Is China ready to rule the world? Not quite yet, argues Simon S.C. Tay. Both Asia and America need to be realistic about their limitations (and both sides now have more than a few of those) and concede that the future is not a zero-sum game. If both sides are interested in prosperity, the relationship will have to be more about cooperation than competition. And if our time is in indeed witnessing the long handoff of global power from one empire to another, the smoother the transition, the better.
It’s always fun to find out what others are reading and peruse their book shelves. Here’s a glimpse at the summer reading lists of a variety of people from business, nonprofits, and corporate social responsibility
Matthew Bishop, Author, Philanthrocapitalism; U.S. Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist : “I’m reading The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Showing Up For Life by Bill Gates Senior. I am enjoying all of them immensely, but the Gates book most of all – not just because it helps to understand better Gates Junior, but because it serves up lots of practical wisdom about how to live an effective life, from someone who was clearly a big person in his various communities long before his son made his billions.”
For anyone who thinks China is a superpower in only the political arena, they are missing the larger geopolitical picture. The Internet is the 21st Century’s newest battlefield where countries will fight for dominance over other nations. As content and data-mining transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, or from Social Media to the Semantic Web, most thought leaders are betting on China as the front-runner in leading this charge.
Last year a British scholar, Martin Jacques, published his latest book titled “When China Rules the World.” In the prevailing global publishing and media environment, the title of Jacques latest book clearly owes much to an editorial emphasis on ensuring headlines and titles are punchy and can immediately attract the public’s attention. However, it was the subtitle of the book which really enticed me to buy and read this book: “The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World.”
US economic and political hegemony and the dominance of the US dollar have come to a screeching end
Corporate media, which never warned that capitalism was in crisis before the financial meltdown, now insists that the system is simply in a down period, and will at some point return to stability. But the crisis became inevitable precisely because “the most predatory, parasitic and criminal elements of Wall Street and bank capital became dominant over the economy and the government.” With these same elements still firmly in charge, how can the future be anything but chaotic?
In 2006-2009 the US financial system and economy came close to systemic collapse. Had it occurred most of the world would have gone down with it. Karl Marx famously described events like these as “momenti mori”, reminders of systemic death. This was the first truly existential crisis of the capitalist economic system since the Great Depression, and it reminds us of its near death fragility.
Not for the first nor the last time, I regret the long-ago death of Rewi Alley, the New Zealander who is one of China’s acclaimed heroes.
He devoted 60 years to setting up schools and thousands of industrial co-operatives there. He wrote of them “fitting into the vast landscape of rural China”. His slogan was: “Yo Banfa!” – “There is a way.” He retained independent views in a country where such attitudes were suspect – and still are. His mana was unquestioned.
In particular, I remember a long conversation with him in Beijing in 1983, when he talked gloomily of his deep misgivings about China’s dogmatic one-child family policy. He feared for the effects on the domestic and family life of the nation he loved, a doubt amounting to communist heresy.
Until fairly recently, the Chinese were earning praise for their shrewd handling of Southeast Asia. Not anymore.
It’s a showdown at the South China Sea Corral — or so you might think if you’ve been listening to China’s state-run news media. On July 23, speaking at an ASEAN regional forum in Hanoi, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that her government “supports a collaborative diplomatic process for resolving the various disputes” over the South China Sea. She also made a point of noting that the U.S. would be happy to offer its services as a mediator and that Washington opposes “the use or threat of force by any claimant.”
Napoleon was right. Okay, so he was tragically wrong deciding to go on his long march to Moscow. But over China he was spot on.
The actual words and the timing of his quote vary but they all match. Example: Historians say that in 1803 he once pointed on a map to China, then a distant and little-known place, and said: “Here lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep, for when he wakes he will shock the world.”
No question Napoleon was basing his concerns on the reports of Jesuit missionaries who had then been in China for two centuries, some of them with the ear of the emperor as confidantes in the Forbidden City.
Possibly the most fashionable theme in current discussions of the future is whether China will replace the United States as the leading world power. That it will do so seems to be taken for granted in pop-historical circles, as well as among economic forecasters or futurists (who currently have a record that does not inspire confidence). A Goldman Sachs analysis declares that China will replace the United States as the largest economy in the world by 2027. But the largest economy is not automatically the leading nation. And ruling the world is more of a problem than one thinks, as Washington is discovering.
Only Tribes held together by a group feeling can survive in a desert. (Ibn Khaldun, 14th century Arab historian)
Time to chuck into the dustbin the cosmopolitan notions so celebrated at global conferences: a world run by wise men of the United Nations, science-driven socialists or their ostensibly more pragmatic twins, global free marketers. We are leaving the age of abstractions and entering one dominated by deep-seated ethnic, religious and cultural loyalties, some with roots from centuries and millennia ago.
The 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun noted that what most holds people together is biology and shared history. These create the critical bonds of kinship and trust and a sense of common purpose that have animated every ascendant group from the days of the Greeks and Romans through the British empire, America and modern day China.
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