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

by Martin Jacques

Europe was the only continent to enjoy this privilege. Every subsequent aspirant for modernity – Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East – had to confront and deal with an outside p...

Even the European settlers in North America had to fight the British in the American War of Independence to establish their sovereignty and thereby en...

A consequence of this is that Europe has been little concerned in recent centuries with dealing with the Other, or seeking to understand the Other, except on very much its own, frequently colonial, ter...

From the sixteenth century to the 1930s European nations, in a remarkable display of expansion and conquest, almost uniquely (the nearest similar example being Japan) built seaborne empires that stretched around the world. The colonies, especially those in the New World and, in the case of Britain, India and the Malay Peninsula,43 were to be the source of huge resources and riches for the imperial powers.

not have achieved its economic take-off in the way that it did. No non-European country, bar Japan after 1868, was to achieve take-off in the nineteenth century: as a result, a majority found themselves colonized by the European powers.

Although the passage through modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to a service-based society via an industrial one, here we find a...

European countries (sixteen in all) – with Britain, Belgium and Germany (in that order) at the head – are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employme...

In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in 1911, when it accounted for 52.2 per cent of the total labour force: by way of contrast, the peak figure for the United States was 35.8 p...

From a global perspective, a different and far more common path has been to move directly, in terms of employment, from a largely agrarian to a mainly service society, without a predominantly industrial phase, a route that has been followed by the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea.

Although the pace of European industrialization was extremely rapid by the standards of previous economic change, it was slow compared with subsequent take-offs, the United States included, but especially East Asia.

One consequence has been that the conflict between modernity and tradition has been relatively muted.

in contrast to North America, where cities were newly created, and East Asia, where little survives from the past in places like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.

Another peculiar characteristic of Europe has been a succession of intra-continental conflicts or what might be described as internal wars.

The initial cause of these internal wars was religious conflict, starting in 1054 with the struggle between eastern and western Christianity followed, after 1517, by the division between Catholicism and Protestantism, which was to split the continent largely on a north-south axis.

The persistence of these religious conflicts was to lend Europe a strongly doctrinal way of thinking which was initially expressed in theological and then later ideological forms. This was to be a far more pronounced characteristic than in any other continent: most of the major non-religious ‘isms’ – for example, liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism, republicanism, monarchism, Protestantism and fascism – were European in origin.

By the late nineteenth century these national rivalries were increasingly transposed on to the global stage, with the struggle over colonies, notably in Africa, contributing to the First World War.

The Second World War started as a further instalment of Europe’s internal wars but rapidly spread to engulf most of the world, although its heartland remained in Europe.

This penchant for internal war found global projection in the very European phenomenon of the Cold War, in which the fundamental divide was ideological, with the two great ‘isms’ of the time – ...

Ultimately, this appetite for internal war was to prove near-fatal for Europe: it fought itself to a standstill in the two world wars of the twentieth century and thereby rendered itself both exhausted...

Alan Macfarlane has described individualism as ‘the view that society is constituted of autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals, and that such individuals are more important, ultimately, than any larger constituent group’.

This individualistic system, with its emphasis on the nuclear family, stands in stark contrast to the traditional extended-household, arranged-marriage, kinship-based systems to be found in societies like China and India, whose values and distinctive characteristics persist to this day, notwithstanding urbanization and a dramatic fall in the size of the nuclear family.

Thus, while marriage in the West is essentially a union of two individuals, in Chinese and Indian culture it involves the conjoining of two families.

the relative absence of an external threat, colonialism, the preponderance of industry, relatively slow growth, a pattern of intra-European conflict (or what I have termed ‘internal wars’), and individualism. We should not therefore be surprised that the characteristics of its modernity are also more distinctive than is often admitted.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, GDP per head in Western Europe and on the North American seaboard was perhaps twice that of South Asia and roughly on a par with Japan and the southern and eastern seaboard of China. By 1900, income per head in Western Europe and the North American seaboard dwarfed that of China by a margin of at least ten times.

The key to Europe’s transformation was the Industrial Revolution. Britain’s was well under way before 1800;

Previously economic growth was of a glacial speed; now compound rates of growth ensured that Western Europe far outdistanced every other part of the world, the United States being the most important exception. Apart from North America, the old white settler colonies52 and Japan after 1868, Europe enjoyed a more or less total monopoly of industrialization during the nineteenth century, a scenario with profound consequences for everyone else.

In the name of Christianity, civilization and racial superiority, and possessed of armies and navies without peer, the European nations, led by Britain and France, subjugated large swathes of the world, culminating in the scramble for Africa in the decades immediately prior to 1914.

