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

by Martin Jacques

Meanwhile, the United States found a new lease of economic life, displaying considerable dynamism across a range of new industries and technologies, most notably in computing and the internet.

The apogee of Japan’s post-1868 achievement – the moment that it finally drew level with and overtook the West during the 1980s44 – carried within it the seeds of crisis.

Ever since 1868, Japan’s priority had been to catch up with the West: after 1945 this ambition had become overwhelmingly and narrowly economic. But what would happen when that aim had finally been achieved, when the benchmarking was more or less complete, when Japan had matched the most advanced countries of the West in key respects, and in others had even opened up a considerable lead?

When the Meiji purpose had been accomplished, what was next? Japan had no answer: the country was plung...

Nor was the country endowed by its history with the ability or facility to change direction. Ever since 1868, through every historical twist and turn, it had displayed an extraordinary ability to retain its focus and maintain a tenacious commitment to its long-term objective.

Japan might be described as single-path dependent, its institutions able to display a remarkable capacity to keep to their self-assigned trajectory. This has generated a powerful degree of internal cohesion and enabled the country to be very effective at achieving long-term goals.

The only major examples were its response to its defeat in 1945 and the subsequent American occupation, and the 1868 Meiji Restoration, both of which involved a huge and compelling external threat.

The post-bubble crisis, which was followed by a long period of very low economic growth, led to much heart-searching and a deep sense of gloom.

Some even went so far as to suggest that Japan had suffered two defeats: one in 1945 and another in the 1990s.

As the United States regained its dynamism and Japan was becalmed, there was a widespread sense that its achievement was little more than a chimera, that it was always destined to live in the shadow of the West.

Unlike the European or American desire to be, and to imagine themselves as, universal, the Japanese have had a particularistic view of their country’s role, long defining themselves to be on the periphery of those major civilizations which, in their eyes, have established the universal norm.

As we have seen, China and the West constituted the two significant others from which Japan has borrowed and adapted, and against which the Japanese have persistently affirmed their identity. ‘

the Chinese, who have seen their own civilization, as we shall explore later, in universalistic terms for the best part of two millennia.

In order to understand Japan’s present dilemma, we need to take into account the broader coordinates of its post-1868 reorientation: for while Japan sought to embrace the West, it turned against Asia and came to regard its neighbours as its inferiors.

In 1894–5 they defeated China, gaining control of Taiwan and effectively also Korea. In 1910 they annexed Korea. In 1931 they annexed north-east China, from 1936 occupied central parts of China, and between 1941 and 1945 took much of South-East Asia.

Between 1868 and 1945, a period of seventy-seven years, Japan engaged in ten major wars, lasting thirty years in total, the great majority at the expense of its Asian neighbours.51 In contrast, Japan had not engaged in a single foreign war throughout the entire 250-year Tokugawa era.

Meiji Japan was thus intent not only on economic modernization and the emulation of the West, but also on territorial expansion, as the national slogan ‘rich country, strong army’ (fukoku kyôhei), which wa...

presented its proposal for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere during the 1930s as a way of promoting Asian interests at the expense of the West, in reality it was an attempt to su...

Japan, unsurprisingly, saw the world in essentially similar terms to the deeply hierarchical nature of its own society.55 While looking up to the West, it looked down on Asia as backward and inferior, seeking to subjugate its own continent for the purpose of its enrichment and aggrandizement.

Whites are still held in the highest esteem while fellow Asians are regarded as of lesser stock.57 Racialized ways of thinking are endemic to mainstream Japanese culture,58 in particular the insistence on the ‘homogeneity of the Japanese people’ (even though there are significant ethnic minorities), the idea of a ‘Japanese race’ (even though the Japanese were the product of diverse migratory movements),

And yet its attitudes towards East Asia remain, in large part, fixed in a Meiji time-warp. Japan would still prefer to see itself as Western rather than Asian:

Japanese modernity is an extraordinary achievement: the only non-Western country to industrialize in the nineteenth century, by far the most advanced country in East Asia, the world’s third largest economy (measured by GDP according to market exchange rates), an enviably high standard of living, and arguably the best public transport system in the world; at the same time it has succeeded in remaining highly distinctive, both culturally and socially.

Following its defeat, Japan entered the American sphere of influence, lost any independent foreign-policy voice, and became to all intents and purposes an American protectorate: under such circumstances, its approach was sotto voce, having no reason or desire to emphasize its distinctiveness.

Second, its deeply troubled relationship with East Asia has meant that Japan has never enjoyed anything like the political and cultural influence in the region its economic strength would suggest. In varying degrees, Japan remains problematic and tainted. Third, as Japan has always seen itself in particularistic rather than universal terms, it has not regarded itself as a model for others.

