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

by Martin Jacques

modernity is made possible by industrialization, and until the middle of the last century this was a condition which was excl...

As a result, before the second half of the twentieth century the West enjoyed a de facto monopoly of modernity, with Japan the only exception, because these were the only co...

that the Soviet Union also constituted a form of modernity, but it remained, contrary to its claims, far more backward than Western nations in terms of GDP per head, the proportion of the population l...

Moreover, although it was Eurasian, the USSR was always dominated by its European parts and therefore shared...

Japan is a fascinating example which I will consider at l...

Until the Second World War it remained a relative outsider, having commenced its industrialization in the last qu...

After 1945 Japan became a powerful economic competitor to the West, and by the 1980s it had established itself as the second larg...

Japan in this period, however, always sought to assert its Western credentials and play down its politica...

Defeated in the Second World War, occupied by the United States until 1951, endowed with a constitution written by the Americans, disqualified from maintaining a significant military force (and thereby dependent on the US–Japan security pact first signed in 1951 for its defence), Japan, if not...

It is this which largely explains why, although it is a highly distinctive country which culturally shares little with the West, it has nonetheless persistently sou...

With the exception of Japan, the modern world has thus until recently been exclusively Western, comprising Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; in other words, Europe plus those countries to which European settlers migrated and which they subsequently conquered, or, as...

In every instance, that experience is either European or comes from Europe, sharing wholly or largely the cultural, political, intellectual, racial and ethnic characteristics of that continent. The narrowness, and consequent unrepresentativeness, of the Western experience is often overlooked, such has been the dominance that the West has enjoyed over the last two centuries.

But as other countries, with very different cultures and histories, and contrasting civilizational inheritances, embark on the process of modernization, the particularism and exceptionalism of the Western experience will become increasingly apparent.

In historical terms, we are still at the very beginnin...

It was only in the late 1950s that the first Asian tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – began their economic take-offs, to be joined in the 1970s by Malaysia, T...

And what was once more or less confined to East Asia – by which I mean Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea in North-East Asia, and countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam in South-East Asia – has rapidly spread to other regi...

In 1950 the US GDP was almost three times that of East Asia and almost twice that of Asia. By 2001, US GDP was only two-thirds that of Asia, ...

In Part I, I will discuss more fully the nature of modernity, arguing that rather than there being a single way of being modern, we are witnessing the birth of a...

This will be a quite new and novel feature of the twenty-first century, ushering in an era of what I chara...

China is by far the most important economically. It is the bearer and driver of the new world, with which it will enjoy an increasingly hegemonic relationship, its tentacles having stretched across East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Africa in little more than a decade.

China is very different from earlier Asian tigers like South Korea and Taiwan. Unlike the latter, it has never been a vassal state of the United States;40 furthermore, it enjoys a huge population, with all that this implies.

The challenge represented by China’s rise is, as a consequence, on a different scale to that...

China will eventually end up – as a result of its modernization, or as a precondition for it, or a combination of the...

to co-operate with China, open its markets to Chinese exports, agree to its admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and allow it to become an increasingly fully-fledged member of the international community.

The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise. This is based on three key assumptions: that China’s challenge will be primarily economic in nature; that China will in due course become a typical Western nation; and that the international system will remain broadly as it now is, with China acquiescing in the status quo and becoming a compliant member of the international community. Each of these assumptions is misconceived. The rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.

in the falling price of many consumer products and the rise in commodity prices.

Goldman Sachs has projected that in 2027, with a population four times the size of that of the United States and a double-digit growth rate, China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy,42 although even then China will still only be in the mid-stage of its transformation into a modern economy.

Breathtaking as these economic forecasts are, however, why should we assume that the effects of China’s rise will be primaril...

Rising powers in time invariably use their new-found economic strength for wider political, cultural and military ends. This is one of the great advantages of being a heg...

Having been hegemonic for so long, the West has, for the most part, become imprisoned within its own assumptions, unable to see the...

Progress is invariably defined in terms of degrees of Westernization, with the consequence that the West must always occupy the summit of human development since by definition it is the most Western, while the progress o...

Political and cultural differences are seen as symptoms of backwardness which will steadily disappear...

is inconceivable, however, that China will become a Western-style nation in the manner t...

China is the product of a history and culture which has little or nothing in common with that of the West. It is only by discounting the effects of history and culture and reducing the world to a matter of economics and technology t...

will show, it is striking how limited in many respects East Asia’s Westernization has been, notwithstanding the effects of a century or more of European colonization followed by a h...

There are four key themes, each rooted in Chinese history, which mark China as distinct from the West and which, far from being of diminishing significance, are likely to exercise an increasing influence over how China both sees ...

These constitute much of the subject matter of the second part of the book, but as a taster I can out...

In the first place, China should not be seen primarily as a nation-state, even though that is how it presently describes i...

China has existed within roughly its present borders for two thousand years and only over the last century has it come t...

The identity of the Chinese was overwhelmingly formed before China assumed the status of a nation-state, unlike in the West, where the identity of people, in both Europe and the United States...

The Chinese, in constantly making reference to what they describe as their 5,000-year history, are aware that what defines them is not a sense of nationhood but of civilization. In this context, China should not primarily b...

The implications of this are far-reaching: it is simply not possible to regard China as like, or equivalent to, any other state. I will explore this question more full...

Likewise, China has a different conception of race to that held by the other most populous nations, notably India, Indonesia, Brazil and the United States, which acknowledge, in varying degrees, ...

Yet the Han Chinese, who account for around 92 per cent of the population, believe that they comprise one race.

The explanation for this lies in the unique longevity of Chinese civilization, which has engendered a strong sense of unity and common identity, with, over a period of thousands of years, a process that has included mixing, melding, absorption, assimilation and effective elimination of a multitude of diverse races.

There is also an ideological component to the Chinese attitude towards race: at the end of the nineteenth century, as the dynastic state found itself increasingly beleaguered in the face of the European, American and Japanese occupying powers, the term ‘Han Chinese’ acquired widespread popularity as part of a nationalist ...

As I demonstrate in Chapter 8, they shape and define how the Chinese see the non-Chinese, whether within China or the rest of the world. The Chinese attitude towards difference will be a powerful factor in determining how China behaves as a global power.

Until little more than a century ago, China’s hinterland – what we know today as East Asia – was, for thousands of years, organized on the basis of tributary relationships which involved neighbouring states acknowledging China’s cultural superiority and its overwhelming power by rendering tribute to the Middle Kingdom (which is the Mandarin Chinese name for China, namely Zhogguó) in return for benevolence and protection.

The tributary system, as it is known, fell victim to the colonization of East Asia by the European powers and Japan, and was replaced by the Westphalian...

Is it possible that the tributary system could return to the region? China, as before, is set to economicall...