Abstract. This article aims to analyze some of the most notable trends and processes, which in recent years, especially in the context of the global financial and economic crisis, led to a kind of inversion of the globalization purpose and functions. A watershed, which is more or less clearly manifested in these adjustments, is the present global financial and economic crisis. The essence of these transformations is an unprecedented increase in the permeability of national and state borders on a worldwide scale leading to profound dispersal of property, wealth, knowledge, science, information technology, and hence diffusion and redistribution of the relative geopolitical power and energy between nations, states and regions. The huge growth of Asia holds the key position in these grand shifts. In general, social and economic-technological breakthrough in East Asia is accompanied with genuine culture and socio-psychological revolution, in the course of which people of the region substantially overcome the inferiority complex towards the West. It is shown that globalization started by industrialized countries of the West in their own interests, gradually created conditions for economic and technological breakthrough of the so-called developing countries represented by China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa (united in the BRICS organization). Originally the brainchild of the West, globalization gradually becomes a springboard from which these countries are able not only to challenge the developed world, but also to qualify for the leading roles in the global economy and, consequently, in world politics. Key positions in the world economy are taken by China, which has become the second economic power in the modern world, and will soon take the top spot.