The fact remains that Japan was the first East Asian country to modernize, and much of the region ...

If Britain was Europe’s pioneer in modernity, so Japan has been Asia’s.

On the orders of King George III, the first British trade delegation to China left London in September 1792, bearing numerous gifts including telescopes, clocks, barometers, a spring-suspension coach and airguns.

They sailed in a man-of-war equipped with sixty-six guns, accompanied by two support vessels, on a mission whose purpose was to impress and seduce the Chinese Emperor Qianlong with Britain’s growing industrial and technological prowess.

The British government, represented by the East India Company, which organized the mission (and which acted as Britain’s de facto corporate overseas persona, having, for example, ruled India until 1858), was anxious to open up the Chinese market to trade, its previous efforts having been rebuffed.

The preparation was meticulous and protracted. The British mission arrived at Macao, the Portuguese enclave on the south coast of China, and then took four months to crawl northwards, as negotiations with the Emperor’s representatives dragged on, eventually reaching Beijing for the long-awaited and much-postponed audience with the Emperor.

The Emperor was unmoved, his mind made up long before the mission ever arrived. Instead of informing Macartney, he sent an edict to George III, explaining that China would not increase its foreign trade because it required nothing from other countries.

To the British, possessed of the hubris of a rising power and flush with the early fruits of the Industrial Revolution – by then well under way, though unbeknown to the 81-year-old Emperor, it would appear – the Chinese reaction was incomprehensible.

One entry reads, ‘The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by bulk and appearance.

He was thoroughly bleak about the prospects for the Celestial Empire, which he saw as destined to be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’. In Macartney’s opinion, it was futile for China to resist the British demands because it was ‘in vain to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge’

From a full six weeks before, the Chinese had pressured Macartney with growing intensity that he should perform the kowtow, the required gesture of deference to the Emperor: a set of three genuflections, each containing three full prostrations with the head touching the ground. Macartney offered to doff his hat, go down on one knee and even kiss the Emperor’s hand, but he declined to kowtow unless a Chinese official of similar position kneeled before a portrait of George III.

For the Chinese, this was out of the question: the Emperor was the ruler of ‘all under Heaven’ and therefore could not possibly be regarded as of equal status to a mere king.

foreigners could only visit China as inferior vassals bearing tribute. In the eyes of the Chinese, Macartney was simply a subordinate ‘conveyor of tribute’: Macartney, for his part, insisted that they were presents from the ambassador of a diplomatic equal.

No compromise was reached. Two eras and two civilizations collided without a hint of mutual understanding.

The mission ended in dismal failure. Macartney’s prediction of the fate that awaited China was to be borne out more fully than the Chinese could ever have imagined, though the British – filled with the testosterone of growing power a...

Already at the time of Macartney’s embassy to Beijing, the East India Company had started to export opium from India to China and this was rap...

launched the First Opium War (1839–42) and bombarded south China into submission. In the Treaty of Nanjing, the Chinese were forced to hand over Hong Kong, open the first five treaty ports and pay reparations. China’s ‘century of humiliation had begun

Japan was the great exception, the only non-Western country to begin its industrialization in the nineteenth century, China was an example of the opposite: a country which failed to industrialize, even though it enjoyed a similar level of development to Japan in 1800.

China’s progress after 1949, and especially since 1978, suggests that the roots of its contemporary dynamism lie in its own history: even if it did not appear so at the time, all was far from lost in the century of humiliation.

Nonetheless, this period was to leave deep psychological scars. As we shall see, China’s modernization, like Japan’s, was to take a very different path from that of the West.

China had already begun to acquire its modern shape in the centuries leading up to the birth of Christ.

Empire contained much of what we now regard as the heartland of modern China, stretching towards Vietnam in the south and as far as the Great Wall in the north, including the densely populated region between the Yangzi and the Yellow rivers

Following the fall of the Qin dynasty, the country continued to expand rapidly during the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) (see Map 6), achieving its furthest extent in the period 141–87 BC, when the Chinese armies penetrated into southern Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula in the north-east, and south and south-west as far as northern Vietnam.

The huge size that China ultimately acquired was related to the natural borders of its continental land mass, bounded by the steppe in the north, the coastline to the south and east, and the mountainous regions to its south-east.

The Qin dynasty, short though its life may have been, constructed over 4,000 miles of imperial highways, as many as the Roman Empire.

Weights, measures and currency were standardized. The distinctive customs that we associate with China – including the Mandate of Heaven, a family structure resting on filial piety, a language that used common signs and symbols, and a religion based on ancestral worship – were already well established by the time of the Qin dynasty.