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

by Martin Jacques

On the basis of these foundations, during the first millennium AD, China was to acquire – given the fact that in practice it embraced many different peoples – an unusually strong sense of cultural identity.

One of the most striking features of Chinese history has been that, although it has been invaded from the north many times – notably by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchu in the seventeenth – all invaders, bar the Mongols (whose rule lasted less than a century) sought to acquire, once secure in power, the customs and values of the Chinese and to rule according to their principles and their institutions: a testament to...

The persistence and steady spread of the Chinese language is a further indication of the strength of the culture: the constant invasions from the north, by obliging the population to stay mobile, kept the language from becoming atomized into different dialects, at the same time making the Chinese themselves ...

The early emergence of a Chinese identity is, perhaps more than anything else, the key to China as we know it today, for without that, China could not have remained a relatively unified country for over two millennia and would h...

China was a classic example of this phenomenon. It is now believed that millet and rice first appeared in northern and southern China respectively 12,000 years ago, earlier even than in Mesopotamia, where sedentary agriculture began about 8,000 years ago.

Although North China has long sustained ‘dry’ agriculture by way of cereals, barley and various kinds of millet, it was the wet cultivation of rice, which developed slowly from the beginning of the first millennium and which was in full swing by its end, that was later to give a major boost to Chinese agriculture, resulting in a shift in the economic centre of gravity from the central plain to the lower Yangzi basin.

These made Chinese wet rice farming one of the most advanced agricultural techniques in the world, generating extremely high yields.

During the Song dynasty (AD 960–1279), these advanced techniques were generalized across large tracts of the country, pushing south as the frontier was steadily extended.

Between (AD 500 and 900 bricked roads were built across the middle of the Chinese empire such that the capital (known then as Chang’an, now as Xian) was only eight to fourteen days’ travel from any reasonably sized city.

Even more significant was the spread of water transport in the form of rivers, canals and coastal shipping. These various waterway systems became part of an integral network that was to form the basis of a nationwide market that steadily took shape by 1200.

The cities were not, however, to play the same role as centres of political and personal freedom as those in Europe: autonomous urban development was constrained by China’s centralized imperial structure, a pattern that only began to change in the twentieth century.

Encouraged by the government, there was a flowering of learning and a wave of remarkable inventions during the Song dynasty, especially in the century and a half of the Northern Song (960–1126).

What is sometimes described as China’s Renaissance witnessed the development of a classical examination system, the birth of neo-Confucianism, the invention of gunpowder, mortars and woodblock printing, the spread of books, and major adv...

In contrast, Europe’s Renaissance only began two centuries after the end of the Northern Song. The diffusion of books enabled by woodblock printing, the publication of large encyclopaedias, the growing number of candidates who entered the examination system for the civil service, the great progress made in mathematics (particularly the development of algebra) and the emergence of a gentry-scholar class marked China out as the most literate and numerate society in the world; only the Islamic world could compare, with Europe lagging well behind.

During the medieval period Europe was to borrow extensively from China’s innovations, including paper, the compass, the wheelbarrow, the sternpost rudder, the spinning wheel and woodblock printing.

After 1300 this efflorescence began to subside and China’s medieval economic revolution gave way to a period of stagnation that only came to an end in 1500.

The Mongol invasion marked the closure of the Song period, in many respects China’s finest age, and led to the establishment of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) and the incorporation of China into the Mongol Empire.

This was to prove a very traumatic period, with the Chinese finding themselves under alien rule and reduced to lowly status. There were several reasons for the economic slowdown. The dynamic by which China had expanded from its heartlands southwards had involved the addition of rich new farmlands, but this area began to fill up with migrants f...

The Song dynasty had placed considerable emphasis on the importance of trade and contact with foreigners, notably Japan and South-East Asia, but also beyond to Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and even the east coast of Africa.

This process slowly went into reverse during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

In 1371 the Ming dynasty forbade coastal people from sailing overseas because of the threat posed to Chinese shipping by large-scale Japanese piracy. An edict in 1390 declared: ‘At present the ignorant people of the Liang-Kuang, Chekiang and Fukien are frequently in communication with the outer barbarians, ...

The successful reconstruction in 1411 of the Grand Canal, which had originally been built between the fifth century BC and the seventh century AD, linking Beijing and Tianjin with Hangzhou in the south and the rich rice fields of the Yangzi, was a crucial moment, signalling a greatly reduced need for coastal shipping and, therefore, also for a navy.

