Martin Jacques, author of the bestselling When China Rules the World, tells Seetha that because people tend to imitate those who are economic successes, the world will aspire to be more like China in future

The “hi” has me feeling relieved. I’ve been wondering about the Chinese way of greeting people. After all, I’m meeting someone who’s written a bestseller called When China Rules the World.

“It’s not literal,” Martin Jacques, the author of the book now in its second edition, hastens to explain when I ask him how soon he expects China to take over. “It’s a great title, but if you take it literally it’s a problem.” Aah, a bit of journalistic licence there, I ask the former British journalist, though he sees himself more as an intellectual or academic. “Yes, thank you,” he laughs.

The book, he explains, is about what the world would be like if China becomes the most influential country. “That is going to happen.” China’s rise, he argues in the book, won’t be primarily or exclusively economic in nature. Like all “hegemonic powers” — which China will be — it will use its economic strength for wider political, cultural and military ends, he maintains. Hegemony is his preferred word — “not dominance, hegemony,” he insists when I use the former word.

Jacques, 66, challenges the conventional view that globalisation will mean an increasingly Westernised world, characterised by free markets and liberal democratic political systems. China, he holds, will defy that and set its own terms and conditions.

As India warily watches China investing in English language training, Jacques points to the Confucius Institutes set up across the world to teach and promote Mandarin. And because people tend to imitate those who are economic successes, the world, he avers, will aspire to be more like China.

China came into his life on his first holiday outside Europe in 1993 to Hong Kong, South China, Singapore and Malaysia. That became the “biggest turning point” of his life. For someone whose world had been “bounded by the West”, the extent of change and modernity in East Asia was fascinating. Guangdong in South China, he recalls, was just catching fire. “The energy of the people was amazing. I thought the Industrial Revolution must have been like this. But this is times hundred.”

The holiday was a much-needed one. He had worked for 14 years as the editor of a journal, Marxism Today. He had been active politically, but realised in the Seventies that the Communist Party of Great Britain had no hope and so he threw himself into the journal. The circulation soared from 3,000 to 2,50,00 and it became the most influential journal of the Left, he says. “It was innovative and a lot of fun. It was not boring, pedantic and leaden as the title would suggest.” The book too is quite a racy read, the graphs, charts and 140 pages of notes and bibliography notwithstanding.

When the journal closed in 1991, Jacques started a think tank called Demos along with a friend. The idea was to come up with policies, to counter the criticism that Marxism Today was great at analyses but did not suggest any policies. Two years later, he went off on his East Asian vacation.

The vacation changed his life in other ways as well. Towards the end, while running along a beach in Malaysia’s Tioman Island, he fell in love “at first sight”. The self-confessed “quick-witted” Britisher found himself at a loss for words when Harinder (Hari) Veriah, a Malaysian of Indian descent, told him at their first meeting, “You were running through the village; only a white man would do something as stupid as that.” This was at the start of a jungle trek and by the end of it, Jacques had “entered her magnetic field… and never ever left it”.

That is evident even now, 12 years after she died in Hong Kong in 2000 because of negligence at a hospital following an epileptic fit. By then they were married and parents of a 16-month-old son, Ravi. Behind his spectacles, Jacques’ eyes fill up and he warns me that it’s difficult for him to tell these stories without crying.

Her death brought him face-to-face with racial discrimination. “Hong Kong is an international city but it is not a multi-racial city. It is a bi-racial city where the whites and Chinese are accepted and others are treated badly.” Hari sensed she was being neglected because of her colour and told Jacques, “I am bottom of the pile here.”

The book, which he had started working on in 1996, took a backseat for five years as he fought a legal battle for Hari from Britain. It took 10 years for the hospital to agree to a settlement. The case — and Hari’s words — became a rallying point for groups fighting against racial discrimination in Hong Kong, which got its first anti-race discrimination law in 2008. The legislation hasn’t helped change attitudes very much, rues Jacques. “I think if Hari was in hospital today and in that situation, the same thing could still happen.”

