PETALING JAYA: China continues to grab world headlines and dominate international news for many reasons.
The world’s second-largest economy is now expected to be the biggest in only a few years, with many far-reaching implications to follow.
World-renowned author and academic Dr Martin Jacques will be presenting a fresh look at the new China in a public talk at Menara Star in Petaling Jaya on Thursday, Sept 27 at 2pm.
Global business leaders are voicing increasing concern over heightened political tensions between China and Japan, sparked by a maritime dispute in the East China Sea. They fear an escalation may have a spill-over effect on their regional operations and damage trade ties between the world’s second and third-largest economies.
Company executives, diplomats and analysts told CNBC that supply chains across China and Japan and regional trade flows are at risk if the territorial dispute between the north Asian neighbors – believed to be the worst in decades – deepens.
“This could really be something that causes a huge economic dislocation,” Mike Splinter, chief executive officer at Applied Materials told CNBC. “If import barriers go up, it could affect our business.”
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.
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.
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?
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).
Reviews worldwide have called it “by far the best book on China”, “a forcefully written lively book that is full of provocations and predictions”, “offering deep knowledge and understanding” about “the end of the Western world and the birth of a new world order.”
Martin Jacques, the author of this celebrated book When China Rules the Worldis currently promoting it in India, China’s largest neighbour which is also viewed as its challenger in the region. Sitting at the New Delhi office of his publisher, Penguin, Jacques dishes out a genial smile, almost sage like, or is it that of a conqueror who knows what today holds and what tomorrow shall bring? With hands clasped together behind his head, he is all keen to reason out with you why he thinks China is the crown prince of the world economy, how it is inching closer to the throne. After all, he chased the subject for almost a decade to fill up a tome of a book at 800 pages.
Martin Jacques isn’t just convinced about something that a lot of people believe but would rather not voice — that China will soon be the most powerful nation in the world — but he is also courageous enough to have written a book on the subject.
On Friday, The Bengal Club in association with The Telegraph and the Aspen Institute presented, as part of Bengal Club Library Talk, a discussion with Jacques on his book,When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. The talk and the ensuing interactive session was moderated by the retired major general Arun Roy.
Most authors have written bestsellers while on a trip to a different country or an exotic holiday destination. Whatever it takes to get inspired. For popular columnist and author Martin Jacques, a trip to East Asian countries did the trick. It gave the author a push to write a book.
“In 1993, I went on a big holiday and life changed thereafter. I met my wife, Hari, during this two-and-a-half week trip and was charmed by East Asia,” says Martin Jacques, who was here in the city to address a gathering on China and world politics at IIT Madras.
“India would be making a big mistake if it allowed itself to get dragged into a Western anti-China alliance,” warns Martin Jacques, author of the international bestseller When China Rules the World.
The 67-year-old British author, broadcaster and speaker whose association with China began nearly two decades ago, is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on that country. His book, rated as by far the best on China to have been published in many years, has already sold more than a quarter of a million copies worldwide, a rare achievement for a scholarly 800 page work of non-fiction.
Mr Jacques has examined the remarkable rise of China and has predicted that “China will soon rule the world (and) as China’s powerful civilisation reasserts itself, it will signal the end of the global dominance of the Western nation-state, and a future of ‘contested modernity’”. In these circumstances, he argues that it would be better for India to make a grand rapprochement with China on entirely new terms rather than to treat it as an enemy.