Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

There are two ways in which China already enjoys a major global cultural influence: food and, to a rather lesser extent, traditional Chinese medicine. The global spread of Chinese cuisine has been taking place for many decades, consequent upon Chinese migration, to the point where it is now highly familiar in most parts of the world. Even if people know little about China, they are often familiar with a Chinese dish or two, and are conversant with chopsticks even if they cannot use them. Interestingly, the global influence of Chinese food stems not from China’s rise but from the opposite — its previous poverty and the desire of poor Chinese to seek a better life elsewhere. Typically, migrants either sought to establish a Chinese restaurant in their adopted homeland or, more likely, get a job in one as a stepping stone to later owning a restaurant of their own. The spread of traditional Chinese medicine outside the mainland has largely been an outcome of the same process, with overseas Chinese taking the traditions of Chinese medicine with them and slowly introducing them to the host population. Both Chinese food and medicine are products of China ’s long and rich history and its ancestry as a civilization-state. [1324] [1324] David Y. H. Wu and Sidney C. H. Cheung, eds, The Globalization of Chinese Food (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 2–7; P. Y. Ho and F. P. Lisowski, A Brief History of Chinese Medicine and Its Influence (Singapore: World Scientific, 1998), p. 37. Indeed, it is interesting to reflect that what most of the world knows about China is through these two quintessentially civilizational legacies. Although their diffusion long predates China’s rise, the country’s growing influence can only accelerate this process. For over two centuries the Chinese cuisines familiar to foreigners have been those associated with the regions from which Chinese migrants have predominantly come, notably Guangdong and Fujian provinces; but the knowledge and availability of other cuisines is now spreading rapidly. [1325] [1325] Wu and Cheung, The Globalization of Chinese Food , pp. 5–6. The richness and diversity of Chinese cuisine means that it is highly flexible, able to cater for many different tastes and needs, from cheap takeaways at one end to lavish, upmarket banquets at the other. Until recently it has been mainly associated with the former, but in recent years that has changed. [1326] [1326] Ibid., pp. 10–11. The growing popularity of Chinese food is closely linked to the post-war spread of restaurant eating in the West, a relatively new Western phenomenon, but one which dates back over a millennium in China. [1327] [1327] Ibid., pp. 9-10.

The global reach of traditional Chinese medicine is also likely to continue expanding. Every Chinese hospital has a department devoted to Chinese medicine, with doctors frequently qualified in both Western and Chinese medicine. When Western-style drugs are prescribed they are often combined with traditional Chinese treatments (which was my own experience in a Beijing hospital). [1328] [1328] Ho and Lisowski, A Brief History of Chinese Medicine , pp. 52-3. The major constraint on the development of Chinese medicine in the West has been that it is not subject to the same kind of regulation as Western medicine (though clinical trials are quite common in China). [1329] [1329] Alok Jha, ‘Not Just a Bunch of Plant Extracts’, Guardian , 25 March 2004; Mure Dickie, ‘Chinese Traditional Medicine Gets a Dose of Modernisation’, Financial Times , 7 November 2003; ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine: Potions and Profits’, The Economist , 27 July 2002. Western drugs have made some headway in China, but traditional Chinese medicines are still favoured by most people, including the affluent middle class and the highly educated, on the grounds that they have thousands of years of experience behind them, are cheaper, and also devoid of toxic side effects. It is accepted that Western drugs are superior for diseases like cancer, but even when these are used, people will generally revert to Chinese medicines subsequently. [1330] [1330] ‘A Tough Sell for Western Drugs’, International Herald Tribune , 26 December 2007. The contrast between Chinese and Western medicine eloquently sums up the difference between civilizational wisdom and scientific knowledge. Chinese medicine, rather like the world’s cuisines, is a product of thousands of years of trial and error, of the everyday experience and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of people and their interaction with their plant environment; Western medicine is a rigorous product of the scientific method and the invention and refining of chemicals. With the exception of those fundamentalists of the scientific method who believe that they enjoy a monopoly of true knowledge, there is a widespread and growing acceptance in the West that medicinal palliatives and cures derived from civilizational experience are a valid and important part of medicine, even if we do not understand, at least as yet, how the great majority of them actually work.

The purpose of this chapter has been to explore the ways in which Chinese global hegemony is likely to grow over the next half-century. There is another side to this coin which we should consider before we conclude. The most traumatic consequences of this process will be felt by the West because it is the West that will find its historic position being usurped by China. The change that this will represent can hardly be exaggerated. For well over two centuries, in some respects much longer, the West, first in the form of Europe and later in the shape of the United States, has enjoyed overwhelming global pre-eminence. Since 1945 Europe has been obliged to adjust to the fact that it is no longer the dominant player in world politics. The sense of being less and less central to a world that it had previously dominated has been a traumatic experience for European states, especially Britain and France. One response has been the construction of the European Union as a way of mitigating the decline in the power and status of individual states. The fact that European dominance was replaced by that of the United States, however, has helped to lessen this sense of loss. Driven by the Cold War antagonism towards the Soviet Union, an enhanced and transformed concept of the West was forged which effectively enabled Western Europe, at least until 1989, to remain a major global player alongside the United States, even though it was very much the junior partner. This was no ordinary relationship between nation-states based on specific interests, however. On the contrary, the United States was a product of European migration: it had been built by Europeans (together with African slaves) and saw itself as the New World joined at the hip with the Old World whence it came. In other words, history, civilization, culture, ethnicity and race, as well as the exigencies of geopolitics, served to weld and underpin the Western alliance.

The rise of China will have no such compensations, either for a declining Europe or a dethroned United States. Europe, at least, has had some preparation for this eventuality: it has spent the last half-century adjusting to decline and dethronement. Even now, though, Europe still finds it extremely difficult to understand its increasingly modest place in the world and to adjust its sights accordingly. The case of Britain is most striking in this context. In a desperate attempt to remain a global power with a metaphorical seat at the top table, it has tenaciously hung on to the coat-tails of the United States, constantly walking in its shadow, seemingly always prepared to do its master’s bidding. [1331] [1331] Tony Blair’s premiership perhaps constituted the most extreme case of this. Its foreign policy has long been a clone of that of the United States and its defence and intelligence policies are almost entirely dependent on and deeply integrated with those of the US. The UK’s dependence on the US is a measure not simply of its own weakness and of its failure to find an independent place in the world following the collapse of its imperial role, but also of how traumatic it has found the idea of no longer being a great power. The relationship with the United States has been a surrogate for its lost past. Europe’s continuing existential crisis underlines how difficult it is for countries to adjust, not least psychologically, to a world in which their importance is greatly diminished. Europe’s decline, furthermore, will certainly continue into the indefinite future. Its remarkable role over the last four hundred years will never be repeated and will become an historical curiosity in the manner of the Greek and Roman empires, whose present-day incarnations as Greece and Italy reflect the grandeur of their imperial past in little more than the survival of some of their historic buildings.