When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

by Martin Jacques

Western experience is often overlooked, such has been the dominance that the West has enjoyed over the last two centuries. But as other countries, with very different cultures and histories, and contrasting civilizational inheritances, embark on the process of modernization, the particularism and exceptionalism of the Western experience will become increasingly apparent. In historical terms, we are still at the very beginning of this process. It was only in the late 1950s that the first Asian tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – began their economic take-offs, to be joined in the 1970s by Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and others, followed by China.37 And what was once more or less confined to East Asia – by which I mean Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea in North-East Asia, and countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam in South-East Asia – has rapidly spread to other regions and continents, including Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. In 1950 the US GDP was almost three times that of East Asia and almost twice that of Asia. By 2001, US GDP was only two-thirds that of Asia, and rather less than that of East Asia.38 In Part I, I will discuss more fully the nature of modernity, arguing that rather than there being a single way of being modern, we are witnessing the birth of a world of multiple and competing modernities. This will be a quite new and novel feature of the twenty-first century, ushering in an...