Thirty years ago, China had a tiny footprint on the global economy and little influence outside its borders, save for a few countries with which it had close political and military relationships. Today, the country is a remarkable economic power: the world’s manufacturing workshop, its foremost financier, a leading investor across the globe from Africa to Latin America, and, increasingly, a major source of research and development.
The Chinese government sits atop an astonishing level of foreign reserves — more than US$2 trillion. There is hardly a single business anywhere in the world that has not felt China’s impact, either as a low-cost supplier, or more threateningly, as a formidable competitor.
China is still a poor country. Although average incomes have risen very rapidly in recent decades, they still stand at between one-seventh and one-eighth the levels in the US — lower than in Turkey and Colombia and not much higher than in El Salvador and Egypt. While coastal China and its major metropolises evince tremendous wealth, large swaths of Western China remain mired in poverty. Nevertheless, China’s economy is projected to surpass that of the US sometime in the next two decades.
Meanwhile, the US, the world’s sole economic hyper-power until recently, remains a diminished giant. It stands humbled by its foreign-policy blunders and a massive financial crisis. Its credibility after the disastrous invasion of Iraq is at an all-time low, notwithstanding the global sympathy for US President Barack Obama, and its economic model is in tatters. The once-almighty dollar totters at the mercy of China and the oil-rich states.
All of which raises the question of whether China will eventually replace the US as the world’s hegemon, the global economy’s rule setter and enforcer. In a fascinating new book, revealingly titled When China Rules the World, the British academic and journalist Martin Jacques is unequivocal: If you think China will be integrated smoothly into a liberal, capitalist and democratic world system, you are in for a big surprise. Not only is China the next economic superpower, but the world order that it will construct will look very different from what we have had under US leadership.
Americans and Europeans blithely assume that China will become more like them as its economy develops and its population gets richer. This is a mirage, Jacques says.
The Chinese and their government are wedded to a different conception of society and polity: community-based rather than individualist, state-centric rather than liberal, authoritarian rather than democratic. China has thousands of years of history as a distinct civilization from which to draw strength. It will not simply fold under Western values and institutions.
A world order centered on China will reflect Chinese values rather than Western ones, Jacques argues. Beijing will overshadow New York, the yuan will replace the dollar, Mandarin will take over from English, and schoolchildren around the world will learn about Zheng He’s (鄭和) voyages of discovery along the Eastern coast of Africa rather than about Vasco de Gama or Christopher Columbus.
Gone will be the evangelism of markets and democracy. China is much less likely to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states. But, in return, it will demand that smaller, less powerful states explicitly recognize China’s primacy (just as in the tributary systems of old).
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