When China Rules the World

The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World

1- There is not simply one western modernity, instead we are witnessing the birth of multiple modernities

2 - Chinese modernity will be very different from western modernity

3 - We are moving into a world of contested modernity

4 - China will become the largest economy in the world within less than two decades and then proceed to rapidly out-distance that of the United States

5 - China’s impact on the world will not simply be economic; it will also have profound political, cultural and ideological effects.

6 - For thousands of years, China was at the centre of the tributary-state system in East Asia, which only came to an end with the arrival of European colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century

7 - As the East Asian economy is rapidly reconfigured around China, we should expect elements of the tributary system to reappear

8 - At its core, China is a civilization-state rather than a nation-state, a fact which will become steadily more apparent

9 - The Chinese state is very different from the western state: it has existed for over two thousand years, for over a millennium it has had no competitors (eg, church, merchants) nor limits to its power; it is regarded with reverence and deference by the Chinese as the guardian and protector of Chinese civilization

10 - The Chinese have a deep and living sense of their own culture and civilization which they regard as superior to all others

11- 92% of the Chinese believe that they are of one race, the Han Chinese, unlike the other most populous nations such as India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia, which recognize themselves to be highly multi-racial and multi-cultural

12 - The similarities between the communist period and the Confucian era are more striking than the differences