Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

Even though one can trace some of the origins of the modern in Europe back to the sixteenth century, the decisive period of change was the nineteenth century, when industrialization swept across north-west Europe, the economic power of European nations was transformed, the modern nation-state was born, and virtually the entire world was brought into a global system dominated by Europe. The merging of all these trends marked a qualitative shift in human organization. This was the period when modernity began to acquire a global reach, and people aspired to be modern and to think of themselves as modern — from dress and ways of being named to the possession of objects like fob watches and umbrellas — not only in Europe and North America, but also even amongst elite groups, though not amongst the masses (with the exception of Japan), in Asia and Africa. [48] [48] Ibid., p. 10.

This process has been gathering speed ever since. By previous standards, Britain ’s Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 was breathtakingly rapid, but, when judged by later examples, especially those of the Asian tigers, it was, paradoxically, extremely slow. Each successive economic take-off has got faster and faster, the process of modernization, with its attendant urbanization and rapid decline in agrarian employment, steadily accelerating. Although Europe has, in the debates about post-modernity, recently expressed qualms about modernity, seen from a global perspective, it is abundantly clear — as it sweeps across the Asian continent, home to 60 per cent of the world’s population — that the insatiable desire for modernity is still the dominant force of our time; far more, in fact, than ever before. Europe’s confidence and belief in the future may have dimmed compared with that of Victorian Britain, but the United States is still restlessly committed to notions of progress and the future. And if one wants to understand what ‘the embrace of the future’ means in practice, then there is no better vantage point than China.

Europe was the birthplace of modernity. As its tentacles stretched around the globe during the course of the two centuries after 1750, so its ideas, institutions, values, religion, languages, ideologies, customs and armies left a huge and indelible imprint on the rest of the world. Modernity and Europe became inseparable, seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the other: they appeared synonymous. But though modernity was conceived in Europe, there is nothing intrinsically European about it: apart from an accident of birth it had, and has, no special connection to that continent and its civilization. Over the last half-century, as modernity has taken root in East Asia, it has drawn on the experience of European — or, more precisely, Western — modernity. However, rather than simply being clones of it, East Asian modernities are highly distinctive, spawning institutions, customs, values and ideologies shaped by their own histories and cultures. In Part I, I will explore how modernity came to be indelibly associated with Europe, and more broadly the West, and how East Asia is now in the process of prising that relationship apart.

By the mid nineteenth century, European supremacy over East Asia had been clearly established, most graphically in Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War in 1839- 42. But when did it start? There is a temptation to date it from considerably earlier. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that China ’s history after the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and especially after the genius of the Song dynasty (960-1279), was to blaze an altogether less innovative trail. Writing of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), for example, the historian David Landes suggests that: ‘ China had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor, coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to gentility.’ As a result, he argues: ‘So the years passed and the decades and the centuries. Europe left China far behind.’ [49] [49] David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 342.

As China disappointed compared with its previous record, Europe, on the other hand, grew steadily more dynamic. From around 1400, parts of it began to display steady economic growth, while the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance provided some of the foundations for its later scientific and industrial revolutions. The longer-term significance of these developments, though, has probably been exaggerated by what might be described as hindsight thinking: the belief that because of the dazzling success and extraordinary domination of Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the roots of that success must date back rather longer than they actually did. The result has been a tendency — by no means universal — to believe that Europe’s lead over China, and China ’s own decline, commenced rather earlier than was in fact the case. [50] [50] For a pessimistic view of China, see ibid., Chapter 21; Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

The idea that Europe enjoyed a comfortable lead over China and Japan in 1800 has been subject to growing challenge by historians. Kaoru Sugihara has argued that, far from going into decline after 1600, over the course of the next three centuries there was an ‘East Asian miracle’ based on the intensive use of labour and market-based growth — which he describes as an ‘industri ous revolution’ — that was comparable as an economic achievement to the subsequent ‘European miracle’ of industrialization. He shows that Japanese agriculture displayed a strong capacity for innovation long before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, with major improvements in crops and productivity helping to support a growing population. [51] [51] Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Agriculture and Industrialization: The Japanese Experience’, in Peter Mathias and John Davis, eds, Agriculture and Industrialization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 148- 52. It is clear, as Adam Smith pointed out, that in the late eighteenth century China enjoyed a rather more developed and sophisticated market than Europe. [52] [52] Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007), p. 69. The share of the Chinese harvest that was marketed over long distances, for example, was considerably higher than in Europe. A key reason for the early development of the market in China was the absence of feudalism. In medieval Europe the serf was bound to the land and could neither leave it nor dispose of it, whereas the Chinese peasant, both legally and in reality, was free, provided he had the wherewithal, to buy and sell land and the produce of that land. [53] [53] John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 102.

In 180 °China was at least as urbanized as Western Europe, while it has been estimated that 22 per cent of Japan ’s eighteenth-century population lived in cities compared with 10–15 per cent in Western Europe. Nor did Western Europe enjoy a decisive advantage over China and Japan before 1800 in terms of capital stock or economic institutions, with plenty of Chinese companies being organized along joint-stock lines. Even in technology, there appears to have been little to choose between Europe and China, and in some fields, like irrigation, textile weaving and dyeing, medicine and porcelain manufacture, the Europeans were behind. China had long used textile machines that differed in only one key detail from the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle which were to power Britain ’s textile-led Industrial Revolution. China had long been familiar with the steam engine and had developed various versions of it; compared with James Watt’s subsequent invention, the piston needed to turn the wheel rather than the other way round. [54] [54] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 34-5, 43-6, 61-2, 70, 168. What is certainly true, however, is that once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution, investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology, innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China. [55] [55] Mark Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, New Left Review , 52, July-August 2008, pp. 96-7, 103. For China, in contrast, its ‘industrious revolution’ did not prove the prelude to an industrial revolution.