When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order |  | Author: Martin Jacques
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
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Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 11263
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 576
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Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 2
ISBN: 1594201854
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.51
EAN: 9781594201851
ASIN: 1594201854
Publication Date: November 12, 2009
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Product Description
How China's ascendance as an economic superpower will alter the cultural, political, social, and ethnic balance of global power in the twenty-first century, unseating the West and in the process creating a whole new world
According to even the most conservative estimates, China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by 2027 and will ascend to the position of world economic leader by 2050. But the full repercussions of China's ascendancy-for itself and the rest of the globe-have been surprisingly little explained or understood. In this far-reaching and original investigation, Martin Jacques offers provocative answers to some of the most pressing questions about China's growing place on the world stage.
Martin Jacques reveals, by elaborating on three historical truths, how China will seek to shape the world in its own image. The Chinese have a rich and long history as a civilization-state. Under the tributary system, outlying states paid tribute to the Middle Kingdom. Ninety-four percent of the population still believes they are one race-"Han Chinese." The strong sense of superiority rooted in China's history promises to resurface in twenty-first century China and in the process strengthen and further unify the country.
A culturally self-confident Asian giant with a billion-plus population, China will likely resist globalization as we know it. This exceptionalism will have powerful ramifications for the rest of the world and the United States in particular. As China is already emerging as the new center of the East Asian economy, the mantle of economic and, therefore, cultural relevance will in our lifetimes begin to pass from Manhattan and Paris to cities like Beijing and Shanghai. It is the American relationship with and attitude toward China, Jacques argues, that will determine whether the twenty-first century will be relatively peaceful or fraught with tension, instability, and danger.
When China Rules the World is the first book to fully conceive of and explain the upheaval that China's ascendance will cause and the realigned global power structure it will create.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 Must Read Material! November 12, 2009
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
85 out of 92 found this review helpful
Martin Jacques' "When China Rules The World" carries a provocative title, but it should not be a surprise. Anyone can see this outcome coming by simply projecting economic growth in the U.S. and China at roughly their current rates; Goldman Sachs gave such conclusions credibility in 2007 when it concluded that China would surpass U.S. GDP in 2027, and double it by 2050. Jacques' book suffers not from an overly wild imagination, but from taking entirely too long to get this already obvious conclusion, and then not exploring enough about what that means for either Britain (his nation) or the U.S.A.
Far too much of "When China Rules The World" is taken up by a detailed historical summary and analysis of China's 5,000-some year history - to establish that it is not prone to colonizing other parts of the world, values unity among its people, and that its predominantly Han 'nationality' of people are becoming increasingly smug (racist?) as China's economic power grows. Jacques could have shortened this material enormously by simply pointing out that the key to China's recent growth has been the pragmatic orientation of its leaders. Obviously, economic growth has been their #1 objective since Mao's death, and public announcements communicated that the military would have to take a back seat. The late Premier Deng Xiaoping demonstrated this pragmatic focus when - despite being Mao's #2 and having been purged twice for not being a strong-enough Communist, he turned the nation's direction around after Mao's death. At the time, Deng explained his lack of commitment to ideology or history as follows: "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." This was interpreted to mean that being productive in life is more important than whether one follows a communist or capitalist ideology.
Regardless, even if Chinese history was the clear determinant of its direction, the topic is so immense and complex I doubt anyone but a Chinese scholar would have the resources or credibility to synthesize the thousands of years involved. That rules Jacques out. However, Jacques' material on today's China is much more useful.
Many China naysayers contend it cannot continue with anything near its recent growth rates because rising demand for labor will end the supply of its low-cost labor. Jacques, however, points out that China needs to create 8 million new jobs/year for its expanding urban population, plus another 15 million for new rural migrants coming to the cities. By 2020 it is estimated that there will be 553 million non-agricultural workers in China - 100 million more than in all the developed world. Another estimate is that 20 years from now China will still have 20% of its population looking for non-agricultural work - in other words, China has a relatively limitless supply of cheap labor.
