Martin Jacques has only a few doubts that the Middle Kingdom will soon be the centre of the world. The title of his book is provocative. What this British journalist actually predicts is a “new kind of world system in which China is the main player — but not to the exclusion of the rest of the world.” What is more important to him is the need for the world, especially the West, to get a grip of what the return of China to a position of global preeminence will mean. Superpower China will not be a West that happens to speak funny.
When China Rules The World
The emergence of China as an economic super-power, holding its own with, and surpassing, the US, is now taken for granted. However, both admirers and detractors of China have been viewing it in the conventional setting, implying some sort of a deviation from the commonly touted notions of politics and economics. They pine for the prospect of China somehow righting itself and conforming to political theories, economic dogmas and social mores familiar to them.
The success of the West in imposing its model so far was largely for want of a spirited effort by the countries of the Orient to contest its basic assumptions. China’s pre-eminence threatens the postulates that the West has long cherished. That is what explains both its fascination for, and fear of, China. What if the political, social and functional paradigm that it represents becomes universal and China, in effect, sets out to rule the world?
Journalist-writer Martin Jacques truly believes , like the title of his book ‘When China Rules the World’, that a China-dominated world order is close at hand. In his revised edition of the bestseller , he’s added a chapter on India’s blow hot-blow cold ties with its largest Southeast Asian neighbour . Jacques tells ET’s Labonita Ghosh there is much India can learn from China about global ascendancy – if only we can get past the our paranoia and the war of 1962.
What will a China-dominated world order look like, and what will be India’s role in it?
China has reached this juncture in a great rush and in a very short space of time . But it’s also difficult to answer for many other reasons . We’re so familiar with a world that has been dominated by the West , it’s difficult for us to think outside that box . But I don’t think it’s right to assume that China will necessarily behave in the same way as the US.
Dr Odera Outa’s article “DO NOT WRITE OFF AMERICA JUST YET”[Star May 22,2012] is indeed dogmatic and oblivious current development in Asia and Kipling’s warning against British imperial hubris seen relevant to America to-day.
As Paul Kennedy a professor of History at Yale University has observed in Newsweek of February 2003,”the U.S. Military budget will soon be equal to that of all countries in the world combined.” Yet hawkish policy makers in Washington are concerned that the U.S. defense forces are dangerously thin and overstretched. How can both facts be true?
A book by Martin Jacques, “When China Rules the World” provides adequate and sacinet answers to economic rise in Asia. The book is a compelling and thought provocative analysis of global economic trends that defies the common western assumptions that to be fully modern, a nation must become democratic, financially transparent and legally accountable. Jacques argues persuasively that China is on track to take over as the World’s dominant power and that when it does, it will make the rules on its own terms, with little regard for what existed before.
Dr Odera Outa’s article “DO NOT WRITE OFF AMERICA JUST YET”[Star May 22,2012] is indeed dogmatic and oblivious current development in Asia and Kipling’s warning against British imperial hubris seen relevant to America to-day.
As Paul Kennedy a professor of History at Yale University has observed in Newsweek of February 2003,”the U.S. Military budget will soon be equal to that of all countries in the world combined.” Yet hawkish policy makers in Washington are concerned that the U.S. defense forces are dangerously thin and overstretched. How can both facts be true?
A book by Martin Jacques, “When China Rules the World” provides adequate and sacinet answers to economic rise in Asia. The book is a compelling and thought provocative analysis of global economic trends that defies the common western assumptions that to be fully modern, a nation must become democratic, financially transparent and legally accountable. Jacques argues persuasively that China is on track to take over as the World’s dominant power and that when it does, it will make the rules on its own terms, with little regard for what existed before.
When the world continues to discuss China’s impact even when there are other issues to consider, China has clearly ‘arrived’.
CHINA’S unrelenting growth is continuing to fuel speculation about the implications of its spectacular rise for the rest of the world.
Its irrepressive re-emergence as a major world power shapes and colours private discourses, academic analyses and bilateral and multilateral discussions, whether or not intended originally to discuss China.
It permeates strategic discourses behind closed doors, casual coffeeshop talk and everything in between. The recent Germany-Malaysia Security Forum in Kuala Lumpur, sponsored by Konrad Adenaur Stiftung (KAS) and organised by ISIS Malaysia, was an example.
Germany’s political foundations like the KAS are affiliated with their respective political parties, and with the KAS it is with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s rightwing Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
SCOTTISH MORTGAGE MANAGER JAMES ANDERSON TALKS TO HEATHER FARMBROUGH ABOUT HOW RAPID ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY ARE HAVING AN IMPACT ON EVERYONE.
I interviewed Martin Jacques, the author of When China Rules the World, for Trust Online. He argues that in the West we are poor at understanding how the Chinese and other societies think and says that until we can, we won’t really understand major changes that are happening.
Yes, we have discussed this in Trust before – how economic growth and innovation are so dependent on education at all levels. I might have also talked to you before about the Swedish doctor, academic and statistician Hans Rosling, whom I admire tremendously. His website [www.gapminder.org] uses and animates data graphically to explore some of the world’s biggest trends. These animations show quite dramatically how countries like China and others can catch up and overtake incumbent powers in so many different ways. He uses education, health and longevity data as well as economic and GDP statistics.
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This is my last entry as editor of The Diplomat. As many readers will have spotted from the notice on our website a few weeks ago, I will be leaving to take up a broadcast media role in New York, and so I’ll be handing over the reins at the end of today to Joel Whitney. I wish Joel the best of luck and hope he finds working with The Diplomat as exciting as I have done.
I’ve been involved with The Diplomat for a few years now, first as a freelance contributor when The Diplomat was a print publication based in Sydney, then as part-time web editor, and since September 2009 as full-time editor when the magazine relaunched and moved completely online.
Martin Jacques has a simple and sobering thesis. The West is in terminal decline and the 21st century will belong to China. More significantly, it will not be simply a rerun of western democracy, with all its obvious positives and glaring limitations. No, this will be a competing modernity complete with eight distinct Chinese characteristics. It’s all change at the head of the table so we damn well better get used to it.
Jacques is clearly a more than competent scholar of Asian and in particular, Chinese affairs, but it is this academic competency that may well be his undoing, for in concentrating as he does on the historical dimensions of China’s staggering rate of industrialisation and modernisation, he may well be in danger of blinding himself and his readers to what is really taking place on planet Earth. Yes, there clearly is some sort of a changing of the guard at the top table, and no one but the most reactionary neo-cons in the US can now doubt the inexorable decline of western power relative to the equally inexorable rise of Asian economic and political power. But all this only serves to obscure the more profound fact that so called free-market, neo-liberal capitalism has run its course, and only those nations that apply rational state planning to their economies are going to prosper.
– Maike Curry