[English version]
The West has lost its bearings. It has no sense of the future. It is in denial about the rise of China and in so far as it recognises China’s economic transformation it refuses to acknowledge that in time this will have profound political, cultural and intellectual consequences. The reason is that the West cannot imagine a different kind of modernity to its own, believing that as countries like China modernise they westernise and become simply clones of the West. But China will not be like the West. Modernity is shaped by history and culture as much as markets and technology. Chinese modernity will be very different. And as China becomes a global power, it will exercise a very different kind of influence on the world to that of the United States.