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

by Martin Jacques

According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, the US economy accounted for 8.8 per cent of global GDP in 1870. There then followed a spectacular period of growth during which the proportion ro...

This was followed by a slow and steady decline to 22.1 per cent in 1973, with the figure now ...

This still represents a formidable proportion, given that the US accounts for only 4.6 per cent of the world’s population, but...

One could make a similar point in relation to Victorian Britain’s imperial reac...

This was made possible because Britain accomplished the world’s first industrial revolution and, as a consequence, came to enjoy a big e...

Compared with the United States, however, whose share of global GDP peaked at 35 per cent in 1944 (albeit in a war-ravaged world), the highest figure for th...

The precipitous decline of Britain as a global power after 1945 has been the predictable result of its deteriorating relative economic position, its share of global G...

A precondition for being a hegemonic power, including the ability or otherwise to preside over a formal or informal empire, is economic strength.

Notwithstanding this, imperial powers in decline are almost invariably in denial of the fact.

That was the case with Britain from 1918 onwards and, to judge by the behaviour of the Bush administration – which singularly failed to read the runes, preferring to believe that the US was about to rule the world in a new American century when the country was actually in decline and on the eve of a world in which it would find its authority consi...

in a poll of leading Washington Democrats and Republicans conducted in January 2010, 24 per cent of the former and 28 per cent of the latter agreed that ‘the financial crisis of 2008 marked the end of American international dominance’.

on the part of Americans of the extent and irreversibility of decline and how it might diminish US power and influence in the future.

It has been estimated that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war will turn out to be around $3 trillion.

Even with this level of expenditure, the armed forces came under huge strain as a result of the war. Deployments got steadily longer and redeployments more frequent, retention rates and recruitment standards fell, while the army lost many of its brightest and best, with a remorseless rise in the number of officers choosing to leave at the earliest opportunity.

for military and financial as well as political reasons then, the Bush administration was unable to seriously contemplate similar military action against Iran and North Korea, the other two members of its ‘axis of evil’, especially given its already very considerable military commitment in Afghanistan.

The United States, in other words, was confronted with the classic problem of imperial overreach.

The burden of maintaining a huge global military presence, with roughly 800 American bases dotted around the world, has been one of the causes of the US’s enormous current account deficit, ...

The United States has lost considerable ground as a major manufacturer and as a large-scale exporter of manufactured goods, having steadily ceded that position to East Asia and especially China.

recent times it has persistently been living beyond its means: the government has been spending more than it saves, households have been doing likewise, and since 1982, apart from one year, the country has been buying more from foreigners than it sells to them, with a consequent huge current account deficit and a growing volume of IOUs.

Current account deficits can of course be rectified, but only by reducing growth and accepting a lowe...

Growing concern on the part of foreign institutions about these deficits led to a steady fall in the value of the dollar until 2008, and this could well be resumed at some point, further threatening the dollar’s role as...

The credit rating agency Moody’s already warned in 2008 that the US faced the prospect of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating, first granted to US government debt when it was assessed in 1917, unles...

This was before the financial meltdown in 2008, which, with the huge taxpayer-funded government bail-out of the financial sector, greatly inc...

imperial power, however, is a hugely expensive business and, peering into the future, as its relative economic power declines, the United States will no longer be able to sustain the military commitments and military superiority that it presently enjoys.

Meanwhile, there is abundant evidence that American global hegemony is steadily eroding: in Latin America its authority is at its lowest point for over a century; in East Asia the US is increasingly being overshadowed by China; in Africa Chinese influence is in the process of overtaking that of the US; while the power and reach of American-dominated institutions like the IMF and World Bank has declined significantly.

The American-made world that has held sway since 194...

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult:

dealing with the paradigms and parameters of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change.

Given that American global hegemony has held sway for almost a lifetime, and that Western supremacy transcends many l...

We are so used to the world being Western, even American, that we have little idea what it w...

The West, moreover, has a strong vested interest in the world being cast in its image, because this ...

As a matter of course, hegemonic powers seek to project their values and institutions on to subordinate nations and the latter, in response, will, depending on circums...

if they don’t, hegemonic powers generally seek to impose those values and arrangements on them...

therefore, the United States, and the West more generally, finds it difficult to visualize, or accept, a world that involves a major and ...

Take globalization as an example. The dominant Western view has been that globalization is a process by which the rest of the world becomes – and should become – increasingly Westernized, with the adoption of free markets, the import of Western capital, priva...

Competition, the market and technology, meanwhile, have been powerful and parallel pressures fostering the kind of convergence and homogeneity which is visible in many developing cities around the world in the form of high-rise buildings, expressways, mobile phones, and much else.

countervailing forces, rooted in the specific history and culture of each society, that serve to shape indigenous institutions like the family, the government and the company and thereby pull in exactly the opposite direction.

as countries grow more prosperous they become increasingly self-confident about their own culture and history, and ther...

Far from being a one-way process, therefore, globalization is rather more complex: the United States may have been the single most influential player, exerting enormous power in successive rounds of global trade talks, for example, but the biggest w...

The process of globalization involves an unending tension between on the one hand the forces of convergence, including Western political pressure, and on the other hand the coun...

Prior to 1960, the West and Japan enjoyed a huge economic advantage over the rest of the world, which still remained largely agrarian in character, but since then a gamut of developing countries have close...

As a consequence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the developed world and the more advanced parts of the developing world: South Korea and Taiwan, ...

As countries reach Western levels of development, do they become more like the West, or less like the West, or perhaps para...

Clearly the pressures for convergence indicate the former but the forces of divergence and indigen...

Previously, the overarching difference between the developed and the developing world was the huge disparity in thei...

There has been an assumption by the Western mainstream that there is only one way of being modern, namely by adopting Western-style institutions, values, customs and beliefs, such as the rule of law, the free market and democratic norms.

that progress for those who are lower down on the developmental scale involves them becoming more like those who are higher up.

if their end-point is similar to the West, or, to put it another way, Western-style modernity, then the new world is unlikely to be so different from the one we inhabit now, because China, India, Indonesia and Brazil, to take four examples, will differ little in their fundamental characteristics from the West. This

Fukuyama, who predicted that the post-Cold War world would be based on a new universalism embodying the Western principles of the free market and democracy.

If, on the other hand, their ways of being modern diverge significantly, even sharply, from the Western model, then a world in which they predominate is likely to look very different from the pre...