When China Rules the World

The global reach of traditional Chinese medicine is also likely to continue expanding. Every Chinese hospital has a department devoted to Chinese medicine, with doctors frequently qualified in both Western and Chinese medicine. When Western-style drugs are prescribed they are often combined with traditional Chinese treatments (which was my own experience in a Beijing hospital). [1328] The major constraint on the development of Chinese medicine in the West has been that it is not subject to the same kind of regulation as Western medicine (though clinical trials are quite common in China). [1329] Western drugs have made some headway in China, but traditional Chinese medicines are still favoured by most people, including the affluent middle class and the highly educated, on the grounds that they have thousands of years of experience behind them, are cheaper, and also devoid of toxic side effects. It is accepted that Western drugs are superior for diseases like cancer, but even when these are used, people will generally revert to Chinese medicines subsequently. [1330] The contrast between Chinese and Western medicine eloquently sums up the difference between civilizational wisdom and scientific knowledge. Chinese medicine, rather like the world’s cuisines, is a product of thousands of years of trial and error, of the everyday experience and resourcefulness of hundreds of millions of people and their interaction with their plant environment; Western medicine is a rigorous product of the scientific method and the invention and refining of chemicals. With the exception of those fundamentalists of the scientific method who believe that they enjoy a monopoly of true knowledge, there is a widespread and growing acceptance in the West that medicinal palliatives and cures derived from civilizational experience are a valid and important part of medicine, even if we do not understand, at least as yet, how the great majority of them actually work.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WEST

The purpose of this chapter has been to explore the ways in which Chinese global hegemony is likely to grow over the next half-century. There is another side to this coin which we should consider before we conclude. The most traumatic consequences of this process will be felt by the West because it is the West that will find its historic position being usurped by China. The change that this will represent can hardly be exaggerated. For well over two centuries, in some respects much longer, the West, first in the form of Europe and later in the shape of the United States, has enjoyed overwhelming global pre-eminence. Since 1945 Europe has been obliged to adjust to the fact that it is no longer the dominant player in world politics. The sense of being less and less central to a world that it had previously dominated has been a traumatic experience for European states, especially Britain and France. One response has been the construction of the European Union as a way of mitigating the decline in the power and status of individual states. The fact that European dominance was replaced by that of the United States, however, has helped to lessen this sense of loss. Driven by the Cold War antagonism towards the Soviet Union, an enhanced and transformed concept of the West was forged which effectively enabled Western Europe, at least until 1989, to remain a major global player alongside the United States, even though it was very much the junior partner. This was no ordinary relationship between nation-states based on specific interests, however. On the contrary, the United States was a product of European migration: it had been built by Europeans (together with African slaves) and saw itself as the New World joined at the hip with the Old World whence it came. In other words, history, civilization, culture, ethnicity and race, as well as the exigencies of geopolitics, served to weld and underpin the Western alliance.