by Przemysław Myszka

"At its core, decoupling is really a contest being fought over the economy of the future." That is how the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China's Decoupling. Severed Ties and Patchwork Globalisation report ends.

It is a tale of how the world's three biggest trading blocks, China, the European Union (EU), and the United States (US), are, it seems, increasingly distancing themselves from one another.

The divide is most likely the sharpest and widest as far as anything digital is concerned, particularly on the China-US front, with Europe caught between a rock and a hard place.

It provokes the question of whether globalisation is a thing anymore. Digital firewalls, export bans, trade tariffs, announcements of self-reliance and market dominance, cleansing of foreign technologies from one's systems, politicisation and weaponisation of trade, principal cultural values that exclude each other - all those and many more issues brought up by the Chamber are thorns in the flesh of overseas cooperation. If somebody is still up for handshakes and bows, that is.

In President Xi Jinping's words, we may as well be entering the period of "assassin's mace," measures developed to pack a hard punch.

It does not bode well for issues that require shared effort, like greening the global economy.

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