When China Rules the World

by Martin Jacques

  If Europe will suffer, that is nothing to the material and existential crisis that will be faced by the United States. It is almost completely unprepared for a life where it is not globally dominant. Under the Bush administration it sought to redefine itself as the world’s sole superpower, able to further its interests through unilateralism and shun the need for alliances: in other words, far from recognizing its relative decline and the prospect of a diminution in its power, it drew precisely the opposite conclusion and became intoxicated with the idea that US power could be further expanded, that America was in the ascendancy, that the world in the twenty-first century could be remade in the country’s image. The dominant ideological force during the Bush era was neo-conservatism, which was predicated on the belief that the United States could and should assert itself in a new way. In the wake of 9/11 Washington was in thrall to a debate about empires and whether the United States was now an imperial power and what that might mean. The Bush administration represented the most extreme expression so far of an aggressive, assertive and expansionist America, but even after it was widely seen to have failed as a result of the Iraq debacle, there were not many in the United States who drew the conclusion that the country was in longer-term decline, that far from it being on the eve of a new global dominance, its power had, in fact, already peaked; on the contrary, there was a widespread perception that the United States simply needed to find a less confrontational and more consensual way of exercising its global leadership. Not even the advances made by China in East Asia were interpreted as the harbinger of a major shift in global power.

  The heart-searching that accompanied the 2007- 8 primary and presidential campaign around Barack Obama’s candidature did not, at least until the financial meltdown just before the election, reach the conclusion that the United States would have to learn to live with decline. Even the precipitous decline in the value of the dollar in 2006-7 did not provoke fear of American decline, though a small minority of observers recognized that in the longer term the position of the dollar might come under threat. The United States thus remained largely blind to what the future might hold, still basking in the glory of its past and its present, and preferring to believe that it would continue in the future. Britain displayed a similar ignorance — and denial — about its own decline after 1918, constantly seeking to hold on to what it had gained, and only letting go when it could see no alternative. Indeed it only began to show an underlying recognition of its own decline in the 1950s, when it became obvious it would lose its colonies. The turning point in the United States may well prove to have been the financial meltdown in September 2008, with the near collapse of the financial system and the demise of neo-liberalism. The US National Intelligence Council report in November 2008 represented a 180-degree shift compared with its previous report just four years earlier in 2004. While the latter predicted continuing American global dominance, ‘positing that most major powers have forsaken the idea of balancing the US’, the new one anticipated American decline, the emergence of multipolarity, and a world in which the US would increasingly be obliged to share power with China and India. It declared: ‘By 2025, the US will find itself as one of a number of important actors on the world stage, albeit still the most powerful one.’ [1332] The task facing Barack Obama’s presidency is far from enviable. The worldwide euphoria that greeted his election sits uneasily with what appears to be the most difficult task that has confronted any US president over the last century: managing long-term decline in an immediate context of the worst recession since 1945 and a commitment to fighting two wars. Encouragingly, Obama’s election indicates that the US is capable of opting for an imaginative and benign response to its travails. But these are very early days yet: we are only at the beginning of a protracted process with many acts to follow over several decades, if not more. The American Right is powerful and entrenched, with deep well-springs of support. The biggest danger facing the world is that the United States will at some point adopt an aggressive stance that treats China as the enemy and seeks to isolate it. A relatively benign example of this was the proposal of the Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain for a ‘league of democracies’, designed to exclude China and Russia (which he also wanted to expel from the G8) and thereby create a new global division. [1333] The longer-term fear must be that the US engages China in military competition and an arms race in something akin to a rerun of the Cold War.

  The fact that China derives from utterly different civilizational and historical roots to those of the West, and is possessed of quite different geographical coordinates, will greatly accentuate the Western sense of loss, disorientation and malaise. It was one thing for Britain to have been confronted with the United States — given the obvious affinities and commonalities that they enjoyed — as its rival and successor as the world’s dominant power, but it is an entirely different matter for the United States to be faced with China — with whom it has nothing in common in either civilizational or political terms — as its usurper and ultimate replacement. For the United States, the shock of no longer having the world to itself — what has amounted to a proprietorial right to determine what happens on all major global questions — will be profound. With the rise of China, Western universalism will cease to be universal — and its values and outlook will become steadily less influential. The emergence of China as a global power in effect relativizes everything. The West is habituated to the idea that the world is its world, the international community its community, the international institutions its institutions, the world currency — namely the dollar — its currency, and the world’s language — namely English — its language. The assumption has been that the adjective ‘Western’ naturally and implicitly belongs in front of each important noun. That will no longer be the case. The West will progressively discover, to its acute discomfort, that the world is no longer Western. Furthermore, it will increasingly find itself in the same position as the rest of the world was during the West’s long era of supremacy, namely being obliged to learn from and live on the terms of the West. For the first time, a declining West will be required to engage with other cultures and countries and learn from their strengths. The United States is entering a protracted period of economic, political and military trauma. It finds itself on the eve of a psychological, emotional and existential crisis. Its medium-term reaction is unlikely to be pretty: the world must hope it is not too ugly.

