When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World by Martin Jacques
Allen Lane, 550 pp, £30.00, June 2009, ISBN 978 0 7139 9254 0
Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang
Cambridge, 348 pp, £15.99, November 2008, ISBN 978 0 521 89810 2
Against the Law: Labour Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt by Ching Kwan Lee
California, 325 pp, £15.95, June 2007, ISBN 978 0 520 25097 0
These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on Anglo-French writing about the Near East, where Islam and Christendom battled with each other for centuries before the region fell to Western imperialism in modern times. But the Far East was always another matter. Too far away to be a military or religious threat to Europe, it generated tales not of fear or loathing, but wonder. Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay, fixed fabulous images that lasted down to Columbus setting sail for the marvels of Cathay. But when real information about the country arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, European attitudes towards China tended to remain an awed admiration, rather than fear or condescension. From Bayle and Leibniz to Voltaire and Quesnay, philosophers hailed it as an empire more civilised than Europe itself: not only richer and more populous, but more tolerant and peaceful, a land where there were no priests to practise persecution and offices of the state were filled according to merit, not birth. Even those sceptical of the more extravagant claims for the Middle Kingdom – Montesquieu or Adam Smith – remained puzzled and impressed by its wealth and order.
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Which direction now? A lot of China writers like to think they have the answer
A Texas-based media-tracking organization recently announced that it had concluded, via a sophisticated statistical analysis of news sources, that China’s leapfrog up the global economic hierarchy was the top story of the past decade. This claim is debatable: the Iraq War, climate change, terrorism and the financial crisis all garnered plenty of headlines. Still, there has certainly been a dramatic upsurge in fascination with and concern over the People’s Republic — and a concomitant proliferation of Big China Books, as I like to call works that carry titles that cry out to be put in bold type.
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Despite the unequivocal title of Martin Jacques’ large and detailed tome on China and its impending superpower status, we do not get a definitive statement of what a Sinocentric unipolar future will be like, if such a thing eventuates. Martin Jacques is too alert to the risks of prophesying to offer such a thing, at least in literal terms. But he is quite sure — and surely right — that China is rapidly becoming a superpower, and he thinks that its history, culture and unique form of modernity give some indications of what its superpowerdom will mean to the rest of us.
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ComScore, Inc, a leader in measuring the digital world, just released a study on growth in the global search market for 2009 and showed that searches have grown 46% globally. The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google retains a commanding lead in the worldwide search market. The U.S. grew 22% from December 2008 to December 2009, with 22.7 billion searches, while China followed with 13.3 billion searches, but only grew 13% year over year.
The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute.
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It’s no coincidence that America’s national anxiety about China has surfaced in tandem with our greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression
Conventional wisdom has long held that China is the most likely emergent superpower to rival US supremacy, but over the past few months, this fear — the West’s greatest since the Cold War — has gained a specific sense of urgency. In a recent poll by Foreign Policy magazine, 71% of thinkers picked China as the next global superpower, and Chinese president Hu Jintao as the world’s most crucial leader — aside from President Obama.
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Google’s defeat foretells the day when Beijing rules the world
The blunt truth is that most Western forecasters have been wrong about China for the past 30 years. They have claimed that Chinese economic growth was exaggerated, that a big crisis was imminent, that state controls would fade away, and that exposure to global media, notably the Internet, would steadily undermine the Communist Party’s authority. The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.
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