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

by Martin Jacques

The American model was distinguished by a new kind of mass market and mass consumer, with all the attendant innovations in areas such as advertising. As a result, from the late nineteenth century American capitalism was to prove far more dynamic and innovative than its European counterparts.

By 1914, the US had pulled well ahead with a share of 18.9% compared with 8.2% for the UK and 8.7% for Germany. In 1950, America’s economic high noon, its share of world GDP was 27.3%, compared with 6.5% for the UK, 5.0% for Germany and 26.2% for the whole of Western Europe.

The damage wrought by two world wars notwithstanding, the American economy hugely outperformed the European economies in the period 1870–1950 and this underpinned the emergence of the United States as the premier global power after 1945.

the United States became the first truly global power: the dollar was enshrined as the world’s currency, a new constellation of global institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and GATT, gave expression to the US’s economic hegemony,

The United States succeeded in creating a world system of which it was the undisputed hegemon but which was also open and inclusive, finally reaching fruition after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and with the progressive inclusion of China.

It demonstrated a new kind of cultural power and influence, through Hollywood and television soaps, and also through such icons of its consumer industry as Coca-Cola and Levi jeans.

Its universities increasingly became magnets for the best scholars and students from all over the world. It dominated the list of Nobel Prize winners. And it was the power and appeal of the United States that lay behind the rise of English as the world’s first true lingua franca.

This is so different from Europe as to be quite alien; and yet the fact that modern America literally comes from Europe has meant that the bond between the two, that sense of affinity, particularly in the global context, has always been very powerful and is likely to remain so.

Whatever the differences between Europe and the United States, the West is likely to retain a powerful sense of meaning and identity: indeed, it may be that the rise of non-Western countries and cultures will serve to reinforce that sense of affinity.

It will be a very long time, if ever, before the still overwhelming white majorities on either side of the Atlantic cease to dominate their societies.

The West has shaped the world we live in. Even now, with signs of a growing challenge from China, the West remains the dominant geopolitical and cultural force. Such has been the extent of Western influence that it is impossible to think of the world without it, or imagine what the world would have been like if it had never happened. We have come to take Western hegemony for granted.

Although young Japanese are very style-conscious, fashion is marked by a powerful conformity and a lack of individualism, with the same basic look, whatever that might be, acquiring near universality.

On the surface, Japan might look similar to any Western country. But inside it is very different. Or, as Chie Nakane told me: ‘Japan is outwardly Western but inwardly Japanese.

Japan was the only Asian country to begin industrialization in the nineteenth century, the only intruder in an otherwise exclusively Western club.

By any standards, it was phenomenally successful in its attempt to emulate the West, industrializing rapidly prior to 1914, and then again before 1939; it had colonized a large part of East Asia by 1945, and then overtook much of the West in GDP per head by the 1980s.

Not surprisingly, Japan served as an influential economic model when the East Asian tigers began their econom...

If we want to understand the nature of Asian modernity, Japan is the best place to start because it was first and because it remains easily the most developed example. Just because Japan is part of East Asia, however, does not mean that it is representative of the regi...

Japan has been shaped by two momentous engagements with the most advanced civilizations of their time: China in the fifth and sixth centuries and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Prior to its engagement with China, Japan had no writing system of its own, but subsequently adopted and Japanized many Chinese characters and blended them with its own invented writing system.

This was an extremely difficult process because the two languages were completely different and unrelated. In the process, the Chinese literary tradition became one of the foundation stones of Japanese culture. Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism were to enter Japan from China via Korea more or less simultaneously around the sixth century.

Taoism melded with Japanese animist traditions and mutated into Shintoism, while Confucianism became, as in China, the dominant intellectual influence, especially amongst the elite, and even today, in its Ja...

Confucianism was one of the most sophisticated philosophies of its time, a complex system of moral, social, political and quasi-religious thought, its greatest achievement perhaps being to widen access to education and cul...

The Chinese influence was to continue for many centuries, only finally being displaced by that of the West wit...

Though Chinese influence was profound, it was refracted through and shaped by Japan’s own experience and traditions.

Japanese Confucianism differed markedly in various respects from Chinese Confucianism. While the latter explicitly included benevolence amongst its core values, the Japanese instead laid much greater emphasis on loyalty, a difference that was to become more pronounced with the passage of time.

Loyalty, together with filial piety and a duty to one’s seniors – based on authority, blood and age – were amongst the key defining characteristics of the hierarchical...

China and Japan were both ruled by an imperial family; there were, however, two crucial...

First, in China a dynasty could be removed and the mandate of Heaven withdrawn: there have b...

Chinese h...

In contrast, the Japanese imperial family was regarded as sacred: the same family has occupied the imperial seat throughout its 1,700-year recorded history. Second, while a Chinese dynasty enjoyed ...

For only a third of its history has the Japanese imperial family ruled in...

For much of Japan’s history, there has been dual or even triple government, with the emperor, in practice at...

The most typical form was dual government, with political power effectively controlled either by shoguns (the military chiefs), or by prime ministers o...

During the Tokugawa era (1603–1867), real political power was exercised by the military i...

Ruth Benedict, in her classic study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, makes the interesting observation that: ‘Japan’s conception of her Emperor is one that is found over and over among the islands of the Pacific. He is the Sacred Chief who may or may not take part in administration. In some Pacific Islands he did and in some he delegated his authority. But always his person was sacred.

The Tokugawa era, the 250-year period prior to the Meiji Restoration, saw the creation of a highly centralized and formalized feudal system.

Beneath the imperial family and the lords (daimyo), society was organized into four levels in such strict hierarchy that it possessed a caste-like quality: these were the warriors (samurai), the farmers, the artisans and the merchants respectively.

One’s rank was determined by inheritance and set in stone. The head of every family was required to post on his doorway his class position and the details of his hereditary status.

His birthright determined the clothes he could wear, the foods he could buy and the type of house he could live in. The daimyo took a portion of his farmers’ rice every year and out of that, apart from catering for his own needs, he paid his samurai.

The samurai possessed no land: their formal function was to defend the daimyo...

During the Tokugawa era the daimyo were answerable to the shogun, who, in turn, was, at least formally, accountable to the emperor in his seclusion in Kyoto.

Unlike Chinese Confucianism, which valued educational excellence above all (the mandarins being products of a highly competitive examination system), the Japanese, in giving pre-eminence to the samurai, and indeed the shogunate, extolled martial qualities.

During the Tokugawa period, China was, in effect, a civilian Confucian country and Japan a ...

Not long after the Tokugawa family began their shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they closed Japan off to the outside world and suppressed Christianity, rejecting foreign influences ...

The Japanese were forbidden from sailing in larger boats – it became an offence to build or operate a boat over a certain size – thereby bringing to an end extensive trading activity along the Japanese coast.

The reasons appear to have been a desire to limit the activities of merchants together with a fear of outside influences, and especially the import of European firearms, which it was believed might serve to destabilize the delicate balance of power between the various provinces and the shogun.

Japan became an increasingly unified community, standardizing its language, engendering similar ways of thinking and behaving between different provinces, and evolving a common set of rules and customs.

As a result, the conditions for the emergence of a modern nation-state began to take shape. Castle towns were built along a newly constructed road network which served to further

By the end of the Tokugawa period, Edo, as Tokyo was then known, was as big as London, with a population of more than a million, while Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya ...

As we saw in the last chapter, Japan’s economy in 1800 compared favourably with that of north-west Europe although it suffered from the same intensifying...