The Middle Kingdom’s prosperity is an illusion. And when China finally falls, we’ll all feel the pain
As fearmongering election campaign ads go, it’s hard to top the “Chinese Professor,” which flickered across the Internet just before Americans went to the polls last fall. In the spot, set in a sleek Beijing lecture hall 20 years in the future, a sharply dressed Chinese instructor explains to his Asian students why previous empires, from Ancient Greece to the U.S.A., turned to dust. The Americans failed because they lost sight of their principles, he says in Mandarin, with subtitles. They overspent, overtaxed and over–borrowed. “Of course, we owned most of their debt,” he cackles, as the class joins in. “So now they work for us.”
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What Martin Jacques had outlined in his lecture is of great importance to us Filipinos who are caught in the big geopolitical power game between the US and China
Jacques narrated that even before the Western Financial Crisis Goldman Sachs had already projected that the Chinese economy will soon surpass that of the US and that in 2050 the Chinese economy will be double the size of that of the US.
Citing BNP Paribas projections, Jacques stated that the post-crisis date when China overtakes the US is now 2020. “China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it’s a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year,” Jacques said.
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As China becomes the world’s second-largest economy, Zambian economist and author Dambisa Moyo says there is much Ireland can learn from the east about rebuilding our country
YESTERDAY’S REPORT that China has finally overtaken Japan to become the world’s second largest economy created a small flurry among western diplomats and economists who have watched China’s rapid emergence from poverty with a mixture of envy, fascination and alarm. On current trends, China could replace the United States as the global economic leader within a decade.
Beijing already has the world’s deepest reserves of foreign currency, which bring China political as well as economic clout with western powers, notably the US.
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For unsurprising reasons, the people’s uprising in Egypt has been widely cast as an epochal event for Arab political culture, and somewhat more widely, for the entire Middle East.
To limit our understanding of these events in this way, however, is to lose sight of a story playing out against an immensely larger backdrop. The putative and much discussed decline of the United States in recent years has been cast against the perceived successes, or at least the argued attractiveness, of an authoritarian other.
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As another Chinese New Year dawns this week, Jonathan Fenby assesses the world’s second-biggest economic power – and charts the risks ahead
China enters its lunar new year on Thursday in anything but rabbit fashion. Having overtaken Japan to become the world’s second biggest economy late in 2010, it has just unveiled economic figures that underline its continuing ability to deliver high levels of growth (10.3 per cent) accompanied by a string of superlatives – from having the world’s biggest car market (13.8 million sales) to holding the largest cache of foreign reserves ($2.85trn). Goldman Sachs forecasts that the last major power ruled by a Communist Party will surpass the United States by 2027. Others see this happening earlier.
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Author looks ahead to the time when China will dominate the world
Martin Jacques finds himself in the unusual position of being something of a celebrity in China. His book When China Rules The World, which examines the implications of China overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy, has sold 150,000 copies and has achieved the most success in the country whose rise he foretells.
“Not bad, is it?” he quips. “When I come to China people talk to me about the book; lots of people have read it. It is different from anywhere else I have been to in the West. People say to me: ‘You know you are famous in China.'”
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Mayor Richard Daley has a favorite book. Or at least one he repeatedly recommends.
He brought it up after a press conference I attended in February in Washington and several times before that with my colleagues at City Hall. In August he wrote to the author, British columnist Martin Jacques, telling him how much he enjoyed it.
“I was very touched by it,” Jacques said.
The book is titled “When China Rules the World,” or “China Rules” in Daley-speak. The 576-page tome often startles readers by sketching a future in which China’s economy and its belief in its own superiority dominate the world.
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Will 2011 be better than 2010? We can only hope. Many columnists agree with Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria that 2010 was a tough year. And if we read the tea leaves correctly, 2011 is going to be a hard one, too.
2010 was a year of dire natural catastrophes: according to Munich-Re, an insurance company, there were 960 earthquakes, floods, droughts and other disasters; climate change is intruding palpably in our daily lives; U.S. President Barack Obama, his approval rating at a personal low of 36 per cent, lost the House of Representatives to ever more petulant and aggressive Republicans; the euro almost failed, as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain faced insolvency; and an increasingly assertive China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.
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The Chinese premier’s visit will boost bilateral trade, the bedrock of Sino-Indian relations
To the millions of Chinese children, Premier Wen Jiabao is affectionately known as grandfather Wen, conveying the tremendous success he has achieved in cultivating the image of ‘people’s man’ or the ‘humane face’ of the Chinese government. This sentiment was transmitted to Delhi’s Tagore International School, which was Wen’s stop on the first day of his recent trip to India. A child asked him, “Could I call you Grandfather Wen?” Pat came his reply, “I love to be called that, especially by children.” Perhaps this exchange was scripted, but one indisputable feature of how he came across—whether meeting schoolchildren or addressing business leaders or talking to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—was his winsome demeanour. Through it, he conveyed the message that he’s a reasonable man, arguably India’s best bet to improve its relations with China.
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To borrow a line from the nuns in that old musical, how do you solve a problem like China?
It isn’t a will o’ the wisp that’ll go away; it isn’t a clown, though it might think the rest of us are. It is a worry for the world and a headache for India.
The Economist, which is now a weekly must-read for trend analysts everywhere, ran a special survey recently on ‘The Dangers of a Rising China’. Several Asia-watchers have written volumes full of anxiety. One by Martin Jacques, titled ‘When China Rules the World’, declares in its subtitle: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. China’s influence, says Jacques, will extend well beyond the economic sphere. It will have social, cultural and political repercussions.
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