Martin Jacques says the global power shift from west to east is inevitable, but it need not be a threat if westerners can learn to understand and appreciate the culture that is driving it.
Jacques, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, spoke about the rapid rise of China during his keynote address Jan. 28 to formally kick off the events of the University of Alberta’s International Week 2013.
Gordon Houlden, director of the U of A’s China Institute, introduced the British author and public speaker to the audience in the Myer Horowitz Theatre and telecast viewers in Calgary and Trinidad. He called Jacques bold and ambitious for his approach to tackling some of the toughest questions concerning China in recent years, such as how modern China achieved its remarkable pattern of growth and modernization, and noted that Jacques “is not afraid to challenge us to think hard about how far China’s momentum will carry the nation, and what will be the implications for the rest of this planet.”
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Merry Christmas everyone! Before the turkey, sprouts, Queen and repeats, here’s IPPR’s Nick Pearce with a Santastic rundown of the best reads of 2012, stocking fillers all…
In the summer, IPPR launched its new journal, Juncture, and my recommend reading starts with the many world leading thinkers who have already written for it.
Each edition contains long-form essays on questions of importance to the centre-left in the UK but the journal is also deliberately cosmopolitan in reach, featuring pieces by theorists from around the world, country-specific articles and reflections on foreign policy challenges. Web-only articles are also regularly published.
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On Nov. 19, I was privileged to join my husband, Vergel, at the lecture of journalist-historian Martin Jacques for his book “When China Rules the World.”
I have been able to read only a few of the 600-plus pages of it at a time, since Vergel seldom puts it down. And just as well, as the book’s main thesis scares me: It’s only a matter of time before China and its 1.3 billion people, with basic beliefs that run counter to those I hold, rule the world.
I’m still struggling to fit into any manner of acceptable culture the carnage at Tiananmen or the seemingly amoral push for market profit or the bullying of neighbors by a nation that claims to be more civilized than any other. In fact, Jacques attributes this last attitude, which it assumes over territorial disputes (with our country, for one) to a Chinese sense of racial superiority that regards all outsiders as barbarians.
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What Canada can learn from Australia
Canadians are missing the point in their debate over increased trade with China, according to one Canadian foreign policy expert.
“The debate that Canadians need to have, and the debate we’re really not having,” according to Kim Nossal, director of Queen’s University’s Centre for International and Defence Policy, is on where we will fit as relations between the U.S. and China change.
The proposed $15.1 billion US bid by state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) for Calgary-based Nexen and Enbridge’sbid to build a pipeline to carry Alberta oilsands crude to the west coasthas led to much discussion about the bilateral relationship.
But what we should be talking about, Nossal says, are “the implications for us, as a small country that has relations with both the United States and with the People’s Republic of China, as the relations between those two great powers begin to shift and change in the next decade or so.”
Nossal has a unique perspective, having being born in Australia and spent time in Beijing and Hong Kong beginning in the 1960s.
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SHANGHAI – Whether and to what extent China will adjust its diplomatic policy under its new leadership has become a focus of attention for China watchers.
“China will continuously push for construction of a harmonious world with permanent peace and common prosperity,” Hong Lei, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told a journalist on November 15 in response to a question as to where the country’s foreign policy will move following this month’s 18th Party Congress. “China will unswervingly follow the road of peaceful development and firmly pursue the independent and peaceful foreign policy. China will unswervingly follow a win-win and open-up strategy. China will comprehensively develop the friendly cooperation with other countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.”
His statement was reiterated by a foreign ministry spokeswoman four days later.
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UNIQUE CIVILISATION: There’s no point judging it by liberal norms
THIS month provided a beauty contest between the two most important powers on the planet right now: America and China. On Nov 6, the United States chose President Barack Obama for a second term in an exciting election that reverberated worldwide.
A week later, the 18th congress of the Communist Party in Beijing began a once-in-a-decade leadership change that lacked for nothing except suspense. Xi Jinping was inaugurated as general secretary on Nov 15. It had been known for some time that he would rise to that pinnacle and become China’s president.
Through narrow Western eyes, the comparison was made as invidious as possible. According to Dominique Moisi, founder of the French Institute of International Affairs, November brought “two victories: not just Obama’s over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the presidential election, but also the victory of America’s democratic system over China’s one-party authoritarianism”.
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While President Aquino was making waves in the summit of Asean leaders and their dialogue partners in Cambodia with his statement urging the United States to speak up on the South China Sea conflict which was anathema to China, visiting journalist and China expert, Martin Jacques, was telling a rapt audience at the Manila Intercon, “I don’t think it would serve the Philippine well to think that the United States will help” in the territorial conflict with China.
“I am not arguing that the Philippines give up its claims, but a way has to be found to deal with these questions, a way that does not involve derailing or poisoining its relationship with China because it will not get anywhere,” he said.
Jacques is the author of the 2009 bestseller, When China Rules the World, which asserts that “by 2027 China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy, and by 2050 its economy will be twice as large as that of the United States.”
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