Her death was a personal catastrophe and staying alive and looking after Ravi became Jacques’s biggest challenge. He returned to the book, which Hari had been keen on. It was conversations with her which had opened his eyes to the difference in modernity in the West and in the East. That is what he had initially set out to explore and writes about in the first few chapters of the book.

Isn’t the China-versus-the-West argument a tad overdone in the book? He concedes the point. “I think a criticism you could make of the book is that it sees it in rather binary terms. And so the future is painted in overly schematic terms.” He has tried to address that in the second, paperback, edition.

The skew happened because of the drama of China’s rise — which was only the second part of the book. “In a way, the reality hijacked that part of the book and made it the book.”

The old-style hegemony of the colonial powers and even the way the United States has exercised influence over the world is no longer possible, he concedes. “Nations, cultures and histories that have been shut out of global discourse are now finding their voice, gaining respect, recognition. The rise of China has to be seen in that context.”

India could be a counterweight to China, since it too has an ancient civilisation and is also growing rapidly, he says, but laments that it “punches below its weight”. Because of so many years of colonisation, Indians have a soft spot for the British, he notes.

“They’re in love with Oxford,” the PhD in economic history from Cambridge says with mock horror. He went to Cambridge after studying economics at Manchester University and taught there briefly.

Jacques believes Indians have a “deferential attitude” to the West. “The Chinese have a sense of who they are and, despite the colonial ravages, they are more confident.” What he liked about China was that the Chinese didn’t defer to him as a white man.

The writer finds the relationship between India and China, which have a lot in common, fascinating. But he believes that India has not come to terms with the bruising it got in the 1962 India-China war. “This is a problem for India. Somehow it has to sort out this border issue and mentally move on.” India, he believes, should have a strategy for its relationship to China which is not based on paranoia or hedging China’s rise by cosying up to the US.

He’s equally distressed at how China doesn’t seem to be thinking enough about India. “The Chinese look down on India and that bugs me.”

Economists have questioned the sustainability of China’s growth story, even as others have wondered whether the authoritarian state would be able to hold its own against growing internal dissent. Is it fair to dismiss all this as the West’s refusal to face up to reality, as the book appears to suggest?

Internal problems can affect China, he concedes, but points out that politically, the country has changed beyond recognition. “The state has been reinvented. It is hugely accountable and representative and more transparent than 30 years ago.” Corruption among the top leaders has increased but the Chinese, he says, are far more alert about this than in many other countries. China, however, will never become a Western-style democracy, he insists.

Whether China can stay ahead of the game will depend on important questions such as whether it can deal with the effects of Westernisation and whether it can move from being an imitative economy to an innovative one.

The publicist from Penguin interrupts us for the second time in 15 minutes — I’m well past my appointed time. Time and another interviewer are clearly not deferring to China.

Most authors have written bestsellers while on a trip to a different country or an exotic holiday destination. Whatever it takes to get inspired. For popular columnist and author Martin Jacques, a trip to East Asian countries did the trick. It gave the author a push to write a book.

“In 1993, I went on a big holiday and life changed thereafter. I met my wife, Hari, during this two-and-a-half week trip and was charmed by East Asia,” says Martin Jacques, who was here in the city to address a gathering on China and world politics at IIT Madras.

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India’s role in a future world order in which China is likely to lead from the front depends a lot on what happens on this country’s growth front, says Martin Jacques, the best-selling author of “When China Rules the World”.

“A lot has been happening to China’s economic growth. It does not matter if India is behind China by 1 or 2 per cent; the main thing is India must carry on growing at a reasonably fast rate. India has to find ways to sustain the growth rate. It will open possibilities for India,” Jacques told IANS in an interview.

Jacques said the great advantage of China is that “it is a competent state and is endlessly reforming”. The Chinese state has “great legitimacy among the Chinese people” as an embodiment of Chinese civilization, the writer said.

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“India would be making a big mistake if it allowed itself to get dragged into a Western anti-China alliance,” warns Martin Jacques, author of the international bestseller When China Rules the World.

