我相信中国将对自己的历史和文化更有信心，在全球化的进程中，不会盲从西方，并将起到“抗西化”的作用。
———马丁·雅克
很多人怀疑，我持如此乐观的态度，是否因为我本人对中国特别偏爱。事实上，我对中国的感情很复杂。1998年，为了写这本书，我和妻子哈莉定居香港，两年后，哈莉因病去世，当时我们的儿子只有16个月。在我看来，很大程度上是医院歧视深肤色族裔造成的悲剧。
我的生活完全垮了，此后的五年几乎不能将书继续写下去。我喜欢中国，但中国始终与我心中最悲痛的事联系在一起，你可以想象我写书的时候，与我的写作对象保持着清醒而负责的距离。
Books about China’s ascendancy to a leading world power are often prefaced by the word “if,” but author Martin Jacques has defied the formula by giving his book the eye-catching title, When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. The British writer, broadcaster and former visiting professor at Renmin University of China, is currently promoting his thought-provoking and somewhat controversial work.
Published by Penguin in June, Jacques’ latest book is a comprehensive and richly detailed analysis of China’s ascendancy and influence he believes it will have on East Asia and the rest of the world – including the West.
With the prospect of China’s economy surpassing the United States’ in less than 20 years, the great debate today is over whether China will integrate into the existing world order or seek to transform it. Invoking the grand logic of the rise and fall of great powers, Jacques, a journalist, makes the case that China will dominate and reshape the global system. He argues that although China’s first steps toward global preeminence are economic, eventually its political and cultural influence will be even greater — and that, overall, “China’s impact on the world will be at least as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater.” Jacques also claims that Beijing appears to offer the world an alternative route to modernity — and therefore a different vision of world order.
Having adopted the trappings of Western capitalism while embracing a more illiberal conception of social order, China is modernizing, not westernizing. Therefore, Jacques argues, its coming hegemony will reorient politics and society. But the book is better at describing differences between the East and the West — their cities, customs, values — than alternative logics of global order. It does not explore in any depth what it will mean for China to become a global hegemon. Hegemony involves building a system of institutions that other states seek to join, overseeing an extensive system of alliances, and providing public goods. The United States’ liberal orientation has facilitated its leadership. It remains to be seen whether China can build a Pax Sinica without an open, rule-based world order.
– G. John Ikenberry
While many are already talking about the notion of a shift in power from West to East, a thought-provoking book by author Martin Jacques called When China Rules the World takes this even further by proclaiming that China will not only thrive in the 21st century, but will do so at the expense of the United States.
“I would expect, and I think we’re witnessing, the beginnings of the decline of America, America as the nation that exercises economic hegemony in the world. I think that the origins of the present crisis actually lie in the inability of the US any longer to be able to sustain and underwrite the international economic system of which it is the architect and patron. That is a deep problem. The indebtedness means it cannot do it any more – the multiple indebtedness.”
With autocratic states like China and Russia looking poised for economic recovery, it’s often hard to make the case for ideals such as democracy and rule of law. To some, like Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules, autocrats seem destined to rule the world economy.
A columnist for the Guardian, Jacques predicted that by 2050 China will easily surpass America economically, militarily and politically. The belief in the power of autocracy even extends to such leading American capitalists as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who have nothing but high praise for what Gates enthusiastically describes as a “brand-new form of capitalism.”
As an academic and journalist working throughout East Asia, Martin Jacques has had a front row seat for the past decade on China’s economic and political emergence. The British author’s latest book is titled When China Rules the World.
Martin Jacques’ When China Rules The World: The End of The Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (Penguin Press/ Nov 2009) carries a provocative title, but it should not be a surprise. Anyone can see this outcome coming by simply projecting economic growth in the U.S. and China at roughly their current rates; Goldman Sachs gave such conclusions credibility in 2007 when it concluded that China would surpass U.S. GDP in 2027, and double it by 2050. Jacques’ book suffers not from an overly wild imagination, but from taking entirely too long to get this already obvious conclusion, and then not exploring enough about what that means for either Britain (his nation) or the U.S.A.
While the decades since the Vietnam War may be most known for their startling technological developments, they have also spawned a chic genre of literature: the ‘America is in Decline’ tract. What started most prominently with the work of Paul Kennedy has turned into a veritable cottage industry. Tomes in this category have included Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Bruce Horton’s Decline and Fall, and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria’s The End of America, which Barack Obama was famously photographed holding last summer. Some of these books argue that the decline is inevitable as a result of “cultural decadence,” others argue decline is a result of “environmental devastation,” and others still attribute the supposed decline to falling birthrates. In the 1980s and early 1990s, many of the more-economically oriented books of the genre argued that the West’s decline was partially a result of the rise of Japan. Today, many are devoted to the proposition that western decline is linked to the rise of another Asian tiger: the People’s Republic of China.
Barack Obama’s visit to China comes at an interesting time. I am engrossed in Martin Jacques’ book, When China Rules the World, bought because of its compelling title.
Jacques reckons that by 2027 China’s economy will have overtaken the US. China will dominate, but not in ways Westerners understand.
“China’s rise signals the end of the global dominance of the West and the emergence of a world which (China) will come to shape in a host of different ways and which will become increasingly disconcerting and unfamiliar to those living in the West.”
Barely three weeks after top officials, including the national security adviser, berated the media for Sinophobia and war hysteria, New Delhi has been stung by what it regards as an astonishing lack of reciprocity from Beijing. It is one thing for China to routinely issue proforma denunciations of the “splittist Dalai clique” and object to every journey undertaken by the exiled Tibetan leader. Yet, even by the exalted standards of Chinese insensitivity, the protest against the visit of the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to Arunachal Pradesh for an election rally took the proverbial biscuit.