When China Rules the World

With the exception of Japan, the modern world has thus until recently been exclusively Western, comprising Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; in other words, Europe plus those countries to which European settlers migrated and which they subsequently conquered, or, as the economic historian Angus Maddison chooses to describe them, the ‘European offshoots’. Western modernity – or modernity as we have hitherto known it – rests, therefore, on a relatively small fragment of human experience. In every instance, that experience is either European or comes from Europe, sharing wholly or largely the cultural, political, intellectual, racial and ethnic characteristics of that continent. The narrowness, and consequent unrepresentativeness, of the Western experience is often overlooked, such has been the dominance that the West has enjoyed over the last two centuries. But as other countries, with very different cultures and histories, and contrasting civilizational inheritances, embark on the process of modernization, the particularism and exceptionalism of the Western experience will become increasingly apparent. In historical terms, we are still at the very beginning of this process. It was only in the late 1950s that the first Asian tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – began their economic take-offs, to be joined in the 1970s by Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and others, followed by China. [36] And what was once more or less confined to East Asia – by which I mean Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea in North-East Asia, and countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam in South-East Asia – has more recently spread to other regions and continents, most notably India. In 1950 the US GDP was almost three times that of East Asia and almost twice that of Asia. By 2001 US GDP was only two-thirds that of Asia, and rather less than that of East Asia. [37] In Part I, I will discuss more fully the nature of modernity, arguing that rather than there being a single way of being modern, we are witnessing the birth of a world of multiple and competing modernities. This will be a quite new and novel feature of the twenty-first century, ushering in an era of what I characterize as contested modernity. [38]

Although we are witnessing the rise of a growing number of developing countries, China is by far the most important economically. It is the bearer and driver of the new world, with which it enjoys an increasingly hegemonic relationship, its tentacles having stretched across East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Africa in little more than a decade. China is very different from earlier Asian tigers like South Korea and Taiwan. Unlike the latter, it has never been a vassal state of the United States; [39] furthermore, it enjoys a huge population, with all that this implies. The challenge represented by China ’s rise is, as a consequence, on a different scale to that of the other Asian tigers. Nonetheless, the consensus in the West, at least up until very recently, has been that China will eventually end up – as a result of its modernization, or as a precondition for it, or a combination of the two – as a Western-style country. American policy towards China over the last three decades has been informed by this belief. It has underpinned America ’s willingness to cooperate with China, open its markets to Chinese exports, agree to its admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and allow it to become an increasingly fully-fledged member of the international community. [40]

The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China ’s rise. This is based on three key assumptions: that China’s challenge will be primarily economic in nature; that China will in due course become a typical Western nation; and that the international system will remain broadly as it now is, with China acquiescing in the status quo and becoming a compliant member of the international community. Each of these assumptions is misconceived. The rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.