Our Beijing-based lawyer, Mathew Alderson, is always reading and referring to deep think books on China. The other day when he told me about Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World, I suggested he do a review. This is not a new book (it came out at the end of 2009), but because it takes positions so diametrically opposed to what so many others are saying, I thought it was still worthy of a post and so I requested Mathew do one. The following is Mathew’s review of When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order:
For the past two hundred years or so we have lived in a Western-made world, a world in which the very notion of being modern has been synonymous with being Western. In this insightful and entertaining book, Martin Jacques argues that the twenty-first century will be different. As increasingly powerful non-Western countries rise, Western nation-states will no longer be dominant and modernity will take an Asian form.
In the new era of “contested modernity,” China will be the central player. As the title of the book suggests, it not a question of if China will become ascendant but merely a question of when. Leaving the timing aside, China will not become a Western-style society but will remain highly distinctive. Modernity, Jacques reminds us, is made possible by industrialization, a process which remained exclusive to a small part of the world until about the middle of the twentieth century. With the exception of Japan, the West has enjoyed a monopoly on industrialization and the modernity that engenders. China’s arrival as a major power therefore marks the end of Western “universalism.” Western norms, values and institutions will increasingly find themselves competing with those of China. There will be an era of competing modernities in which no hemisphere will have the unique prestige or legitimacy that the West has enjoyed for the past two hundred years.
Jacques notes that the mainstream attitude has been that the world will not change fundamentally with China’s rise. He regards this attitude as based on three misconceived assumptions. The assumptions are, first, that China’s challenge to the West will be primarily economic and, second, that China will become a typical Western nation. The third assumption is that the international system will remain basically as it is now, with China becoming a compliant member of the international community. These assumptions are misconceived because they ignore that China is the product of a history and culture with little or nothing in common with that of the West. China is simply something quite different.
Jacques identifies a number of key differences between China and other countries which, he says, will make a Chinese modernity very different from the current Western form of modernity.
One key difference is that China is not a nation-state but should be understood as a “civilization-state.” Its identity was formed well before China assumed the status of a nation-state. What defines the Chinese, therefore, is not their sense of nationhood but their sense of civilization, a civilization frequently claimed to have existed continuously for the past 5,000 years. Another difference, says Jacques, is that China is increasingly likely to revert to an ancient conception of its East Asian neighbours as tributary-states rather than as nation-states. Until little more than a century ago, China was organised in relation to these other peoples. Yet another difference is that there is a distinctively Chinese attitude to race and ethnicity. Unlike the world’s other most populous nations, the Chinese do not acknowledge or seek a multiracial character. The Han Chinese, comprising a majority of some 92%, believe themselves to comprise a distinct race whose superiority, when a long view is taken, they regard as self-evident. In this view, Western ascendancy is a recent and brief anomaly, following which China will return to its natural position at the centre of the world. It is this latter point which gives rise to one of Jacques’ most compelling concepts: the “middle kingdom mentality.”
Until its engagement with Europe in the nineteenth century forced it to operate more according to the rules of nation-states, China thought of itself as the centre of the world — it was the middle kingdom or the “land under heaven.” It did not even need a name. Unlike, say, the United States or Israel, it was not said to be the land chosen by a God, but rather the chosen land by virtue of the sheer brilliance of its civilization. China, therefore, has a long-standing and utterly Sinocentric view of its place in the world. Surrounded by barbarians, it conceives of itself as a universe in its own right. Unlike those of a nation-state, China’s frontiers were, until relatively recently, never carefully drawn or policed, but instead regarded as zones tapering from civilization into barbarism. China’s expansion into these frontiers was land-based, unlike the expansion of the European powers, which was maritime-based. With land-based expansion, China always enjoyed the advantage of proximity. China was therefore able to undertake a process of cultural and racial expansion over millennia. This is in stark contrast to the expansion of the European powers, most of whose colonies never became permanent because of the difficulty of assimilating alien cultures and races from a distance.
In stark contrast to this Sinocentric mentality, Jacques argues that the dominant Western view of globalization is that it is a process by which the rest of the world becomes and should become increasingly Westernized, with free markets, the rule of law and democratic norms. But, as Jacques points out, China does not conform to the present conventions of the developed world and the global polity. Its underlying nature and identity will increasingly assert themselves. When it becomes, as Jacques presumes it must, a great power, it will not behave like the West. The greatest concern about China as a great power, he says, is its deep-rooted superiority complex and the hierarchical mentality this has engendered, both of which derive from the middle-kingdom mentality.
Though at times Jacques seems almost to exalt in an ascendant China, he is methodical in laying down the historical, economic and geopolitical foundations for the positions he takes and he is at pains to acknowledge the many competing views. On the whole, this lends the book a balance, making it of value even to a reader who might not agree with its conclusions. Though I myself did not agree with all of Jaques’ conclusions, I still heartily recommend When China Rules the World to anyone interested in China and its future role in the world.
