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

by Martin Jacques

witness to the huge cost of instability and conflict, and preached the importance of harmony.

A further difference between the Chinese state and the various European states was that for over a millennium the former has not faced competition from rival elites seeking to limit its power. By the mid tenth century, the Chinese aristocratic elites had been destroyed, with the consequence that no elite enjoyed authority independent of the state.

The opposite, in fact, was the case: the bureaucratic elite enjoyed unrivalled authority and numerous privileges, with all other elites dependent for the...

The key mechanism for the selection of the bureaucratic elite was the imperial examination system, which had been more or less perfected by th...

Knowledge of the Confucian classics formed the core of the exams and served, for successful and unsuccessful candidates alike, to articulate and reinforce a common set of values.

Whereas in Europe the elites remained relatively autonomous, except at extreme moments like war, the Chinese elites were absorbed by and became effectively part of the state, often being called upon to act on its behalf.

The imperial bureaucracy, under the aegis of the emperor, faced no challenge from a Church (after the seizure of Buddhist properties in the ninth century), a judiciary, a landed a...

The most important exception was the tradition of the literati, like Confucius himself, who were given licence to write critical things provided that they, in effe...

While the boundaries between the state and society in Europe were clearly delineated and constantly contested, this was not the case in China, where the frontiers remained blurred and fuzzy, as they still are today: there has been no need to define them because there were no competing social groups.

In Europe, by contrast, autonomous, competing elites – nobles, clerics and burghers – fought to constrain the power of the state. Whereas the contest between state and elites in Europe was intimately bound up with both Church and class, in China the functional differentiation into scholars, peasants, merchants and tradesmen did not translate into independent bases of power or institutionalized voices.

Instead, the power of the state has rested primarily on consent reinforced by forms of coercion. The Chinese state went to great lengths, in both the Ming and Qing periods, to inculcate in the population a sense of shared values and culture based on Confucian principles.

Here was another contrast with Europe, where such matters were not considered to be the responsibility of the state and, until the late nineteenth century, were left in the hands of the Church.

For the elites, the state required that the Confucian classics be taught in schools as well as in preparation for the imperial exams.

promoted lectures for the common people on the virtues of Confucian behaviour, and imperial edicts frequently adopted a moral tone on issues such as social hierarchy and the payment of taxes.

A crucial mechanism in the exercise of social control was the clans or lineages, which were – and remain, even – far more important in China than they generally were in Europe. These were huge extended kinship groups, which traced their origins back to a common male ancestor (at the time of the 1949 Revolution there were still fewer than 500 surnames in China),49 and were based on formal membership.

Nor was there a complete absence of accountability: imperial rule was always haunted by the possibility that the mandate of Heaven, and therefore its right to rule, might be withdrawn.

During the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC) emperors claimed for the first time that their sanction to govern came from a broader, impersonal deity, Heaven (tian), whose mandate (tianming) might be conferred on any family that was morally worthy of the responsibility.

The Chinese concept of Heaven differed from the Western concept of a universe created and controlled by a divine power.

Unlike a Western ruler’s accession through the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which rested solely on birth, the Chinese mandate of Heaven established moral criteria for holding power, which enabled the Chinese to distance themselves from their rulers and to speculate on their virtue and suitability.

A striking example was the way the Qing during the eighteenth century managed granary reserves in order to ensure that the local laws of supply and demand worked in a reasonably acceptable fashion and produced relative price stability, a practice which dated back much earlier to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and even before.

anything, indeed, quite the reverse: the Chinese state acquired many of the characteristics of a modern state, not least a large-scale bureaucracy, long before, on a European time-map, it should have done.

The problems faced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) began to mount in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its first taste of what lay in wait was its defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839–42). Then, around the middle of the century, as economic difficulties began to grow, the Qing were shaken by a series of local revolts together with four major rebellions:

Of these, the Taiping was by far the most serious. With trust in the imperial regime shaken by its defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War, together with serious floods and famine in 1848–50, the conditions were ripe for rebellion.

This state of affairs began to change with the Second Opium War (1857–60), which culminated in the ransacking and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops and the resulting Treaty of Tianjin and the Beijing Conventions. These established a whole string of new treaty ports in which Western citizens were granted extra-territoriality; the right to foreign military bases was conceded; missionaries were given freedom to travel in the interior; and further reparations were imposed.

As a result, China began to lose control over important aspects of its territory.65 In 1884 the French succeeded in crushing the Chinese navy in a struggle for influence over Vietnam, which had long been part of the Chinese tributary system but was in the course of being colonized by France.

The naval battle revealed the alarming disparity between the power of an advanced European industrial nation, even so far from its home base, and that of an overwhelmingly agrarian China. The Chinese flagship was sunk by torpedoes within the first minute of battle; in less than an hour all the Chinese ships h...

