When China Rules the World

The other side of the coin is China ’s attitude towards the overseas Chinese. As mentioned earlier, one of the narratives of Chinese civilization is that of Greater China, an idea which embraces the ‘lost territories’ of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the global Chinese diaspora and the mainland. The Middle Kingdom has always been regarded as the centre of the Chinese world, with Beijing at its heart and the disapora at its distant edges. All Chinese have held an essentially centripetal view of their world. The way that the diaspora has contributed to China ’s economic transformation is an indication of a continuing powerful sense of belonging. The rise of China will further enhance its appeal and prestige in the eyes of the diaspora and reinforce their sense of Chineseness. The Chinese government has sought, with considerable success, to encourage eminent overseas Chinese scholars to work and even settle in China. Meanwhile, as discussed earlier, Chinese migration is on the increase, notably to Africa, resulting in the creation of new, as well as enlarged, overseas Chinese communities. It is estimated that there are now at least half a million Chinese living in Africa, most of whom have arrived only very recently. There are over 7 million Chinese living in each of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, over 1 million each in Myanmar and Russia, 1.3 million in Peru, 3.3 million in the United States, 700,000 in Australia and 400,000 in the UK; the approximate figure for the diaspora as a whole is 40 million, but this may well be a considerable underestimate.

How will this relationship between China and the diaspora develop? Will the mainland at some point consider allowing dual citizenship, which at the moment it does not? Is it conceivable that in the future there might be a Chinese Commonwealth which embraces the numerous overseas Chinese communities? Or, to put it another way, what forms might a Chinese civilization-state take in a modern world in which it is predominant? A commonwealth would no doubt be unacceptable to other nations as things stand, but in the event of a globally dominant China, the balance of power would be transformed and what is politically possible redefined. The impact of any such development would, of course, be felt most strongly in South-East Asia, where the overseas Chinese are, relatively speaking, both most powerful and most numerous.

ECONOMIC POWERHOUSE

Chinese economic power will underpin its global hegemony. With the passing decades, as the Chinese economy becomes increasingly wealthy and sophisticated, so the nature of that power will no longer rest primarily on the country’s demographic clout. It is impossible to predict exactly what this might mean in terms of economic reach, but, given that China has a population around four times that of the United States, one might conjure with the idea that China ’s economy could be four times as large as that of the US. In mid 2007, before the credit crunch, with rapidly rising share prices on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges, [1263] Chinese companies accounted for three of the ten largest companies in the world by market value (see Figure 46), and by the end of October that figure had risen to five out of ten. Citic Securities, the biggest publicly traded brokerage in China, trailed only Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch in market value among securities firms, while Air China was the world’s biggest airline by market value, having overtaken Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa. [1264] Of course it may transpire, as happened with the value of Japanese companies in the asset bubble of the late eighties, that these figures prove to be considerably inflated, but nonetheless they are probably a rough indication of likely longer-term trends.