When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (out in paperback next January) is the provocative the title of Martin Jacques’ assessment of China’s future role as the dominant global power.
For more than a decade Jacques was editor of “Marxism Today” – having first transformed it from an obscure ideological organ of the Marxist Left into a broad platform for wide ranging political and social debate. Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union “Marxism Today” was also wound up and Jacques went on to become deputy editor of The Independent, an engaging newspaper columnist and author.
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The aftermath of China’s fatal high-speed rail crash in July was a reminder that the foundations of the country’s remarkable economic growth are perhaps not as solid as some may suggest.
With the outpouring of anger and grief came a series of accusations over what was to blame for the crash, corruption, cheap equipment and botched reverse-engineering among them. It was barely the best advert for a new rail network that was supposed to be yet another signal of China’s arrival as a modern global superpower.
Of course the West still looks on at China with envy; its growth rate remains at a level most can only dream of. China has revelled in the role of the white knight riding to the rescue of the global economy, buying up US and European debt and even lecturing the US on fiscal responsibility.
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Those following the events in China are intrigued by an important question: What will be its likely future course once it achieves a high level of economic development?
Someone analysing China based on what is happening in the wider world may come to the conclusion that it will follow the Western model and become a multi-party democracy. Whereas those analysing China based on its history and culture may come to the conclusion that it will not follow the Western model even after it achieves a high level of economic development.
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In A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (Norton, $27.95), Aaron L. Friedberg ’78, Ph.D. ’86, dissects the present and future of Sino-American relations, stating that “despite several reasons a closer relationship between the two economic powers is possible, two main factors—a growing clash of interests and deep ideological and political differences—will prove more decisive and will make the relationship more tense and competitive,” according to a review by the New York Times Book Review.
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The latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine carries an article on the inevitability of China becoming the next superpower, one of a mounting cascade of articles on America’s decline and China’s rise. For many Chinese, it is high time for their country to regain its rightful place in the world, after a century and a half of humiliation, beginning with the Opium War of 1839-1842 and culminating with the invasion and occupation of much of China by Japan 100 years later.
As Martin Jacques explains in his bestselling “When China Rules the World:” “China had already begun to acquire its modern shape in the centuries leading up to the birth of Christ” and, a millennium ago, it was “the greatest maritime nation in the world.”
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The United States and the People’s Republic of China are locked in a quiet but increasingly intense struggle for power and influence, not only in Asia, but around the world.
And in spite of what many earnest and well-intentioned commentators seem to believe, the nascent Sino-American rivalry is not merely the result of misperceptions or mistaken policies; it is driven instead by forces that are deeply rooted in the shifting structure of the international system and in the very different domestic political regimes of the two Pacific powers.
Throughout history, relations between dominant and rising states have been uneasy—and often violent. Established powers tend to regard themselves as the defenders of an international order that they helped to create and from which they continue to benefit; rising powers feel constrained, even cheated, by the status quo and struggle against it to take what they think is rightfully theirs. Indeed, this story line, with its Shakespearean overtones of youth and age, vigor and decline, is among the oldest in recorded history. As far back as the fifth century BC the great Greek historian Thucydides began his study of the Peloponnesian War with the deceptively simple observation that the war’s deepest, truest cause was “the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”
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Throughout history, every great transformation in Chinese society has been ushered in by ideological change.
Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched reform and opening-up in 1978, China has abandoned Mao Zedong’s revolutionary model of social development and adopted the so-called “Beijing consensus” or “China model” to serve its great transformation.
After three decades of change from an agrarian to an industrial society, China has now become the world’s second-largest and fastest-growing economy. It is 10 times bigger than it was in 1978 and the nation has experienced the same degree of industrialization and social transformation as Europe did over two centuries. [1]
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Unlike many others, Economist George Magnus is not optimistic about China’s outlook.
George Magnus has the distinction – unlike many economic commentators – of being right, at least once.
Like Nouriel Roubini of “Dr Doom” fame, the 62-year-old senior economic adviser at Swiss bank UBS predicted the financial crisis.
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The Western financial crisis heralded a significant shift in the balance of power between the United States and China. Most starkly, it brought forward the date when the Chinese economy will overtake the US economy in size from 2027 (the Goldman Sachs projection in 2005) to 2020. The reason is simple: while the US economy is around the same size as it was in 2008, with the prospect of perhaps a decade of very weak growth ahead, the Chinese economy has continued to grow at around 9 percent and future economic growth is likely to be in the region of 8 percent. While 2027 sounded sufficiently far in the future to sound speculative, 2020, in contrast, is less than a decade away and feels much more like an extension of the present. The rise of China and the decline of the United States is becoming more tangible by the year.
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