When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order by Martin Jacques The Penguin Press, 2009 ISBN 1594201854, 978-1594201851 Hardcover, 576 pages"When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order" is the provocative the title of Martin Jacques' assessment of China's future role as the dominant global power. For more than a decade Jacques was editor of "Marxism Today" - having first transformed it from an obscure ideological organ of the Marxist Left into a broad platform for wide ranging political and social debate. Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union "Marxism Today" was also wound up and Jacques went on to become deputy editor of The Independent, an engaging newspaper columnist and author.Having heard him speak recently about his book on China my main reservation is that he is still overly influenced by his political antecedents, and perhaps too willing to overlook the nature of the Chinese political system as he rightly dwells on China's extraordinary growth, economic capacity, and cultural richness.The title of the book is itself a giveaway.Mercifully, no nation has ever ruled the world and however much national fortunes may change no free people would accept the idea of one nation determining our destiny. It's neither desirable nor historically probable.In 1963 the great Welsh tenor, Sir Harry Secombe, recorded a song entitled "If I ruled the world". It contained the memorable lines that if he ever found himself in that position "every man would be as free as a bird" and "every voice would be a voice to be heard. " Would this be China's song for its own citizens or the rest of us? Jacques tends to dismiss concerns for human rights as the West patronizing China and he believes that because the Communist State has created economic growth (a Pew Poll indicated that over 91% of its people are satisfied with its economic performance) this confers legitimacy on the Government. He argues that there is no widespread desire for democracy or for the "enlightenment values" of the West.His central point is that, unlike Western powers, China is not a nation state but a "civilization state "; that China is far more diverse than we imagine, and more flexible. He cites the example of Hong Kong and the creation of "two systems in one country" as an example of both its diversity and its flexibility.What is incontestably true is that at a moment when our western economies are in crisis and stagnating, Chins continues to accelerate.In 1992 just 3.5% of America's imports came from China; today it is 14.5%; in Brazil it was 0.9%, today it is 14%; and in the UK, from virtually nothing in 1990, China provides 6% of our imports today. One fifth of Australia's imports come from China, while its two-way trade with its near neighbors - Taiwan, Singapore, and even Japan -soars. Over the next five years we will see the Chinese currency, the Renminbi (RNB) - "the people's currency" - increasingly challenge the mighty U.S. dollar.Globalization will no longer be shaped by the United States but by China - although Jacques takes far too little account of America's military might or China's disastrous demographic trends, or the flight of capital from China's new rich. The inhumane one child policy (previously a flagship of the country's Communist ideology) has left it with an aging population which will have to be supported by a significantly reduced young workforce (the back bone of its current economic growth). Perhaps expressed less provocatively and less provocatively than in the title of Jacques' book, it could certainly be said that the twenty-first century is China's century; just as the twentieth century was America's century and the nineteenth century was Britain's. …