Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

In his book The Consequences of Modernity , Anthony Giddens seeks to draw a distinction between the characteristics of modernity and pre-modernity. Speaking of pre-modern society, he argues:

The orientation to the past which is characteristic of tradition does not differ from the outlook of modernity only in being backward-looking rather than forward-looking… Rather, neither ‘the past’ nor ‘the future’ is a discrete phenomenon, separated from the ‘continuous present’, as in the case of the modern outlook. [323] [323] Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 105.

In East Asian modernity, however, the present and the past are not ‘discrete’, in terms of perceptions, in the way Giddens suggests, nor is the future: on the contrary, the present is layered with both the past and the future. In other words, the past and the future are combined in East Asian modernity in a way that is quite distinct from Western modernity. It is, at one and the same time, both very young and very old. This paradox is at its most extreme in China, the oldest continuous civilization in the world and yet now, in cities like Shanghai and Shentzen, also one of the youngest. There is a sense of enormous ambition, a world without limits, symbolized by Pudong, one of the most futuristic cityscapes, with its extraordinary array of breathtaking high-rise buildings. [324] [324] Pudong was conceived, in 1992, as a completely new business and financial centre for Shanghai. Across the Huangpu River from the Bund, it represents an extraordinary urban and architectural leap into the new century: Cheng Youhua, et al., ‘Urban Planning in Shanghai towards the 21st Century’, in Dialogue (Taipei), February/March 1999, pp. 48–55. According to Gao Rui-qian, professor of philosophy at East China National University in Shanghai, ‘China is like the adolescent who is very keen to become an adult. He can see the goal and wants to reach it as soon as possible. He is always behaving as if he is rather older than he actually is and is constantly forgetting the reality of his situation.’ [325] [325] Interview with Gao Rui-qian, Shanghai, April 1999. East Asian modernity, then, is a unique combination, in terms of social and economic realities, attitudes and consciousness, of the present, the past and the future. These countries might be described as ‘time-compression societies’, where the past and the future are squeezed and condensed into the present. Two hundred years of experience and history elsewhere are seemingly contained within the same place and the same moment of time. Everything is rushed. There is no time to reflect. Generational differences are a gaping chasm, society like a living geological formation.

Giddens also argues that with modernity, ‘Kinship relations, for the majority of the population, remain important, especially within the nuclear family, but they are no longer the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space.’ [326] [326] Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity , p. 108. That may be true of the West but it is certainly not the case in mainland China, or Taiwan, or the Chinese diaspora: in each instance ‘kinship relations’, especially in the form of the extended family, are frequently ‘the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space’. The Chinese diaspora, for example, has relied on the extended family as the means by which to organize its globally dispersed business operations, whether large or small. Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and the more advanced parts of China are, moreover, unambiguously part of the modern world. [327] [327] The literature on the Chinese diaspora, and the role of the family and kinship, is voluminous: see, for example, Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas Chinese (London: Arrow, 1998); Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCLPress, 1997), Chapters 4, 7; Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1992), Chapter 6. The fact is that kinship has always been far more important in Chinese than Western societies, whatever their level of development. Or take belief-systems. In his second BBC Reith Lecture in 1999, Giddens argued:

Such views, of course, don’t disappear completely with modernization. Magical notions, concepts of fate and cosmology still have a hold but mostly they continue on as superstitions, in which people only half-believe and follow in a somewhat embarrassed way. [328] [328] ‘Risk’, available at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith1999/lecture2.shtml.

This certainly does not apply to modern Chinese societies: superstition and traditional beliefs — as we saw earlier with the worship of ancestral spirits and the prayers offered to various deities in the hope of good fortune — remain an integral part of the thinking and behaviour of most Chinese. [329] [329] Mark Elvin, ‘Secular Karma: The Communist Revolution Understood in Traditional Chinese Terms’, in Mabel Lee and A.D. Syrokomia-Stefanowski, eds, Modernisation of the Chinese Past (Sydney: University of Sydney, School of Asian Studies, 1993), p. 75.

The arrival of modernization in different parts of the world and in diverse cultures obliges us, therefore, to rethink what is meant by modernity and to recognize its diversity and plurality. We can no longer base our concept of modernity simply on the experience of North America and Europe. Our understanding of modernity is changed and expanded by the emergence of new modernities. The Chinese scholar Huang Ping argues that Chinese civilization has been so different from Western societies in so many ways that it is impossible to comprehend it, and its modernity, simply by the use of Western concepts. ‘Is it not a question of whether the concepts/theories are far away from Chinese reality? China ’s own practice,’ he concludes, ‘is capable of generating alternative concepts, theories, and more convincing frameworks. ’ [330] [330] Huang Ping, ‘“Beijing Consensus”, or “Chinese Experiences”, or What?’, unpublished paper, 2005, p. 8.

In his book East and West , Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, writes: ‘I find myself driven to the conclusion that what we see when we compare West and East is a consequence more of time lags than of profound cultural differences.’ [331] [331] Chris Patten, East and West: China, Power, and the Future of East Asia (London: Times Books, 1998), p. 166. The implication of his argument is that timing is a relatively transient question and that culture matters little. As we have seen, however, the timing and speed of industrialization and urbanization, far from being merely transient phenomena, have real and lasting effects. More fundamentally, it is a mistake to believe that cultural difference does not have a far-reaching impact on the nature of modernity. When countries are much less developed than the West — before or in the early stages of economic take-off — then it is plausible to argue that the disparities are primarily a function of their backwardness rather than any cultural difference. But the transformation of the Asian tigers, with countries like Taiwan and South Korea now at least as developed as many European nations, means that the proposition that cultural difference counts for little can now be tested in practice. The classic exemplar is post-war Japan. As we saw in Chapter 3, Japan remains, notwithstanding the fact that it is at least as advanced as the West, very different from its Western counterparts in a myriad of the most basic ways, including the nature of social relations, the modus operandi of institutions, the character of the family, the role of the state and the manner in which power is exercised. By no stretch of the imagination can Japanese modernity be described as similar to, let alone synonymous with, that of the United States or Europe. [332] [332] For an interesting discussion of Japan ’s specificity, see Alan Macfarlane, Japan Through the Looking Glass (London: Profile Books, 2007).