The West hopes that wealth, globalisation and political integrationwill turn China into a gentle giant. A new book argues that this is adelusion(幻想)
When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. By Martin Jacques. Allen Lane; 592 pages; £25. To be published in America by Penguin Press in November. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
THERE have been many rivals for America’s crown as the world’sgreatest power. In the 1950s the Soviet Union threatened its militaryhegemony; in the 1980s Japan challenged its economic might. These daysthe pretender is China. The evidence of America’s decline seemsobvious. The limits of its military power were exposed after theinvasion and occupation of Iraq, and the flaws of its capitalist systemwere revealed by the global financial crisis that started on WallStreet. The West now looks to China to prop up its financial system,and to the Chinese consumer to stimulate the global economy.
Is the long era of Western dominance, first by European powers andthen by America, finally coming to an end? For Martin Jacques, aBritish commentator and recently a visiting professor at universitiesin China, Japan and Singapore, the answer is clear. The title of hisbook says it all: “When China Rules the World”.
         

         
      

   
  He begins by citing the latest study by Goldman Sachs, whichprojects that China’s economy will be bigger than America’s by 2027,and nearly twice as large by 2050 (though individual Chinese will stillbe poorer than Americans). Economic power being the foundation of thepolitical, military and cultural kind, Mr Jacques describes a worldunder a Pax Sinica. The renminbi will displace the dollar as theworld’s reserve currency; Shanghai will overshadow New York and Londonas the centre of finance; European countries will become quaint relicsof a glorious past, rather like Athens and Rome today; global citizenswill use Mandarin as much as, if not more than, English; the thoughtsof Confucius will become as familiar as those of Plato; and so on.
All this makes for an interesting parlour game. Yet there issomething too deterministic about Mr Jacques’s economic and politicalextrapolations. The author does not allow for uncertainty, chaos anderror. He predicts that history is about to restore China to itsancient position of global power. But might it not equally push Chinaback into self-destructive upheavals such as the Great Leap Forward andthe Cultural Revolution? After all, the same Communist Party remains inpower and, as Mr Jacques puts it, the Chinese state has never sharedauthority with anyone. He accords little importance to the thousands ofprotests in China, most of them against corruption and the loss ofland. In his dense recitation of data, there is hardly a mention of thedemographic crisis facing China, which means that the country couldwell become old before it becomes rich. He sees little risk ofinstability from ethnic unrest in Tibet or Xinjiang.
For Mr Jacques (the last editor of a defunct British magazine called Marxism Today),the Communist Party is a benign force, guiding the country through itsspectacular boom while avoiding the collapse that afflicted the SovietUnion. He has little truck with the notion that free markets can onlywork, in the long term, in free societies; that liberty of thoughtleads more easily to innovation; that democratic states correct theirmistakes more easily than authoritarian ones.
All this is a Western conceit, says Mr Jacques. Democracy and ruleof law were not a precondition for the West’s economic power, but acoincidence. This argument is the most interesting (and contentious)part of Mr Jacques’s book, rather than his workaday account of Chinesehistory or the overlong prose about China being a “civilisation state”rather than a “nation state”.
The parting of ways between Europe and China came, in his view, notwith the Renaissance or the Enlightenment but with the industrialrevolution. Even so, the West’s success was not preordained. Until1800, Mr Jacques argues, the most advanced parts of China and Europehad reached comparable levels of development. Indeed, China had built aform of steam engine before James Watt. So why did the industrialrevolution begin in Britain and not along the Yangzi river? In largepart, it was an accident of history.
Britain, like China then, suffered from a shortage of land. ButBritain had coal, which replaced firewood as a fuel, and colonies withslaves providing plenty of farmland and cheap labour. The habit of war“helped to hone the European nation states into veritable fightingmachines” and the incorporation of merchant classes into the elitesencouraged European rulers to promote capitalism. By contrast, claimsMr Jacques, imperial China’s attachment to Confucian values of harmonymeant its main concern was to keep order and social equality within itsdomains. So it was not the West’s superior values that allowed it torule the world, but rather its flaws.
If colonisation assisted Western hegemony, the end of the colonialera after the second world war set the stage for the rise of China. Itseconomic development from 1978 has been “the most extraordinary inhuman history”, more rapid than that of Europe or America, faster eventhan that of Japan, South Korea and the other Asian miracles. Conflictof the sort that accompanied the rise of Germany and Japan cannot beruled out, says Mr Jacques, but there is a good chance that it can beavoided. “China does not aspire to run the world because it believesitself to be the centre of the world,” he writes. Perhaps so. For nowChina is developing in collaboration with the West. It relies onWestern investment and markets, and seeks stability abroad.
The West hopes that wealth, globalisation and political integrationwill turn China into a gentle giant, a panda rather than a dragon.George Bush senior declared in 1999: “Trade freely with China and timeis on our side.” But Mr Jacques says this is a delusion. Time will notmake China more Western; it will make the West, and the world, moreChinese.