Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

The Age of the West was not only marked by economic and military dominance but by Western ascendancy in more or less every field, from culture and ideas to science and technology, painting and language to sport and medicine. Western hegemony meant anything associated with the West enjoyed a prestige and influence that other cultures did not. White skin colour has been preferred globally — in East Asia too, as we saw earlier in this chapter — because it was synonymous with Western power and wealth. Western-style clothes have been widely adopted for the same reason. English is the global lingua franca because of the overweening importance of the United States. The history of the West — in particular, the United States and Western Europe — is far more familiar to the rest of the world than that of any other country or region because the centrality of the West has meant that everyone else is obliged, or desires, to know about it. Western political values and ideas are the only ones that enjoy any kind of universalism for a similar reason. But now that the West is no longer the exclusive home of modernity, with the rest of the world cast in a state of pre-modernity, the global equation changes entirely. Hinduism will no more be a byword for backwardness. Nor will Indian clothes. It will no longer be possible to dismiss Chinese political traditions as an obsolete hangover from the days of the Middle Kingdom, nor equate the Western family with modernity and dismiss those of India and China as remnants of an agrarian age. To growing numbers of people outside the West, Chinese history will become as familiar as Western history is now, if not more so. The competition, in other words, between the West and the rest will no longer be fundamentally unequal, pitting modernity against tradition, but will take place on something that will increasingly resemble a level playing field, namely between different modernities. We can already see this in the corporate world, where Korean, Japanese and Chinese companies, bearing the characteristics of the cultures from which they emanate, compete with their rather different Western counterparts, often with considerable success.

The twentieth century was characterized by the ideological cleavage between socialism and capitalism, an era ushered in by the October Revolution in 1917 and which found expression in the onset of the Cold War after 1945, until finally coming to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989- 91. That world, where every conflict and division was refracted through the prism of this wider ideological schism, then proceeded to evaporate with great speed. American neo-conservatives believe that the new global divide is the war on terror — what they like to describe as the Fourth World War (the third having been the Cold War) — but this represents a basic misreading of history. The era we are now entering, in fact, can best be described as one of contested modernity . Unlike the Cold War, it is not defined by a great political or ideological divide but rather by an overarching cultural contest. The emergence of new modernities not only means that the West no longer enjoys a virtual monopoly on modernity, but that the histories, cultures and values of these societies will be affirmed in a new way and can no longer be equated with backwardness or, worse still, failure. On the contrary, they will experience a new sense of legitimacy and, far from being overawed by or deferential towards the West, will enjoy a growing sense of self-confidence.

Hitherto the world has been characterized by Western hubris — the Western conviction that its values, belief systems, institutions and arrangements are superior to all others. The power and persistence of this mentality should not be underestimated. Western governments feel no compunction or restraint about lecturing other countries on the need for, and overwhelming virtue of, their versions of democracy and human rights. This frame of mind is by no means confined to governments, who, for the most part, simply reflect a popular cultural consensus. Many Western feminists, for example, tend to assume that gender relations in the West are more advanced than elsewhere, and that they are more liberated and independent than women from other cultures. There is a deeply embedded sense of Western psychological superiority which draws on powerful economic, political, ideological, cultural and ethnic currents. The rise of a world of multiple modernity challenges that mentality, and in the era of contested modernity it will steadily be eroded and undermined. Ideas such as ‘advanced’, ‘developed’ and ‘civilized’ will no longer be synonymous with the West. This threatens Western societies with an existential crisis of the first order, the political consequences of which we cannot predict but will certainly be profound. The assumptions that have underpinned the attitudes of many generations of Westerners towards the rest of the world will become increasingly unsustainable and beleaguered. The West has thought itself to be universal, the unquestioned model and example for all to follow; in the future it will be only one of several possibilities. This is a scenario that, at least until very recently, [420] [420] This has begun to change as reflected in recent books such as Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (London: Allen Lane, 2008) and Bill Emmott, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade (London: Allen Lane, 2008). Also see Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). the West has been almost entirely unprepared for, as Paul A. Cohen, cited at the very beginning of this chapter, suggests. In future it will be required to think of itself in relative rather than absolute terms, obliged to learn about, and to learn from, the rest of the world without the presumption of underlying superiority, the belief that ultimately it knows best and is the fount of civilizational wisdom. The bearer of this change will be China, partly because of its overwhelming size but also because of the nature of its culture and outlook. China, unlike Japan, has always regarded itself as universal, the centre of the world, and even, for a millennium and more, believed that it actually constituted the world. The emergence of Chinese modernity immediately de-centres and relativizes the position of the West. That is why the rise of China has such far-reaching implications.

Although parts of China are already prosperous and developed, around half of the population still lives in the countryside. China remains very much a developing country. As a consequence, Chinese modernity can only be regarded as work in progress. Some of its characteristics are already evident, others are only in embryonic form, while others still are not yet visible. It is abundantly clear, however, that Chinese modernity will differ markedly from Western modernity. The reasons for this lie not only in the present, but even more tellingly in the past. China has little in common with the West. It comes from entirely different cultural coordinates. Its politics, its state and its moral outlook have been constituted in a highly singular way, likewise its relationship with its neighbours. The fact that for many centuries the Chinese regarded themselves as constituting the world, as ‘all land under Heaven’, only serves to underline the country’s unique character. Unlike most developing countries, furthermore, China was never colonized, even though many of its cities were. Colonization was a powerful means by which countries were Westernized, but in China its absence from vast swathes of the country meant this never happened in the same manner that it did in India or Indochina, for example. The sheer size of China, both as a continental land mass and, more importantly, in terms of population, were, of course, indispensable conditions for enabling the Chinese to think in such autarchic and universalist terms. It might be argued that all these considerations lie in the past, but it is history that shapes and leaves its indelible mark on the present. Modernity is not a free-floating product of the present, but a function of what has gone before.