The decisive turning point was the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, which, like the war with the French, concerned China’s influence over its tributary states, in this case Korea, which had for...

The Chinese suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of its rapidly industrializing and increasingly aggressive neighbour and in the Treaty of Shimonoseki was forced to pay huge reparations, amo...

Korea effectively became a Japanese protectorate, though not formally until 1905. China lost Taiwan and part of southern Manchuria, four further treaty ports were created, and Japan won the right to build factories and...

Japan’s victory also proved the occasion for further demands from the Western powers and a series of new concessions...

By the turn of the century, China’s sovereignty had been severely curtailed by the growing presence of Britain, France, Japan, Germany, the United States...

Although China was not colonized, in effect it became a semi-colony, with foreign troops free to roam its territory, the treaty ports resembling micro-colonies, missionaries enjoying licence to proselytize Western values wherever they went,68 and foreign companies able to establish subsidiaries with barely any taxation or duties. China was humiliated and impoverished.69

was replaced by the republican government of Sun Yat-sen, but, far from ushering in a new and more hopeful era, Sun’s regime proved the prelude to a further Balkanization of China, in which limited sovereignty gave way to something much worse: a chronic multiple and divided sovereignty.

Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (or Nationalist) Party was in a very weak situation, with no troops at its command or effective state apparatus at its disposal. He sought to strike a deal with the country’s most powerful military overlord, Yuan Shih-kai, but the result was to render Yuan the real power in the land and to sideline Sun. After Yuan’s death in 1916, the military governors that he had installed in the provinces quarrelled and shared out China between them, with the support of various foreign powers.

The years 1916-28 were the period o...

Only between 1928 and 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek, the heir to the warlords and leader of the Nationalist Party, a position he inherited from Sun Yat-sen, became China’s leader and effective dictator, was China relatively united.

But even Chiang Kai-shek’s power was circumscribed by a combination of the Japanese occupation of the north-east, the presence of other foreign powers and his lack of support in rural areas, together with the opposition of the Communist armies in the south (until he drove them out in the early 1930s), followed by their Long March around China in 1934–5 when they tried to evade the Nationalist offensive against them.77

After 1936 he was forced to stop the civil war against the Communists and co-operate with them in a united front against the Japanese, with the former fighting a guerrilla war behind Japanese lines which was to earn them considerable prestige.80

Not surprisingly, despite their many losses in the fighting against the Japanese, such episodes served to tarnish Chiang’s nationalist credentials.

The Communist victory in the subsequent civil war was a result of manifold factors, including rampant corruption under the Nationalists, their long-running failure to unite and modernize the country, and the inadequacy of the struggle against the Japanese.

In the 1949 Revolution, the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong finally took power. Unlike the 1911 Revolution – which, in practice, turned out to be one of history’s commas, the prelude to almost four decades of divided authority and for...

There were two exceptions to this: the ultimately successful pressure for an independent Outer Mongolia between 1933 and 1941, and the de facto independence enjoyed by parts of Tibet between 1913 and 1933.

This notwithstanding, the scale of China’s suffering and dislocation in the century of humiliation has had a profound and long-term effect on Chinese consciousness, which remains to this day.

By 1949 China had suffered from an increasingly attenuated sovereignty for over a century. After 1911 it had experienced not only limited sovereignty but also, in effect, multiple sovereignty,87 with the central government being obliged to share authority with both the occupying powers (i.e., multiple colonialism)88 and various domestic rivals. Most countries would have found such a situation unacceptable, but for China, with its imposingly long history of independence, and with a tradition of a unitary state system dating back over two millennia, this state of affairs was intolerable, gnawing away at the country’s sense of pride.

the return of the country’s sovereignty; the reunification of China; and the reconstruction of the state and the restoration of unitary government.

Although the Communists had played a key role in the resistance against the Japanese, it was the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World Wa...

In 1949, with the defeat of the Nationalists by the Communists in the Civil War, the country was finally reunified (with the exception of the ‘lost territor...

The key to the support enjoyed by the Communist regime after 1949 – and, indeed, even until this day – lies, above all else, in the fact that it restored the independence and unity of ...

China, ever since the rise of the West, had been faced with a range of strategic choices concerning its modernization: it could reform the traditional imperial institutions, which was attempted unsuccessfully prior to 1911; it could imitate the Western model, an experiment which failed badly between 1911 and 1949; or it could develop new institutions, drawing on foreign examples where appropriate as well as on the past.

The last, in effect, became the Communist project, with inspiration being sought in part from the Soviet Union, although Maoism was overwhelmingly a home-grown product rather than a foreign import.