Western hegemony was one of the great asymmetries of world history. Taken together, the metropoles of all the Western empires – the American, Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish – accounted for 7% of the world’s land surface and just 18% of its population. Their possessions, however, amounted to 37% of global territory and 28% of mankind.

exporting its manufacturing products to as many markets as possible while importing food and raw materials at the lowest possible prices.

It was the means by which Britain tried to take advantage of its overwhelming advantage in manufacturing and prevent others from seeking to erect tariffs to protect their nascent industries.

The international free trade regime championed by Britain had a stifling effect on much of the rest of the world outside north-west Europe and North America. Industrial development in the colonial world was for the most part to prove desperately slow, or non-existent, as the European powers t...

‘Whatever the official rhetoric,’ writes Eric Hobsbawm, ‘the function of colonies and informal dependencies was to complement metropolitan ...

India – by far Britain’s most important colony (it was colonized by the East India Company from the mid eighteenth century, and formally annexed by Britain in 1857)59 – had a per capita GDP of $550 in 1700, $533 in 1820, and $533 in 1870. In other words, it was lower in 1870 than it had been in 1700, or even 1600 (when it was also $550). It then rose to $673 in 1914 but fell back to $619 in 1950. Over a period of 250 years, most of it under some form of British rule, India’s per capita GDP increased by a mere 5.5 per cent.

Compare that with India’s fortunes after independence: already by 1973 its per capita GDP had risen to $853 and by 2001 to $1,957.

China was a classic case in point. The British fought the Chinese in the First Opium War of 1839–42 over the right to sell Indian-grown opium to the Chinese market, which proved a highly profitable trade both for Britain and its Indian colony.

China’s ensuing inability to prevent the West from prising open the Chinese market hastened the decline of the Qing dynasty, which by the turn of the century was hopelessly enfeebled, with foreign rule entrenched in the numerous so-called treaty ports.

Paradoxically, nothing serves to illustrate the overwhelming power of Europe more vividly than the rise of Japan. Stalked by the threat of Western invasion and fearful that it might meet the same fate as China, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan embarked on a carefully calculated process of rapid modernization.

It rejected the idea that it was any longer a meaningful part of Asia and instead coveted acceptance as a Western power. It even emulated the Western model of colonialism, occupying Taiwan, Korea and part of China. The Meiji project of modernization was testament to the comprehensive character of European hegemony.

India obtained a widely shared language in English, Taiwan inherited the Japanese education system, and the Chinese in the treaty ports, especially Shanghai, learnt about Western commerce.

The one great exception was the white settler colonies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand: these were always treated entirely differently – for straightforward racial and ethnic reasons – and prospered greatly as a consequence.

By then, however, the United States had begun to emerge as the successor power, enjoying not only great economic strength but also growing cultural and intellectual influence. The full impact of its rise, though, continued to be obscured by a combination of its isolationism and its obvious affinity with Europe.

The decline of Europe became manifest after 1945 with the rapid and dramatic collapse of its empires, with the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, much of Africa, Indo-China and Malaysia, for example, all gaining independence. In the process, the number of nation-states grew by three times.

India’s performance was transformed, as the figures cited earlier for its economic growth illustrate, but Africa was left debilitated by the experience of the slave trade and then colonialism. It has been estimated that the slave trade may have reduced Africa’s population by up to a half as a result of the forcible export of people combined with deaths on the continent itself.

In contrast East Asia, which was far less affected by colonialism and did not suffer slavery (though it did experience indentured labour), was much less disadvantaged. In the light of the economic transformation of so many former colonies after 1950, it is clear that the significance of decolonization and national liberation in the first two decades after the Second World War has been greatly underestimated in the West, especially Europe.

Although American and European modernity are often conflated into a single Western modernity, they are in fact rather different.

Their intention was to re-create the Old World in the New World.70 In contrast to Europe, however, where capitalism was shaped by its feudal antecedents, the settlers were not constrained by pre-existing social structures or customs.

While Europe was mired in time-worn patterns of land tenure, the American settlers faced no such constraints and, with the decimation of the native population, enjoyed constantly expanding territory as the mythical frontier moved ever westwards.

The fact that the United States started as a blank piece of paper enabled it to write its own rules and design its own institutions: from the outset, steeped in Protestant doctrine, Americans were attracted to the idea of abstract principles, which was to find expression in the Constitution and, subsequently, in a strong sense of a universalizing

The fact that the European settlers brought with them a powerful body of values and religious beliefs, but were largely devoid of the class attitudes of their ancestral homes, lent the white American population a sense of homogeneity. The exclusion of African slaves from American society together with the destruction of the Amerindians imbued their identity with a strongly racial dimension.

The result was an economy which showed a far greater proclivity for technological innovation, mechanization, the standardization of products, constant improvement in the labour process, economies of scale and mass production than was the case in Europe.