Australia is leading the West into a new era of Chinese ascendancy, according to author and China-expert Martin Jacques.
‘You are incredibly privileged because you are the pioneer Western country as we move into a completely new historical era in which China is dominant,’ he said.
As part of his only public appearance in Melbourne, Jacques introduced an audience of over 300 to the updated version of his best-selling book ‘When China Rules the World’ and acknowledged Australia’s place on the ‘cutting edge’ of relations with China.
He also warned that it is ‘no longer a Western economy’.
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Amid rumours that the transition to a new Chinese leadership will take place in mid-October, a key player in the Bo Xilai affair has just been charged in Chengdu. The affair, the biggest scandal in the People’s Republic in decades, has all of the ingredients to derail plans for a “smooth transition”—but Communist authorities are doing everything in their power to ensure that it doesn’t.
Driving from the airport into the Dongcheng district of central Beijing last Saturday, I noticed the signs and signifiers of China’s economic heft were all present and accounted for—the glass and concrete towers of the financial institutions that act as the world’s bankers, the logos of the mining conglomerates that bring in the resources to fire the country’s (still) prodigious growth, the porticos of the luxury hotels where some of the planet’s biggest deals are negotiated and sealed. There were also, of course, the brutalist facades of the Chinese parastatals, which, like the ubiquitous black Audis of the party apparatchiks, signified that you were no longer in Kansas, Dorothy.
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In 1991, Chinese Premier Li Peng, who was on a visit to India, handed over Rs 500 to an Intelligence Bureau official who had been assigned as the liaison officer with the Chinese delegation. Although it is customary for visiting delegations to give gifts of mementos, the cash ‘gift’ was considered a breach of protocol, and according to media accounts, was promptly returned to the Chinese embassy.
It appears that Chinese visitors have, at the very least, been sensitised to the impact of inflation in India in recent years. For yesterday, visiting Chinese Defence Minister Liang Guanglie committed another such breach of protocol, when he handed over a cash ‘gift’ to two IAF officers – but this time the ‘gift’ was for a total of Rs 1 lakh.
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Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire ambitiously attempts to unite Asia intellectually, and such an enterprise is bound to face insurmountable odds.
Mishra might argue that it’s merely about how the de-colonisation of Asian countries was preceded, in the 19th century, with the stirrings of intellectual de-colonisation. Specifically, he says that the Islamic Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the Chinese Liang Qichao and the Indian Rabindranath Tagore were first to intellectually reject the West; that this happened even before the 1905 defeat by Japan of Russia, a historical watershed demonstrating that the white man was not invulnerable; and that their ideas, rooted in “going back to one’s roots” influenced one another and subsequent Asian thinkers till de-colonisation became inevitable after World War II.
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Thirty-six years after “Great Helmsman” Mao Zedong died of a heart attack, leaving his country briefly rudderless during a time of crisis and uncertainty, the Chinese ship of state is still sailing. But is it still seaworthy? Observers are energetically debating whether the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, which has endured so much, can endure. After all, the government today bases its legitimacy on economic growth, which may well be slowing. We can’t predict the future, but we can examine the past, and Chinese history suggests that, even if the Communist Party does face a legitimacy crisis, it would not be out of character for it to survive this particular storm.
The China-watchers who insist the country faces a crippling legitimacy crisis include, perhaps most famously, Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, as well as political scientist Minxin Pei. As they see it, there are simply too many contradictions inherent in the Chinese model for it to survive.
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As Britain basks in the glow of its successful Olympics, the thought that comes to this China specialist’s mind is, what a difference four years makes. There is a striking contrast indeed, where China is concerned, between the largely positive international chatter about that country in mid-2008, as the Beijing Games concluded, and the largely negative buzz about it now.
The change in China’s fortunes has little to do with medal counts or world records. Still, a look back to the Beijing Games helps place then-and-now contrasts into sharp relief.
Plenty of criticisms were leveled at China’s leaders just before the 2008 Olympics over issues such as repression in Tibet, and the Games were hardly free of controversy either, thanks to complaints about everything from parts of the opening ceremonies being faked (for example, the fireworks that looked like footprints in the sky being doctored digital effects) to underage gymnasts competing on the Chinese team. And yet, overall, a lot of things went right for the Party four years ago. As a result, a good number of international observers came away from China’s first Olympics seeing the country much as its leaders desperately want it to be seen: as a country that is respectful of its past yet surging toward a prosperous future; that is no longer poor, chaotic, isolated, with leaders prone to ideological extremism, personality cult rule, and factional infighting.
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The Chinese economy is a source of wonder and fascination in the West, as well it might be. According to the World Bank, the People’s Republic clocked a cool 9.1% growth in 2011, while the United States languished at 1.7%. While the Chinese central bank is sitting on $3.24tn of reserves, the United States federal government is the most heavily-indebted entity in the history of humanity, with nearly $16tn in liabilities.[1] While the absolute figures are smaller, the debt problem in Europe is so acute that it may yet rip the Eurozone apart, and it will almost definitely be a drag on growth for a decade or more.[2] Increasingly, bewildered politicians in Europe are lashing out at each other, with few seeming to appreciate the magnitude of the debt problem and even fewer willing to level with the public about what it means.
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In a February 2003 edition of Newsweek, Professor of History at Yale University, Paul Kennedy, said, “the US military budget will soon be equal to that of all countries in the world combined.”
Yet even now, hawkish policy makers in Washington are concerned that the US defence forces are dangerously thin and overstretched. So how can both facts be true?
And, a book by Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World provides adequate and, precise answers to economic rise in Asia.
Even before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2008, war, scandal, economics and politics had plunged Americans into sullen self-deprecation. Commentaries in newspapers and books announced the Post-American World. China was riding high on the success of the Beijing Olympics, its grand coming-out party. It came out relatively unscathed in the first phase of the global financial crisis that followed Lehman Brothers’ collapse. Sustained economic growth and rising prosperity in Asia were shifting the global balance of power eastwards.
It was around this time that Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World first hit the bookstores, the certainty of its title confirming Americans’ fears. Four years on, an updated edition is out. The US is not fully out of the latest of its periodic bouts of declinist thinking, but, as I have argued in these pages, China finds itself in its most vulnerable moment in two decades (see “Dealing with a vulnerable China”, November 21, 2011).
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