BOOK OF THE DAY: When China Rules the World: the Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, By Martin Jacques, Allen Lane, pp550, £25
AS ECONOMIES in the West buckled under the weight of bad debts and property bubbles, shamed by spending sprees and foolish fiscal ways, it was the prudent savers of China, who had kept aside 40 per cent of their income for rainy days just like these, who emerged tut-tutting and powerful on the global stage, bearing wallets fat with bail-out cash. After decades of potent economic expansion, China had arrived and was now being called upon to use its financial muscle to rescue the rest of the world. In return, China slammed the West’s spendthrift ways and called for a share of political power to match its economic strength.
The days of referring to China as an emerging superpower are drawing to a close. While it remains a developing country, China is a force to be reckoned with, on track to being the world’s biggest economy and the West must learn to deal with this.
The course of this radical realignment of the global power paradigm is central to Martin Jacques's When China Rules The World.
This book makes enormously important points and argues them vigorously. Describing China as “the bearer and driver of the new world”, Jacques’s sub-heading spells out the central thesis and its clarion call for attention – the rise of the Middle Kingdom and the end of the Western World.
“Western hegemony is neither a product of nature nor is it eternal. On the contrary, at some point it will come to an end,” Jacques warns, illustrating in detail how the United States and Europe’s share of global commerce and influence is waning, and fast.
Grim forecasts of the end of the West are nothing new – Oswald Spengler's The Downfall of the Occident, which held that the West was in the winter of its influence, was first published in 1918, while more recently James Kynge's China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nationpointed out how China's advance means nothing can ever be the same again in Europe and America.
Jacques, a former Marxism Todayeditor, addresses the issues that China's new position poses for the world, and outlines a new international order, but he is careful to avoid the "Yellow Peril" clichés that can blight some tracts dealing with China's rise.
The dominant China that Jacques envisages jars with the commonly held view that China will eventually become democratic. Rising wealth and greater freedoms in recent years have not translated into any significant calls for democracy. China is rising very much on its own terms, he says, and the West is unlikely to feel comfortable with the version of China that takes its place at the world’s top table. The idea that China will eventually come around to the Western way of thinking is, he writes, “wishful thinking”.
The keen observations in this book are based on his broad experience of the Greater China, but his time in Asia has also encompassed great sorrow. He believes the death of his young Indian-Malaysian wife Harinder Veriah in a Hong Kong hospital in 2000 resulted from a combination of Chinese racism and incompetence, but Jacques leaves this weighty emotional baggage behind when he argues that race and ethnicity will play a defining role in China’s ascent.
“The rise of China as a global superpower is likely to lead, over a protracted period of time, to a profound cultural and racial reordering of the world in the Chinese image,” he writes.
While much Western commentary has focused on the absence of democracy, he believes culture and how China handles difference is the key, because China sees itself as a “civilisation state” rather than a “nation state”.
Clifford Coonan is China Correspondent of The Irish Times