The 67-year-old British author, broadcaster and speaker whose association with China began nearly two decades ago, is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on that country. His book, rated as by far the best on China to have been published in many years, has already sold more than a quarter of a million copies worldwide, a rare achievement for a scholarly 800 page work of non-fiction.

Mr Jacques has examined the remarkable rise of China and has predicted that “China will soon rule the world (and) as China’s powerful civilisation reasserts itself, it will signal the end of the global dominance of the Western nation-state, and a future of ‘contested modernity’”. In these circumstances, he argues that it would be better for India to make a grand rapprochement with China on entirely new terms rather than to treat it as an enemy.

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New Delhi, July 20 (IANS) India’s role in a future world order in which China is likely to lead from the front depends a lot on what happens on this country’s growth front, says Martin Jacques, the best-selling author of “When China Rules the World”.

“A lot has been happening to China’s economic growth. It does not matter if India is behind China by 1 or 2 per cent; the main thing is India must carry on growing at a reasonably fast rate. India has to find ways to sustain the growth rate. It will open possibilities for India,” Jacques told IANS in an interview.

Jacques said the great advantage of China is that “it is a competent state and is endlessly reforming”. The Chinese state has “great legitimacy among the Chinese people” as an embodiment of Chinese civilization, the writer said.

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Martin Jacques has only a few doubts that the Middle Kingdom will soon be the centre of the world. The title of his book is provocative. What this British journalist actually predicts is a “new kind of world system in which China is the main player — but not to the exclusion of the rest of the world.” What is more important to him is the need for the world, especially the West, to get a grip of what the return of China to a position of global preeminence will mean. Superpower China will not be a West that happens to speak funny.

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The emergence of China as an economic super-power, holding its own with, and surpassing, the US, is now taken for granted. However, both admirers and detractors of China have been viewing it in the conventional setting, implying some sort of a deviation from the commonly touted notions of politics and economics. They pine for the prospect of China somehow righting itself and conforming to political theories, economic dogmas and social mores familiar to them.

The success of the West in imposing its model so far was largely for want of a spirited effort by the countries of the Orient to contest its basic assumptions. China’s pre-eminence threatens the postulates that the West has long cherished. That is what explains both its fascination for, and fear of, China. What if the political, social and functional paradigm that it represents becomes universal and China, in effect, sets out to rule the world?

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Journalist-writer Martin Jacques truly believes , like the title of his book ‘When China Rules the World’, that a China-dominated world order is close at hand. In his revised edition of the bestseller , he’s added a chapter on India’s blow hot-blow cold ties with its largest Southeast Asian neighbour . Jacques tells ET’s Labonita Ghosh there is much India can learn from China about global ascendancy – if only we can get past the our paranoia and the war of 1962.

What will a China-dominated world order look like, and what will be India’s role in it?

China has reached this juncture in a great rush and in a very short space of time . But it’s also difficult to answer for many other reasons . We’re so familiar with a world that has been dominated by the West , it’s difficult for us to think outside that box . But I don’t think it’s right to assume that China will necessarily behave in the same way as the US.

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Dr Odera Outa’s article “DO NOT WRITE OFF AMERICA JUST YET”[Star May 22,2012] is indeed dogmatic and oblivious current development in Asia and Kipling’s warning against British imperial hubris seen relevant to America to-day.

As Paul Kennedy a professor of History at Yale University has observed in Newsweek of February 2003,”the U.S. Military budget will soon be equal to that of all countries in the world combined.” Yet hawkish policy makers in Washington are concerned that the U.S. defense forces are dangerously thin and overstretched. How can both facts be true?

A book by Martin Jacques, “When China Rules the World” provides adequate and sacinet answers to economic rise in Asia. The book is a compelling and thought provocative analysis of global economic trends that defies the common western assumptions that to be fully modern, a nation must become democratic, financially transparent and legally accountable. Jacques argues persuasively that China is on track to take over as the World’s dominant power and that when it does, it will make the rules on its own terms, with little regard for what existed before.

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