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

by Martin Jacques

Although large numbers of Chinese migrated to South-East Asia, the Chinese state, unlike the European nations, showed no interest in providing military or political backing for its subjects’ overseas endeavours: in contrast, the Qing dynasty displayed great concern for its continental lands in the north and west, reflecting the fac...

This raises the wider question of the extent to which the contrasting attitudes of the European and Chinese states, and their respective elites, were a factor in China’s failure to make the breakthrough that Europe achieved.

The highly developed granary system, the government-built 1,400-mile-long Grand Canal and the land settlement policies on the frontiers all demonstrated a strong interventionist spirit.

the priorities of the imperial state tended to be focused on the maintenance of order and balanced development rather than narrow profit-making and industrialization.

The state was resistant to excessive income differentiation and marked displays of extravagance, which were seen as inimical to Confucian values of harmony.

The state did not block market activities and commerce – on the contrary, it strongly supported the development of an agrarian market economy – but it did not, for the most part, promote commercial capitalism, except for those me...

In contrast, the European state, especially the British, tended to be more responsive to the new industrial possibilities.25 Nor did the imperial state believe in pitting one province against another, which would clearly have made for instability, where...

The main reason for the different mentalities of the Chinese and Western European states was that while the rising merchant classes were eventually incorporated, in one form or another, into European governance, in Ch...

Rather than enjoying an independent power base, the merchants depended on official patronage and support to promote and protect ...

Western European states, and in the first instance the British, were more favourably orientated towards industrial development than China, where the administrative ...

more favourably disposed towards industrial capitalism (and therefore industrialization) than the Chinese state, while colonization and persistent intra-European wars had furnished Western Europe with various strategic assets, notably raw materials and military capacity.

The fact that colonization was to provide Britain with the means by which to side-step its growing land and resource problem towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, was, in the event, entirely fortuitous.

The point remains, therefore, that in 1800 China (and, indeed, Japan) found itself in a rather similar economic position to Western Europe and possessed a not...

What made the key difference were those contingent factors – New World resources and, to a lesser extent, accessible supplies of coal – that enabled Britain to deal with its resource constraints; though the supportive attitude of the British sta...

China enjoyed no such contingent salvation and, as a result, found itself in a hole from which it was unable to extricate itself, a situation that was to be exacerbated within less than half a century by the growing incursions of the Eur...

The historical consequences were to be enormous: China was at least as agrarian in 1850 as it was in 1750 and...

According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, China’s GDP in 1820 was $228.6 billion – almost four times greater than in 1600 – but had barely increased at all by 1913, by which time it had nudged up to $24...

This makes China’s remarkable economic transformation since 1978 rather more explicable.

While these characteristics may have remained relatively dormant in the inclement intervening period, after 1978 they have once again come to the fore.

In 1800, rather than being Eurocentric, the global economy was, in fact, polycentric, economic power being shared between Asia, Europe and the Americas, with China and India the world’s two largest economies.

The global economy is now once more becoming increasingly multipolar. Rather than regarding this as unusual, perhaps instead we should see the last two centuries, in which economic power became concentrated in the hands of a relatively small part of the world’s population, namely Europe, North America and later Japan, as something of an historical aberration.

If, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Western Europe was in a rather similar position to China, the implications for our understanding of history and subsequent events are far-reaching.

suggests that the explanation for the rise of Europe was in large part to do with relatively short-term factors rather than preordained by its slow but steady transformation over previous centuries; in other words, we need to rethink the idea that the ensemble of characteristics which Europe had been acquiring over centuries, and enjoyed on the eve of economic take-off, were, as has often been assumed, also preconditions for that take-off.

but were they also conditions without which the process would never ...

Japan, China and India were not too far away from achieving a similar economic breakthrough but their political and cultural histories c...

If they had succeeded and Europe failed, then the characteristics of their subsequent paths of development, and the institutions and values they would have spawned, would certainly have looked very diff...

Indeed, as we shall see later, as these countries have modernized they have diverged markedly...

are, in fact, many ways of achieving take-off.

‘Industrial growth does not have to be an outcome of a centuries-long accumulation of the particular skills found in north-west Europe; there are numerous paths to economic modernity, and England followed only one of them.

As a small example, the nature of class differentiation in the English countryside, including the rapid decline of the peasantry, has not been repeated in the case of China’s industrialization nor,...

The roots of European civilization are usually traced back to Greek democracy, Roman law and Judaeo-Christian religion.

It has been commonplace to regard these as preconditions for, as well as characteristics of, European modernity.

Although the impact of democracy in ancient Greece has been exaggerated, with the West not adopting it, except for small minorities, until the late nineteenth century at the earliest, there is no mistaking the broad influence that Greek civilization has exercised on European history down the ages, including the way we think about right and wrong, the trad...

A more prosaic example is the constant recycling of mainly Doric but also Ionic and, via the Roman Empire, Corinthian columns as the preferred architectural style for buildings that seek to convey a sense of eternal authority, from the Bank of England to the French National Assembly; the same, of course, is tr...

Similarly, the development of Roman-inspired law – essentially through Christianity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries – helped to establish the concept and reality of an independent legal system, which played a signifi...

Christianity was to imbue Europe with a powerful sense of universalism, which was to shape the continent’s attitudes towards not only itself but also other cultures and races, playing an important role in moulding the...

It is not difficult, then, to see the lines of continuity. It is rather more difficult, however, to argue that they were ...

These cultural characteristics certainly helped to shape European modernity, but that is not the same...

Something similar can be said of Western individualism and the Western family. It would appear, with the benefit of hindsight, for example, that many different types of family are ...

But other intellectual traditions, notably the Chinese during the Qing dynasty and the Islamic, also gave rise to forms of debate, argument and empirical observation that stand comparison with the emerging scientific rationalism of Western Europe.

The rider – and a very important one – is that in these other traditions there was still a strong tendency to seek to reconcile new arguments with those of older authorities, instead of rejecting them.

By 1800 Europe had accumulated an array of such cultural assets, but these were not the key t...

They should be seen as characteristics of European modernity rather than a...

There is no reason to believe that other cultures – with their own diverse characteristics – were incapable of achieving the breakthrough into modernity: this, after all, i...

Christopher Bayly draws the following conclusion: ‘If, in terms of economic growth, what distinguished Europe from China before 1800 was only its intensive use of coal and the existence of a vast American hinterland to Europe, then a lot of cultural baggage about inherent European political superiorities looks ready to be jettisoned.

EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM Far from Europe being the template of modernity which every subsequent transformation should conform to and be measured by, the European experience must be regarded – notwithstanding the fact that it was the first – as highly specific and particular.

In practice, however, it has seen itself, and often been seen as, the defining model.

The extraordinary global hegemony enjoyed by Europe for almost two centuries has made the particular seem universal. What, then, have been the peculiar characteristics o...

Although European nations spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy fighting each other, the European passage to modernity from the mid sixteenth century onwards was achieved without, for the most part, a persistent threat from outs...

By the seventeenth century, however, the latter was progressively being rolled back, though it was not until the nineteenth century that it...