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

by Martin Jacques

The Europeans have long since departed East Asia, while the American position is progressively weakening. It should not be taken for granted that the interstate system that prevails in the regi...

If, with the rise of China, we are entering a different world, then that is even truer of East Asia, which is already in the process of being rec...

Finally, the most single important characteristic of China concerns its unity.

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square repression it was widely believed in the West that China would fracture in a manner similar to the Soviet Union.

The latter has occupied roughly similar territory – certainly in terms of where the great majority of the population...

When the Roman Empire was in the process of fragmenting into many smaller states, China was moving in the opposite direction, acquiring a unity which has, despite long peri...

This profoundly affects how it sees the rest of the world as well as providing it with – potentially ...

The sheer size of China defines it as different from all other c...

It is obvious from the profundity of these four points – civilization-state, race, tributary state, and unity – let alone many others that I will consider during the course of the book – that China has enjoyed a quite different history to that of the West.

Countries invariably see the world in terms of their own experience.

As they become hegemonic powers – as China will – they seek to shape the world in the light of their own values and priorities. It is banal, therefore, to believe that China’s influence on the world will be mainly and overwhelmingly economic: on the contrary, its po...

The underlying argument of the book is that China’s impact on the world will be as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably ...

This brings us to the question of whether, in the long run, China will accept the international system as presently constituted or see...

It is an impossible question to answer with any certainty because we are still at such an e...

China has progressively sought to become a fully-fledged member of the international community and has gone to considerable lengths to reassure the West that it is a ‘resp...

The postwar Western order is historically unique. Any international order dominated by a powerful state is based on a mix of coercion and consent, but the US-led order is distinctive in that it has been more liberal than imperial – and so unusually accessible, legitimate, and durable.

rules and institutions are rooted in, and thus reinforced by, the evolving global forces of democracy and capitalism. It is expansive, with a wide and widening array of participants and stakeholders. It is capable of generating tremendous economic growth and power while also signalling restraint – all of which make it hard to overturn and easy to join.

Ikenberry argues that the present American-created international order has the potential to integrate and absorb China rather than instead being replaced in the long run by a Chinese-led order.

This is a crucial barometer of what the rise of China might mean. Hitherto, the arrival of a new global hegemon has ushered in a major change in the international order, as was the case with both Britain and then the United States.

Given that China promises to be so inordinately powerful and different, it is difficult to resist the idea that in time its rise will herald the birth of a new international order. It is a qu...

Until the second half of the eighteenth century, life was conceived of largely in terms of the past.

Similarly, the future, rather than being a separate and distinct idea, was regarded as a repetition or re-creation of the past.

In a world in which the overwhelming majority worked on the land and where change was glacial, this is understandable. Material circumstance and daily experience complemented a philosophy and rel...

The values that counted – in everyday life, art, literature – were those of experience, age, wisd...

Change was acceptable and legitimate as long as it did not threaten the cheri...

Even the Renaissance and the Reformation, two great efflorescences of European life, were, as their names suggest, couched in terms of the past, despite the fact that they co...

Scholars of Renaissance Europe believed that the learning of classical antiquity was being restored even while they were busy transforming the very m...

From the sixteenth century, this retrospective way of thinking gradually began to be eroded, not just in Europe but also in China, India, Japan and the Islamic world, though...

The growth of scientific knowledge, the expanding influence of the scientific method, the spread of secularism, and the burgeoning importance of the market and commerce slowly undermined the idea that the present ...

From the late eighteenth century, a fundamentally different outlook began to take root wit...

Instead of the present being lived as the past, it became increasingly orient...

A new set of words and concepts became the bearers of the values that were intrinsic to modernity: progress, change, modernization, reason, enlightenment, development and emancipation.

There was growing conflict between these attitudes and those – such as tradition, custom, heritage, experience and conservative – associated with the old modes of thinking.

The modernity–tradition divide became a new central organizing prin...

The coming of modernity cannot be considered in neat chronological terms like the reign of a king, or the period of a dynasty, or the duration of a war, or (though with less preci...

Its inception cannot be given a date, only a period; so far, moreover, there appears, as yet at least, to be no obvious end but rathe...

marked the arrival and diffusion of modernity and, rather like the ever-expanding universe, modernity has relentl...

According to Göran Therborn, modernity marked the emergence of ‘an epoc...

Christopher Bayly argues that modernity should be seen as an open-ended process, ‘which began at the end of the eighteenth century an...

If modernity was a novelty at the time of the British Industrial Revolution, it has since become a compelling and seemingly omnipotent narrative, sweeping all before it, with the ‘new’ exercising a magnetic attraction on the popular ...

The extent to which so many contemporary conflicts are fought out between ‘progressive’ on the one hand and ‘conservative’ or ‘traditionalist’ on the other underlines the degree to which the language of modernity...

The decisive moment for modernity was, and remains, economic take-off and the com...

It is with the arrival of industrial capitalism that the new mentality – the orientation towards change and uncertainty, the belief that the future will be different from the past – slowly moves from being the preserve of a few elite...

The locus of economic activity shifts from the field to the factory, and that of residence from t...

Every aspect of human life is progressively transformed: living standards, family structure, working conditions, skills and knowledge, self-organization, political representation, the relationship with the natural environme...

Even though one can trace some of the origins of the modern in Europe back to the sixteenth century, the decisive period of change was the nineteenth century, when industrialization swept across north-west Europe, the economic power of European nations was transformed, the modern nation-state was born, and virtually the entire world was brought into a global system dominated by Europe.

The merging of all these trends marked a qualitative shift in human organization.

This was the period when modernity began to acquire a global reach, and people aspired to be modern and to think of themselves as modern – from dress and ways of being named to the possession of objects like fob watches and umbrellas – not only in Europe and North America, but also even amongst elite groups,...

By previous standards, Britain’s Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 was breathtakingly rapid, but, when judged by later examples, especially those of the Asian tigers, it was, paradoxically, extremely slow.

Each successive economic take-off has got faster and faster, the process of modernization, with its attendant urbanization and rapid decline in agrarian employment, steadily accelerating.