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

by Martin Jacques

Although Europe has, in the debates about post-modernity, recently expressed qualms about modernity, seen from a global perspective, it is abundantly clear – as it sweeps across the Asian continent, home to 60 per cent of the world’s population – that the insatiable desire for modernity i...

Europe’s confidence and belief in the future may have dimmed compared with that of Victorian Britain, but the United States is still restlessly commit...

And if one wants to understand what ‘the embrace of the future’ means in practice, then China is now ...

Europe was the birthplace of modernity. As its tentacles stretched around the globe during the course of the two centuries after 1750, so its ideas, institutions, values, religion, languages, ideologies, customs and armies...

Modernity and Europe became inseparable, seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the othe...

But though modernity was conceived in Europe, there is nothing intrinsically European about it: apart from an accident of birth it had, and has, no special conne...

Over the last half-century, as modernity has taken root in East Asia, it has drawn on the experience of European – or, mo...

East Asian modernities are highly distinctive, spawning institutions, customs, values and ideologies shaped by t...

In Part I, I will explore how modernity came to be indelibly associated with Europe, and more broadly the West, and how East Asia is now in the pr...

By the mid-nineteenth century, European supremacy over East Asia had been clearly established, most graphically in Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War in 1839–42.

Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that China’s history after the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and especially after the genius of the Song dynasty (960–1279), was to blaze an altogether less innovative trail.

‘China had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor, coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to gentility.’ As a result, he argues: ‘So the years passed and the decades and the centuries. Europe left China far behind.

From around 1400, parts of it began to display steady economic growth, while the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance provided some of the foundations for its later scientific and industrial revolutions.

the belief that because of the dazzling success and extraordinary domination of Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the roots of that success must date back rather longer than they actually did.

The idea that Europe enjoyed a comfortable lead over China and Japan in 1800 has been subject to growing challenge by historians.

Kaoru Sugihara has argued that, far from going into decline after 1600, over the course of the next three centuries there was an ‘East Asian miracle’ based on the intensive use of labour and market-based growth – which he describes as an ‘industrious revolution’ – that was comparable as an economic achievement to the subsequent ‘European miracle’ of industrialization.

He shows that Japanese agriculture displayed a strong capacity for innovation long before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, with major improvements in crops and product...

A key reason for the early development of the market in China was the absence of feudalism.

In medieval Europe the serf was bound to the land and could neither leave it nor dispose of it, whereas the Chinese peasant, both legally and in reality, was free, provided he had the wherewithal, to buy and sell land and the produce of that land.

In 1800 China was at least as urbanized as Western Europe, while it has been estimated that 22 per cent of Japan’s eighteenth-century population lived in cities co...

China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain’s textile-led Industrial Revolution that started around 1780.

China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round.

What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-gro...

For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to ...

The key point is that the most advanced regions of China, notably the Yangzi Delta, seem to have been more or less on a par with the most prosperous parts of north-west Europe, in particular Britain, at the end of the eighteenth century.

Given the crucial role played by the most advanced regions in pioneering industrial take-off, the decisive comparison must be that between Britain and the Yangzi Delta.

The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in ...

instead, it would appear more likely that industrialization was, in large measure, a consequence of relatively contingent factors.

This still begs the question, however, as to why Western Europe, rather than Japan or China, was able to turn its fortunes around so rapidly from around 1800 and then outdistance Japan, and especially China, by such a massive margin during the nineteenth century.

Here the fortuitous or chance factor, while by no means the sole reason, ...

Around 1800 the most heavily populated regions of the Old World, including China and Europe, were finding it increasingly diff...

The basic problem was that food, fibre, fuel and building supplies were all competing for what was becoming incr...

now, however, it became increasingly exhausted through overuse.

For two crucial reasons, Europe – or rather specifically Britain – was able to break this crucial land constraint in a way that was to elude China.

First, Britain discovered large quantities of coal that were accessibly located for the new industries, thereby helping to ease the growing shortage of wood, and able to play a vital role in fuelling the Industrial Revolution.

contrast, although China also had very considerable deposits of coal, they lay a long way from its main centres of population, the largest being in the north-west, far from the textile...

Second, and much more importantly, the colonization of the New World, namely the Caribbean and North America, was to provide huge tracts of land, a massive and very cheap source of labour in the form of slaves, and an abundant flow of food and raw materials: the early growth of Manchester, for example, would have been i...

Raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain’s New World cotton imports would have required huge quantities of land (almost 9 million acres ...

Overall, it is estimated that the land required in order to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New World in 1830 would have been between 25 and 30 million acres – or more ...

The role played by colonization, in this context, is a reminder that European industrialization was f...

removed the growing pressure on land that was endangering Britain’s economic development.

China was to enjoy no such good fortune.

The consequences were to be far-reaching: ‘England avoided becoming the Yangzi Delta,’ argues the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘and the two came to look so different that it became har...

The fact that the New World colonies proved a vital source of raw materials for Britain at such a critical time was a matter of chance, but there was nothing fortuitous about the way that Britain had colonize...

Rivalry over colonies, as well as the many intra-European wars – combined with their obvious economic prowess – helped to hone European nation-states into veritable fighting machines, as a result of which, during the course of the nineteenth century, they were able to establish a huge military advantage over every other...

HMS Victory, commanded by Admiral Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, cost five times as much as Abraham Crowley’s steelworks, one of the flagship inv...

Colonial trade also provided fertile ground for innovations in both company organization and systems of financing, with the Dutch, for example, inventing...

Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind...

It is true that China also had what might be termed colonies – newly acquired territories achieved by a process of westward imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century – but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and ...

South-East Asia, which was abundant in resources, would have been a more likely candidate to play the role of China’s New World. Admiral Zheng’s exploits in the early fifteenth century, with ships far larger than anything that Europe could build at the time, show that China was not lacking the technical ability or financial means, but the attitude of the Chi...