The bulk of corporate political orientation and opinion in South Africa has historically leant to the West. The reasons are easy to discern. South Africa was colonised by Western nations that brought with them a Western corporate culture and orientation. That culture was sustained through the apartheid years and carried into South Africa’s democratic dispensation in 1994.

The post-1994 momentum was initially sustained by the fact that after 1989 the world had returned to unipolarity. The Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union was defeated, and the United States was again dominant, with China’s rising eminence still only imminent. Western actors, European, British, and American, had also played an instrumental (and poorly understood today) role in the final defeat of apartheid, and with their Soviet opponent vanquished, the momentum of Western culture within corporate South African thinking was naturally sustained. This was anchored by the fact that the bulk of fixed investment stock in the country originated from Western Europe and North America.

But 30 years later the world has moved from unipolarity to multipolarity, while the rise of China poses a direct challenge to the military and economic dominance of the United States.

Further at odds with the position 30 years ago is that it is no longer the case that advice South Africa receives from the West can be assumed to be in the country’s best interests. Western climate and equity ideologies, for example, undermine the competitiveness of any economy that seeks to adopt them, and Western donors and allied non-governmental groups have spent vast sums instilling these ruinous and divisive ideas in South Africa’s policy thinking. Pointedly, these ideologies have not been adopted by China, India, or Russia. South Africa’s government would therefore do well to take core elements of its economic policy advice from Moscow and Beijing rather than from London and Brussels. The jury is still out on Washington.

Western brands and their historic market dominance may also be displaced from South Africa. What is happening in the country’s car industry, on the back of rapid Chinese and Indian innovation, foretells what may begin to happen more broadly. In many fields, Chinese technological advancement now exceeds that of the West.

At this newspaper we have previously advised that South Africa’s unity government pursue a purely non-aligned foreign policy anchored only in national interest. We have argued that such a policy, which aims to extract the greatest possible trade and investment benefits for South Africa’s people, is morally, economically, and strategically the correct course for its unity government to follow.

The same advice should apply to its corporations. There is no telling how global power balances will shift and what the implications for South Africa may be. Its corporations would therefore do well to review default loyalties and assumptions and adopt strategies based on the principle that it is wise to make friends with everyone now.