For almost four and a half centuries, from the consolidation of the Song Empire until the remarkable seafaring expeditions of the early Ming (1405–33), China was the greatest maritime nation in the world – using big compartmented ships (with up to four decks, four or five masts and a dozen sails), steered by a sternpost rudder, guided by charts and compass, and able to carry 500 men.

In 1436 the construction of seagoing ships was banned and the number of smaller vessels built was reduced. The reason for this growing isolation and introspection is not entirely clear.

would appear that the failure to continue with Zheng He’s great voyages was the result of several factors: a political shift in the attitude of the Ming dynasty; the moving of the imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421, which led to heightened sensitivities about the northern border and reduced interest in oceanic and coastal priorities; and growing concern about both the cost of the maritime voyages and the relative failure of the military expeditions against the Mongols in the north.

Between 1500 and 1800, however, stagnation gave way to vigorous economic growth and reasonable prosperity. There was a steady increase in the food supply, due to an increase in land under cultivation – the result of migration and settlement in the western and central provinces, greater productivity (including the use of new crops like corn and peanuts) and better irrigation.

China’s performance during this period has tended to be overshadowed by the dynamism of the earlier medieval economic revolution; unlike during the Song dynasty, this later growth was achieved with relatively little new invention.

Adam Smith, who saw China as an exemplar of market-based development, observed in 1776 that ‘China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.’30 It was not until 1850, indeed, that London was to displace Beijing as the world’s largest city.

As we saw in Chapter 2, Britain was able to escape the growing resource constraints at the end of the eighteenth century by deploying the resources of its colonies, together with an abundant supply of accessible domestic coal.

Mark Elvin argues that the reason for China’s failure was what he describes as a ‘high-level equilibrium trap’

China’s shortage of resources in its densely populated heartlands became increasingly acute: there was a growing lack of wood, fuel, clothing fibres, draught animals and metals, and there was an increasing shortage of good

Hectic deforestation continued throughout the nineteenth century and in some places the scarcity of wood was so serious that families burned litt...

In provinces such as Henan and Shandong, where population levels were at their most dense, forest cover fell to between 2 per cent and 6 per cent of the total land area, which was between one-twelfth and one-quarter o...

The pressure on land and other resources was driven by the continuing growth of population in a situation of relative technological stasis. Lacking a richly endowed overseas empire, China had no exogenous ...

With the price of labour falling, profit margins declining and static markets, there was no incentive to invest in labour-saving machinery; instead there was a premi...

there was little reason to engage in the kind of technological leap into the factory system that marked B...

In other words, it was rational for the Chinese not to invest in lab...

With growing markets and a rising cost of labour, on the other hand, investment in labour-saving machinery was entirely rational in the British context and was to unleash a virtuous circle of invention, application, increased labour productivity and economic growth; in contrast, China remained trapped within its old parameters.

While Britain suggested a causal link between the domestic and the factory systems, this was not true in China: widespread rural industrialization did not lead to a Chinese industrial revolution.

The most striking difference between Europe and China was not in the timing of their respective industrializations, which in broad historical terms was similar, separated by less than two centuries at the most, but in the disparity between the sizes of their polities, which has persisted for at least two millennia and whose effects have been enormous.

For roughly two thousand years, China has been united and Europe has been divided.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was never again to be ruled, notwithstanding the ambitions of Napoleon and Hitler, by an imperial regime with the capacity to exercise centralized control over more or less the entire continent.

With the creation of the modern nation-state system, and the unification of Germany and Italy, Europe remained characterized by its division into a multi-state system.

In contrast, China retained the imperial state system that emerged after the intense interstate competition – the Warring States period – that ended in the third century BC, though this was to assume over time a range of different forms, including, as in the case of the Mo...

China’s equilibrium state has been that of a unified agrarian empire in contrast to Europe, which for two millennia has been an agglomeration of states.

while the Chinese attach greater importance to unity than literally anything else, the Europeans overwhelmingly believe in the nation-state rather than European-wide sovereignty, the European Union notwithstanding.

The underlying strength of the Chinese desire for unity is illustrated by the fact that, while the rise of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century resulted in the break-up of old empires and the creation of many new states, this has never happened, and shows no sign of happening, in China.

The Chinese commitment to unity has three dimensions: the fundamental priority attached to unity by b...

the central role expected of the state in ensuring that this unity is maintained; and a powerful sense of a common Chinese identity that underpins thi...

This unity could never be taken for granted: China has spent around half its history in varying degrees of division, which, in the light of the country’s size and diversity (far greater than that of Europe), is not surprising. As a result of its attachment to unity, China has largely escaped the intra-state wars that have scarred Europe’s history over many centuries, though its periods of disunity and fragmentation have often carried a very heavy cost in ...