A key appointment at the World Bank shows the importance of Beijing to the institutions it will soon come to dwarf
In June Justin Lin Yifu, a Beijing professor, will take up the post of chief economist at the World Bank. Nothing could be a clearer sign of the times. This is the number two job in one of the two major international economic institutions, the other being the International Monetary Fund. Earlier incumbents have included the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and the UK’s Nicholas Stern. Previously the top jobs in these two outfits have always been shared between Americans and Europeans. Lin’s appointment thus marks a major break with political tradition. Hitherto there have been hardly any appointments of Chinese to senior positions in the major international organisations. China’s burgeoning importance, however, is set to change this state of affairs, with Lin’s appointment likely to set the tone for the future.
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Tata’s purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover signals that India and China are turning the old hierarchy of global trade on its head
The cost to Tata of purchasing Land Rover and Jaguar may have been small, but its wider symbolic significance is enormous. Western societies are slowly becoming used to the idea that India and China are set to emerge as major economic powers, but there remains an underlying assumption that the process starts in the economic and technological foothills and only much later reaches the summit.
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Events in Tibet expose China’s achilles heel: its inability to recognise and respect ethnic difference
The Beijing Olympics are a huge occasion for China. Ever since the opium wars, the country has experienced what it describes as a “century of humiliation”. Extraordinarily, the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 was its first major foreign policy success since the early 19th century.
Western countries are thoroughly accustomed to being the centre of global attention, which they have come to regard as their natural birthright. Not so China. It was thwarted in its attempt to hold the 2000 Olympics, which, as a result of American-led pressure, was awarded to Sydney. For China, therefore, the 2008 Olympics assume a huge importance as its first opportunity to command the global stage. The fact that the games also coincide with China’s emergence as a global power only serves to enhance their significance. These Olympics, not surprisingly, have been long in the planning, with nothing left to chance.
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China will emerge over the next half-century as the world’s leading power. But how will Chinese hegemony be expressed, and how will the west deal with its displacement and sense of loss?
Over the past two centuries, there have been two globally dominant powers: Britain between 1850 and 1914, and the United States from 1945 to the present. But even in the case of the United States, whose influence is far greater than that of any other nation in history, such overweening power has never been without constraint. The concept of hegemony elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci entails the complex interaction of coercion and consent, force and leadership, and, though it was originally advanced to explain the nature of power within societies, it is also relevant to international relations. Far from hegemony being set in concrete, it is constantly contested and redefined, the balance of power never static, always in motion.
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China will be the next superpower: already it’s in competition with the US for the hearts and minds of the developing world
At the time of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the US stood supreme with barely a challenge visible on any meaningful time horizon. Almost five years on, we can clearly see both the inadequacies in the then-prevailing common sense, and the fallacies intrinsic to the neoconservative view of the world. There are, of course, always limits to power, even if they are not visible. The last five years have made the limits of American power plainly visible.
It is Iraq that has exposed those limits. The idea of US omnipotence always depended on its overwhelming military power, and the neoconservatives saw the latter as the key to a new era of American ascendancy. Iraq has demonstrated the limits of military power when it comes to subduing and governing a society. This failure has curbed the desire to intervene elsewhere: even if military action is contemplated in Iran, which now seems less likely, there will be no Iraq-style invasion and occupation. The idea that Iraq would be a precursor to a new kind of American empire – as advocated by Niall Ferguson, for example, in his book The Colossus – is dead in the water.
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Eleven years before the epochal events in Germany, a seismic change was taking place in China
It is, of course, common sense that 1989 was the defining moment of the last quarter of the 20th century. Who could possibly disagree? It closed a chapter of history that had been ushered in by the October revolution in 1917. It brought to an end the systemic challenge that communism had posed to capitalism, the belief that there was, indeed, an alternative. It allowed the United States to emerge as the undisputed superpower of a new century. It gave globalisation access to the former Soviet bloc from which it had been excluded: henceforth, globalisation could live up to its name.
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China’s opposition to action against Iran shows how it is increasingly at odds with the United States. It is a shame Washington hasn’t noticed.
There is a fascinating difference between the international diplomacy on Iran as compared with that on Iraq prior to the invasion. The opposition to the Anglo-American action was led by France, with somewhat muted support from Russian and China. Indeed, China remained as quiet as could possibly be. Nearly four years later we are in very different waters. The opposition in the United Nations is being led by Russia and China with France on the opposite side.
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For the sake of all of us, Hu Jintao and George Bush need to get on
The meetings between the US president and the Chinese president are now the most important events on the international calendar. The former represents the most powerful country in the world, while the latter represents the second largest economy and the next superpower. They need to meet and, for the sake of us all, they need to get on. But the mood music surrounding this latest meeting is a reminder that there are growing tensions and conflicts in the US-China relationship.
The issue that most preoccupies is economic. There is mounting pressure within Congress for tariffs against various Chinese imports, together with demands that China revalues the yuan. The problem is not China. It is the fact that the dollar is seriously over-valued. Nor will tariffs mean that the US will make the goods that China now exports. The real problem is not China but the fact that the US economy is living beyond its means with its huge budget deficit and trade deficits. These economic tensions, however, aren’t going to go away. On the contrary, they seem likely to grow more serious.
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The disastrous foreign policies of the US have left it more isolated than ever, and China is standing by to take over
‘Our power, then, has the grave liability of rendering our theories about the world immune from failure. But by becoming deaf to easily discerned warning signs, we may ignore long-term costs that result from our actions and dismiss reverses that should lead to a re-examination of our goals and means.”
These are the words of Henry Hyde, chairman of the House international relations committee and a Republican congressman, in a recent speech. Hyde argues that such is the overweening power of the US that it may not hear or recognise the signals when its policy goes badly wrong, a thinly veiled reference to Iraq. He then takes issue with the idea that the US can export democracy around the world as deeply misguided and potentially dangerous. He argues: “A broad and energetic promotion of democracy in other countries that will not enjoy our long-term and guiding presence may equate not to peace and stability but to revolution … There is no evidence that we or anyone can guide from afar revolutions we have set in motion. We can more easily destabilise friends and others and give life to chaos and to avowed enemies than ensure outcomes in service of our interests and security.”
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The rapidity of the Asian giant’s rise is overturning western received wisdom about politics and the shape of the global future
The past two or three years have marked a new moment in the global perception of China. There is suddenly a new awareness that encompasses both a recognition of China’s economic transformation and an understanding that, because of its huge size and cohesive character, it will have a profound impact on the rest of the world, albeit in ways still only dimly understood. Until recently, China’s economic rise always seemed to be qualified by the rider that something was likely to go amiss – a rider that is now rarely heard. China has arrived and will increasingly shape our future, not just its own.
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