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

by Martin Jacques

One of the key problems that faced both the late imperial state and the Nationalists, under Sun Yat-sen and then Chiang Kai-shek, was a loss of control over government revenues.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) – as the new regime was known – quickly reasserted central control over revenues and disbursements. Although the actual expenditure of revenues was to remain in local hands, as it had been since the eighteenth century, central government once again determined how they should be used; there was, in this respect, a strong continuity with the late imperial state.

Prior to 1949, the Communist Party’s main base of support lay amongst the peasantry, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, rather than in the cities, where the Nationalists were strong.

This was very different from the Bolsheviks in the USSR, whose support was concentrated in the cities, where only a very small minority of the population lived, and was very weak in the countryside.

As a consequence, the Chinese Communist Party always enjoyed far greater popular support and much deeper roots tha...

The underlying strength and resilience of the new regime was demonstrated by the ability of the Communist Party to reinvent itself after the death of Mao.97 This was the nadir of the regime. Mao’s actions ...

It is estimated that 25 million died as a result of the famine and malnutrition consequent upon the Great Leap Forward in 1958–60. The Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1969 – although its effects lasted into the mid seventies – led to the death of around 400,000 people as a resul...

Yet after Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, displayed a remarkable ability to renew itself, by shifting direction and embarking on a quite new economic policy, which led to a sustained period of extremely rapid economic gr...

Judgements about the post-1949 era have – both in China and the West, albeit in differing ways – placed overwhelming emphasis on the extent to which it represented a new departure, a...

The Communist Party directed its venom against many Chinese traditions, from the long-standing oppression of women to Confucian notions of hierarchy, and carried out a sweeping land reform in the name of class struggle.

In sum, for a variety of reasons, there has been a tendency to overlook the powerful lines of continuity between post-1949 China and the dynastic period.

As Bin Wong points out, while the overt differences between Confucian and Communist ideology are clear – hierarchy versus equality, conservatism versus radicalism, harmony versus conflict – there are also important similarities between the two traditions.

As in the Maoist period, for example, the Confucian tradition also emphasized the need to reduce inequality, limit the size of landholdings and redistribute land. Similarly, as we discussed earlier, the state’s responsibility for moulding the outlook of the people is an old Chinese tr...

which the Communists continued during the Maoist period in the form of the ‘iron rice bowl’, with state enterprises required to provide employees with housing, educati...

There are political parallels, too. Both the Confucian and Communist modes of rule involved an implicit contract between the people and the state: if the state failed to meet its obligations then the peasants had, according to Mencius (37...

In the imperial era this took the form of the mandate of Heaven; in the Communist era it was expressed, in the name of class struggle, in the right of the proletariat to resist and defeat the bourgeoisie, which during the Maoist era was the pretext for the many top-down mass mobilizat...

The relationship between state and subject in both traditions was authoritarian and hierarchical, and very different from the Western tradition with its narrative of politica...

Confronted with the problem of the gulf between the cities and the countryside, both acknowledged the ...

While the Confucian tradition recruited a governing elite consisting of the highly educated and literate by means of the imperial examination system, the Communists, faced with the same task, used the Party as their means of recruitment to the state, though to this day the civil service exams remain...

The absence of a civil society and an autonomous public realm in Communist China is not a new phenomenon: China has never had either.

There are, thus, powerful continuities between the Communist tradition and dynastic history. The PRC is an integral part of Chinese history and can only be understood in that context.

As we shall see in Part II, the contours of Chinese modernity bear the imprint not just of the Communist present but, far more strongly, that of the Chinese past.

To this end, it engaged in a huge project of land redistribution and the creation of large communes, from which it extracted considerable agricultural surpluses in the form of peasant taxes, which it then used to invest in the construction of a heavy industry sector.

Despite the wild vicissitudes of Mao’s rule, China achieved an impressive annual growth rate of 4.4 per cent between 1950 and 1980,109 more than quadrupling the country’s GDP110 and more than doubling its per capita GDP.

increase of two and three-quarter times), as a result of placing a huge emphasis on education, tackling illiteracy, promoting equality (including gender equality) and improving healthcare.

The first phase of Communist government marked a huge turnaround in China’s fortunes. During these years, the groundwork was laid for industrialization and modernization, the failure of which had haunted the previous century of Chinese history.

Since we got there first, we think we have the inside track on the modern condition, and our natural tendency is to universalize from our own experience. In fact, however, our taste of the modern world has been highly distinctive, so much so that John Schrecker has seen fit to characterize the West as ‘the most provincial of all great contemporary civilizations’…Never have Westerners had to take other peoples’ views of us really seriously.

‘It’s so modern!’, and then, with barely a pause for breath, ‘It’s so Western.’

There is a natural tendency in all of us – an iron law perhaps – to measure the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar: we are all relativists at heart.

When we recognize signs of modernization and progress, we regard them as evidence that the society or culture is headed in the same direction as ours, albeit some way behind. As yet one more McDonald’s opens in China, it is seen as proof positive that China is getting more Western, that it is becoming ever more like us.

And sometimes it is. But all too often they inhabit something akin to a Western cocoon. A significant proportion of Westerners who live in East Asia are based in Singapore or Hong Kong, city-states which have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive to Western expats.

Hong Kong, as a British colony for nearly a century and a half, still bears the colonial imprint, while Singapore, more than any other place in the region, has sought to make itself into the Asian home of Western multinationals, a kind of Little West in the heart of Asia.

the software – the ways of relating, the values and beliefs, the customs, the institutions, the language, the rituals and festivals, the role of the family. This is far more difficult to penetrate, and even more difficult to make sense of.

In the 1950s the school of ‘dependency theory’ generalized this state of affairs into the proposition that it was now impossible for other countries to break into the ranks of the more advanced nations.

Furthermore, two world wars sapped the energies not only of the main combatants but of much of the rest of the world as well.

From the late 1950s onwards, there appeared the first stirrings of profound change in East Asia. Japan was recovering from the ravages of war at great speed – but as a fully paid-up member of the pre-1914 club of industrialized countries, its economic prowess was hardly new.