The title of Martin Jacques’s new book, “When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order” has a willfully alarmist ring to it, signaling the rise of China as the new global superpower and the coming fall of America and the rest of the West. Mr. Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London, argues that “we stand on the eve of a different kind of world,” and that common assumptions in the West — China will become increasingly like us, and the international system “will remain broadly as it now is with China acquiescing in the status quo” — are symptoms of Americans’ state of denial.
