When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "global village" in the early 1960s it conveyed little more than the sense of the world becoming more connected. Globalization subsequently made it a fact. Then adopted as a marketing strategy by Western multinationals, globalization became a contemporary restatement of so-called universal truths about free markets and liberal institutions, converging with the dominant political orthodoxy in the West. In this way it became a totalizing narrative.

Its most comprehensive expression was contained in US journalist Thomas L. Friedman's bestselling book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999). The world now had a "new system", a "different framework of international relations", an "overarching international system", "the era of globalization", "constitutes a fundamentally new state of affairs".

Globalization was totalizing in the sense that even its opponents were captured by its scope. To be anti-globalization meant initially to oppose the expansion of capitalism, especially its erosion of national and traditional cultures. But its opponents found themselves using the same means of communication and mobilization as their adversaries. Their World Social Forums mimicked the World Economic Forum. Their own labels like Alter-Globalization, Globalization from Below, Bottom-Up Globalization, effectively reinforced globalization as the name of the age.

The "three worlds" vanished. It was just the Fast World; all politics is global, declared Friedman, after visiting a Chinese village in 1998 to observe village elections and finding a candidate telling the villagers the whole world was their market. At the same time Friedman gave an enormous hostage to fortune in declaring that the United States was now the dominant and sole superpower, not simply through its overwhelming military superiority but also because the driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism.

The total scope of globalization extended beyond politics. "Culturally speaking, globalization is largely, though not entirely the spread of Americanization." US president Bill Clinton aimed to win support by equating globalization with national interests and at the same time to suggest it was an inevitable process embracing the whole world. Only at the end of 1999 with demonstrations in Seattle that caused the suspension of the World Trade Organization meeting did he look to appeal to the anti-globalization movement.

The 1990s, a decade that can be said to run from 1992 to 2001, saw the high point of globalization as the master narrative of the age. It ended with two events. One is the installation of a new president of the United States, George W. Bush, who dropped his predecessor's globalization narrative. And the other is the destruction of the World Trade Center by an Islamist terrorist group on Sept 11, 2001.

Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) came to define the first decade of the 21st century in the public mind more than the "flat world" with which Friedman followed up The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

In the 40 years following the launch of reform and opening-up, China has recognized the thrust of the Western narrative of globalization, and understood the strategic ideas underlying it, but never adopted it as providing an inevitable direction for the contemporary world.

President Xi Jinping has frequently referenced economic globalization as a rapidly developing feature of the contemporary world, necessitating cooperation between countries, and closely linked to cultural diversity, multipolarity and the advance of information technology. As such it is clearly a process beyond national boundaries to which every country must find its own response. It is a process of building a community with a shared future for the whole of mankind based on the harmony of differences.

Globalization, as a contemporary pursuit of building a shared future for mankind, converges with traditional Chinese philosophical ideas which feature correlative thinking and stress the inseparability of one and many.

The first is the oneness of the universe and humanity. The Chinese organic world outlook, as compared to the Western mechanistic world outlook, views the world as a whole organic entity which becomes lifeless once it is split up. In the Tao-centered cosmos, according to the Tao Te Ching, the classic account of the Tao, the Tao, sky, earth and man are all related. "Man follows the ways of earth; Earth follows the ways of sky; Sky follows the ways of Tao; Tao follows its own way."

The second is the unity of state and family. The Chinese see the state not as being in opposition to the family, but rather sees both as complementary. In his exhortations to rulers, Xunzi, a Confucian philosopher in ancient China, insisted that "in the case of the handicapped and helpless, the government should gather them together, look after them, and give them whatever work they are able to do. Employ them, provide them with food and clothing, and take care to insure that none are left out ... The government must also look after orphans and widows, and assist the poor."

The third, but by no means the least, is the unity of divisions of labor. Xunzi once said that the farmers are engaged in farming; businessmen are engaged in trading; craftsmen do their jobs well. The class of the literati and officialdom deal with state affairs; the head of each kingdom governs by establishing a system in which the highest ranking officials are in charge of the nation and discuss political affairs. The emperor alone thus sits doing nothing. China's economic development in the past 40 years or so is in large measure the result of cooperation based on divisions of labor.

Dialectical relations always generate novel states of affairs. If we put Western economic globalization together with Chinese globalization featuring a greater care for all we contribute to a shared future for mankind. But then that future is neither Western nor Chinese, or of any other particular culture. It is shared by all and belongs to all collectively.

Zhang Xiaoying is a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Martin Albrow is a professor emeritus at the University of Wales and fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.

The authors contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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