  12. Concluding Remarks: The Eight Differences that Define China

  Broadly speaking, there have been two kinds of Western response to the rise of China. The first sees China more or less solely in economic terms. We might call this the ‘economic wow factor’. People are incredulous about the growth figures. They are in awe of what those growth figures might mean for China’s position in the world. Any undue concern about their implications, moreover, is calmed by the belief that China is steadily becoming more like us, possessed of the accoutrements — from markets and stock exchanges to cars and private homes — of a modern Western society. This response is guilty of underestimating what the rise of China represents. It is a victim of tunnel vision and represents a failure of imagination. Economic change, fundamental as it may be, can only be part of the picture. This view, blind as it is to the importance of politics and culture, rests on an underlying assumption that China, by virtue of its economic transformation, will, in effect, become Western. Consciously or unconsciously, it chimes with Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ view: that since 1989 the world has been converging on Western liberal democracy. The other response, in contrast, is persistently sceptical about the rise of China, always half expecting it to end in failure. In the light of Maoism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the suppression of the students in Tiananmen Square, the argument runs, it is impossible for China to sustain its transformation without fundamental political change: unless it adopts the Western model, it will fail. The first view holds that China will automatically become Western, the second does not: but both shar
e the belief that for China to succeed, it must, in effect, become Western.

  This book is predicated on a very different approach. It does not accept that the ‘Western way’ is the only viable model. In arguing this, it should be borne in mind that the West has seen off every major challenge it has faced, culminating in the defeat after 1989 of its greatest adversary, Soviet Communism. It has a formidable track record of growth and innovation, which is why it has proved such a dynamic force over such a long period of time. Unlike the stark either/or alternatives of the great ideological era between 1917 and 1989, the choices are now more nuanced. The East Asian examples of modernization have all drawn from the Western experience, including China’s post-1978 transformation. But to suggest that this is the key to East Asia’s success or even amounts to the main story is a mistake. The reason for China’s transformation (like those of the other East Asian countries, commencing with Japan) has been the way it has succeeded in combining what it has learnt from the West, and also its East Asian neighbours, with its own history and culture, thereby tapping and releasing its native sources of dynamism. We have moved from the era of either/or to one characterized by hybridity.

  Central to the book is the contention that, far from there being a single modernity, there will in fact be many. Until around 1970 modernity was, with the exception of Japan, an exclusively Western phenomenon. But over the last half-century we have witnessed the emergence of quite new modernities, drawing on those of the West but ultimately dependent for their success on their ability to mobilize, build upon and transform the indigenous. These new modernities are no less original for their hybridity; indeed, their originality lies partly in that phenomenon. Nor will hybridity remain an exclusively Asian or non-Western condition: in the face of the growing success of East Asian societies, the West will be obliged to learn from and incorporate some of their insights and characteristics. In a limited way this is already the case, with the West, for example, employing some of the innovations developed by the Japanese system of manufacturing — although, given that these are very much rooted in Japanese culture, usually with somewhat less success. A key question concerns which elements of the Western model are indispensable and which are optional. Clearly, all successful examples of economic transformation currently on offer are based upon a capitalist model of development, although their economic institutions and policies, not to mention their politics and culture, display very wide variations. However, the proposition that the inheritance must, as a precondition for success, include Enlightenment principles such as Western-style rule of law, an independent judiciary and representative government is by no means proven. Japan, which is at least as advanced as its counterparts in the West, is not based on the principles of the Enlightenment, nor does it embrace Western-style democracy, even though, since the early fifties, largely for reasons of political convenience, it has routinely been seen as doing so by the West. And even if China moves in the direction of more representative government and a more independent judiciary, as it probably will in the long term, it will surely do so in very much its own way, based on its own history and traditions, which will owe little or nothing to any Western inheritance.

