Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

Convergence, however, is only one side of the picture. Increasingly the rise of China will be characterized by the opposite: powerful countervailing pressures that push towards divergence from the established norms. In a multitude of ways, China does not conform to the present conventions of the developed world and the global polity. As a civilization-state masquerad ing in the clothes of a nation-state, its underlying nature and identity will increasingly assert itself. The present Westphalian system of international relations in East Asia is likely to be steadily superseded by something that resembles a modern incarnation of the tributary system. A nation that comprises one-fifth of the world’s population is already in the process of transforming the workings of the global economy and its structure of power. A country that regards itself, for both cultural and racial reasons, as the greatest civilization on earth will, as a great global power, clearly in time require and expect a major reordering of global relationships. A people that suffered at the expense of European and Japanese imperialism will never see the world in the same way as those peoples that were its exponents and beneficiaries. A state that has never shared power with any other class, group or institution, which has never been subject to popular sovereignty, which operates on a continental scale and which, to this day, is suffused with a Confucian outlook, albeit in a distinctive and modernized Communist form, stands in sharp contrast to the credo that informs Western societies and which has hitherto dominated the global community. While the West has been shaped by the Declaration of American Independence in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, the British Industrial Revolution, the two world wars, the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the collapse of Communism in 1989, for China the great historical monuments are mostly very different: 221 BC and the beginnings of modern China; dynasties such as the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing; the Opium Wars; the 1911 Revolution; Japanese colonization between 1931 and 1945; the 1949 Revolution; and the 1978 reforms. The different historical furniture betrays a different history. China, then, if convergent is also manifestly divergent. While the rise of China since 1978 has been characterized by the predominance of convergent tendencies, well exemplified by China’s current desire to reassure the world that it is a ‘responsible power’, the divergent tendencies will in due course come to predominate as China grows more wealthy, self-confident and powerful. But all this lies well in the future; for the next twenty years or so, as China continues its modernization, it will remain an essentially status-quo power.

There are two powerful forces that will serve to promote the steady reconfiguration of the world on China ’s terms. The fact that China is so huge means that it exercises a gravitational pull on every other nation. The nearest parallel is the United States, but the latter is on a much smaller scale. Size will enable China to set the terms of its relationships with other countries: hitherto that has been limited by China ’s level of development, but its gravitational power will grow exponentially in the future. China ’s mass will oblige the rest of the world largely to acquiesce in China ’s way of doing things. Moreover China ’s size, combined with its remorseless transformation, means that time is constantly on its side. It can afford to wait in the knowledge that the passage of time is steadily reconfiguring the world in its favour. Take its relationship with Japan: on the assumption that China ’s rapid growth continues, Japan will ultimately be obliged to accept China ’s leadership of East Asia. The same can be said, albeit less starkly, of China ’s relationship with the United States and Europe. With the rise of China, indeed, time itself takes on a new and different meaning: timescales are, in effect, elongated. We have become used to thinking in terms of the converse: the ever-shortening sense of time. The template for this is provided by the United States, a country with a brief history, a short memory, and a constant predilection for remaking itself. China is the opposite. It is possessed of a 5,000-year history and an extremely long memory, and unsurprisingly conceives of the future in terms of protracted timescales. As a result, it is blessed with the virtue of patience, confident in the belief that history is on its side. If that has been the Chinese mentality since time immemorial, in the twenty-first century it will come to fruition.

So how will China act as a great power, once it is no longer confined to the straitjacket of modernization? It would be wrong to assume that it will behave like the West; that cannot be discounted, but history suggests something different. While Europe, and subsequently the United States, have been aggressive and expansionist, their tentacles reaching all over the world, China ’s expansion has been limited to its continent and although, in the era of globalization, that will change, there is little reason to presume that it will be a West Mark 2. Many in the West are concerned about the absence of Western-style democracy in China, but over the last thirty years the country has become significantly more transparent and its leadership more accountable. This process is likely to continue and at some point result in a much bigger political transformation, though any democratic evolution is likely to take a markedly different form from that of the West. For the foreseeable future, however, given the success of the period since 1978, there is unlikely to be any great change. The greatest concern about China as a global power lies elsewhere, namely its deeply rooted superiority complex. How that will structure and influence Chinese behaviour and its attitudes towards the rest of the world remains to be seen, but it is clear that something so entrenched will not dissolve or disappear. If the calling card of the West has often been aggression and conquest, China ’s will be its overweening sense of superiority and the hierarchical mentality this has engendered.

The arrival of China as a major power marks the end of Western universalism. Western norms, values and institutions will increasingly find themselves competing with those of China. The decline of Western universalism, however, is not solely a product of China ’s rise, because the latter is part of a much wider phenomenon, an increasingly multipolar economic world and the proliferation of diverse modernities. Nor will the decline of the Western world be replaced in any simplistic fashion by a Sinocentric world. The rise of competing modernities heralds a quite new world in which no hemisphere or country will have the same kind of prestige, legitimacy or overwhelming force that the West has enjoyed over the last two centuries. Instead, different countries and cultures will compete for legitimacy and influence. The Western world is over; the new world, at least for the next century, will not be Chinese in the way that the previous one was Western. We are entering an era of competing modernity, albeit one in which China will increasingly be in the ascendant and eventually dominant.

But all this lies some way off. For the time being, the world is preoccupied by the onset of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. At the time of writing, the consequences of this remain unknown. Depressions are a bit like wars: they test societies in a way that normal periods of prosperity and growth do not. They reveal weaknesses and vulnerabilities that otherwise remain concealed. They give rise to new political ideologies and movements, as the world learnt to its great cost in the interwar years. On the face of it, China is much better equipped to deal with this crisis than the West. Its financial sector is in a much superior condition to that of the West, having avoided the hubristic risk-taking that hobbled the Western banks; nor is China confronted with the kind of de-leveraging which threatens deflation and a major shrinkage of demand in the West and Japan. While the developed world faces the prospect of shrinking economies for perhaps two or more years, China is still looking forward to considerate growth, albeit of uncertain magnitude. The unknown for China is the effect that a growth rate which falls below 8 per cent, perhaps to 6 per cent or much lower even, would have in terms of unemployment and social unrest. This will prove to be by far the biggest test Chinese society has faced since 1989. The world is entering a new political era. Despite regular Western warnings that the Chinese model was unsustainable and needed to be Westernized, the financial crisis in 2008 marked the demise of neo-liberalism and the failure of the Western free-market model as practised since the late seventies: the Chinese rather than the Western approach has been affirmed. [1337] [1337] The Chinese have made this perfectly clear. See ‘Interview: Message from Wen’, Financial Times , 1 February 2009; ‘Wen Blames Crisis on Policy Mistakes’, Financial Times , 28 January 2009; ‘Wen and Putin Lecture Western Leaders’, Financial Times , 29 January 2009. At the same time, the departure of George Bush and his replacement by Barack Obama has kindled enormous global interest, not least in the developing world, which should serve to increase the standing of the United States in the eyes of many. But it is the effect of the global recession that is likely to have the most serious impact. If China continues to grow at 6–8 per cent and can avoid debilitating social unrest, while the Western economy enters a period of negative or near zero economic growth, then the global recession is likely to significantly accelerate the trends discussed in this book and result in an even more rapid shift of power to China.