When China Rules the World

The coming of modernity cannot be considered in neat chronological terms like the reign of a king, or the period of a dynasty, or the duration of a war, or (though with less precision) the boundaries of an industrial revolution. Its inception cannot be given a date, only a period; while there appears, as yet at least, to be no obvious end but more a process akin to perpetual motion. It was the onset of industrialization that marked the arrival and diffusion of modernity and, rather like the ever-expanding universe, modernity has relentlessly kept on moving ever since. According to Göran Therborn, modernity marked the arrival of ‘an epoch turned to the future’. [45] Christopher Bayly argues that modernity should be seen as an open-ended process, ‘which began at the end of the eighteenth century and has continued up to the present day’. [46] If modernity was a novelty at the time of the British Industrial Revolution, it has since become a compelling and seemingly omnipotent narrative, sweeping all before it, with the ‘new’ exercising a magnetic attraction on the popular imagination from North America to Europe, from China to Japan. The extent to which so many contemporary conflicts are fought out between ‘progressive’ on the one hand and ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional ist’ on the other underlines the degree to which the language of modernity has insinuated itself into the bloodstream of societies.

The decisive moment for modernity was, and remains, economic take-off and the coming of industrialization. This is when the new mentality – the orientation towards change and uncertainty, the belief that the future will be different from the past – slowly moves from being the preserve of a few elites to eventually infecting the psyche of the entire population. The locus of economic activity shifts from the field to the factory, and that of residence from the countryside to the cities. Every aspect of human life is progressively transformed: living standards, family structure, working conditions, skills and knowledge, self-organization, political representation, the relationship with the natural environment, the idea of time, and the perception of human existence. Like modernity itself, and as its key driver, the industrial revolution unleashed a process of economic transformation which continues unabated to this day. [47]

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]

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.