  The desire to measure China primarily, sometimes even exclusively, in terms of Western yardsticks, while understandable, is flawed. At best it expresses a relatively innocent parochialism, at worst it reflects an overweening Western hubris, a belief that the Western experience is universal in all matters of importance. This can easily become an excuse for not bothering to understand or respect the wisdom and specificities of other cultures, histories and traditions. The problem, as Paul A. Cohen has pointed out, is that the Western mentality — nurtured and shaped by its long-term ascendancy — far from being imbued with a cosmopolitan outlook as one might expect, is in fact highly parochial, believing in its own univeralism; or, to put it another way, its own rectitude and eternal relevance. [1334] If we already have the answers, and these are universally applicable, then there is little or nothing to learn from anyone else. While the West remained relatively unchallenged, as it has been for the best part of two centuries, the price of such arrogance has overwhelmingly been paid by others, as they were obliged to take heed of Western demands; but when the West comes under serious challenge, as it increasingly will from China and others, then such a parochial mentality will only serve to increase its vulnerability, weakening its ability to learn from others and to change accordingly.

  The problem with interpreting and evaluating China solely or mainly in terms of the Western lexicon of experience is that, by definition, it excludes all that is specific to China: in short, what makes China what it is. The only things that are seen to matter are those that China shares with the West. China’s history and culture are dismissed as a blind alley or merely a preparation for becoming Western, the hors d’oeuvres before the Western feast. Such an approach is not only demeaning to China and other non-Western cultures, it also largely misses the point. By seeing China in terms of the West, it refuses to recognize or acknowledge China’s own originality and, furthermore, how China’s difference might change the nature of the world in which we live. Since the eighties and nineties, the heyday of the ‘globali zation as Westernization’ era, when the Asian tigers, including China, were widely interpreted in these terms, there has been a dawning realization that such a huge country embodying such a rich history and civilization cannot be so summarily dismissed. We should not exaggerate — the Western consensus still sees history as a one-way ticket to Westernization — but one can detect the beginnings of a new Western consciousness, albeit still weak and fragile, which is more humble and realistic. As China grows increasingly powerful — while remaining determinedly different — the West will be forced, however reluctantly, to confront the nature and meaning of that difference. Understanding China will be one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century.

  What then will be the key characteristics of Chinese modernity? They are eight in all, which for the deeply superstitious Chinese happens to be their lucky number. In exploring these characteristics, we must consider both the internal features of China’s modernity and, given China’s global importance, how these might impact upon and structure its global outlook and relations.

  First, China is not really a nation-state in the traditional sense of the term but a civilization-state. True, it describes itself as a nation-state, but China’s acquiescence in the status of nation-state was a consequence of its growing weakness in the face of the Western powers from the late nineteenth century.

  The Chinese reluctantly acknowledged that China had to adapt to the world rather than insisting, in an increasingly utopian and hopeless mission, that the rest of the world should adapt to it. That cannot hide the underlying reality, however, that China is not a conventional nation-state. A century might seem a long time, but not for a society that consciously thinks of itself as several millennia old. Most of what China is today — its social relations and customs, its ways of being, its sense of superiority, its belief in the state, its commitment to unity — are products of Chinese civilization rather than its recent incarnation as a nation-state. On the surface it may seem like a nation-state, but its geological formation is that of a civilization-state.

  It might be objected that China has changed so much during the period of its accommodation to the status of nation-state that these lines of continuity have been broken and largely erased. There was the failure of the imperial state to modernize, culminating in its demise in the 1911 Revolution; the failure of the nationalist government to modernize China, unify the country, or defeat the occupying powers (notably Japan), leading to its overthrow in the 1949 Revolution; the Maoist period, which sought to sweep away much of imperial China, from Confucius and traditional dress to the old patterns of land tenure and the established social hierarchies; followed by the reform period, the rapid decline of agriculture, the rise of industry and the growing assertion of capitalist social relations. Each of these periods r
epresents a major disjuncture in Chinese history. Yet much of what previously characterized China remains strikingly true and evident today. The country still has almost the same borders that it acquired at the maximum extent of the Qing empire in the late eighteenth century. The state remains as pivotal in society and as sacrosanct as it was in imperial times. Confucius, its great architect, is in the process of experiencing a revival and his precepts still, in important measure, inform the way China thinks and behaves. Although there are important differences between the Confucian and Communist eras, there are also strong similarities. This not to deny that China has changed in fundamental ways, but rather to stress that China is also marked by powerful lines of continuity — that, to use a scientific analogy, its DNA remains intact. This is a country, moreover, which lives in and with its past to a greater extent than any other: tormented by its failure to either modernize or unify, China possesses a past that casts a huge shadow over its present, to the extent that the Chinese have lived in a state of perpetual regret and anguish. But as China finally circumnavigates its way beyond the ‘century of humiliation’ and successfully concludes its 150-year project of modernization, it will increasingly search for inspiration, nourishment and parallels in its past. As it once again becomes the centre of the world, it will luxuriate in its history and feel that justice has finally been done, that it is restoring its rightful position and status in the world. [1335]