing business, finance, and our wider society. . . . A must-read. Gillian Tett, New York Times bestselling author of Anthro-Vision

Foroohar has consistently been right on globalization. Homecoming explains how local manufacturing is becoming a solution for many communities around the world. The detailed reporting and interviews make for eye-opening and gripping reading. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize laureate in economics

The way we eat impacts everything in our world, and Homecoming is a thorough examination of not just the dire consequences but also the many hopeful possibilities contained in that simple truth. Alice Waters, New York Times bestselling author of Coming to My Senses

By asking the fundamental questions of what matters and who matters, this book comes with some conditioned optimism about the future: Global cooperation is possible (and needed), but can yield positive social outcomes only if built on sound economic thinking that values community, sustainability, and equity. The road to this new form of capitalism is paved with books like Homecoming. Mariana Mazzucato, author of Mission Economy

In this fascinating book, Rana Foroohar argues that the retreat from hyperglobalization is a fact and a welcome one at that. Homecoming will change