How will China continue to rapidly grow its economy? First, by increasing its internal consumption, and secondly by moving up the value chain. Manufacturing comprises only about 15% of the cost of getting a product to market. China's leaders aim to increase China's proportion of the whole by raising R&D from $25 billion in 2004 to $45 billion in 2010 and $113 billion in 2020. China is also intensifying efforts to persuade overseas Chinese to return (eg. one-third of Silicon Valley's professional and technical staff are Chinese), and to raise the status and enrollment of its best universities. China has also been very successful in leveraging access to intellectual knowledge in exchange for granting foreign firms access to its markets. Then there's also its reputation for intellectual piracy. Jacques envisions strong Chinese total-product competition in aircraft manufacture, electric automobiles, communications, computers, and solar panels. Given their growing number of engineering graduates and American research labs located in China, I suspect they will also be strong contenders in household goods, biomedical products, wind turbine production - probably about any area they decide to move into, given their strong cost advantages.
Another reason some doubt China's continued success is that it isn't bringing democracy to the masses. Jacques, however, contends that very few countries have combined democracy (as now envisioned) with the process of economic take-off. (The U.S., for example, was late to grant voting to women and minorities.) Jacques also contends that developing countries are especially likely to value a government's ability to deliver economic growth, maintain ethnic harmony, limit corruption, and sustain order and stability as equal, if not greater values to democracy. Regardless, "When When China Rules The World" also presents data showing that most Chinese believe the political climate has improved since 1989 (Tienanmen Square), and 72% of its population are satisfied with the condition of the country vs. only 39% in the U.S. (As for the widely reported large number of civil disturbances within China reported each year, Jacques contends most have nothing to do with the central government - eg. local land issues.)
Bottom line - like it or not, China will become the major global power by 2050 - assuming continued rapid economic growth, and Jacques doesn't think that is going to stop. What does this mean? Jacques says Chinese companies will be the biggest in the world, as will its stock exchanges and banks. Macao will take Las Vegas' place as gambling capital of the world. The dollar will continue its decline and American military bases overseas will become increasingly difficult to finance. China's new aircraft carriers, stealth submarines, etc. will take over the Pacific near China, and its anti-ship missiles render the U.S. Navy obsolete. Taiwan will return to China's jurisdiction.
My projections for the U.S. are a return to protectionism and/or continued decline in our standard of living. Off-shoring will expand to include higher-level jobs such as engineering design, R&D, branding, corporate ownership, and even some marketing. Absent gaining control of our trade and government deficits, the U.S. risks substantial inflation. Government spending will have to drastically reduced at all levels, especially existing outlays for health care, education, and defense.
The "good news" is that there is already compelling evidence of U.S. overspending in all three areas. U.S. health care and education expenditures as a percentage of GDP are both about 2X and more those of other major developed nations, while U.S. defense expenditures (6-7% of GDP) equal those of the rest of the world combined (more if Homeland Security is added in). U.S. outcomes in these areas, however, are middling at best. Thus, about 15.5% of GDP could be eliminated from government and private expenditures for these three areas - about $2.2 trillion/year. In addition, Social Security benefits will have to be cut, the maximum level of taxable earnings eliminated, or both.
Jacques makes a very good point when he says that globalization was largely developed and instigated by Western nations, especially the U.S.; the benefits, however, have largely accrued to East Asia and China, and the drawbacks to the U.S. Combined with increased private and public efforts to outsource service jobs to India, and more jobs lost to technology, its going to be a very rough next few decades in the U.S.A. Americans need to be much more careful about what they wish for!
A fascinating, sprawling, and thought provoking book, with a scary title January 3, 2010
Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
There is an ancient saying in Eastern countries in general, and China and India in particular, and in some African countries too, that "A man is rich when other people owe him money". What applies to an individual could very easily apply to a nation as well. And judged from this point of view, China, which owns more than a trillion dollars of America's debt, is a very wealthy nation indeed.
In his fascinating, sprawling, and thought provoking book, with a long, sprawling and rather scary title: "When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order", Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London, elucidates that China will not only displace the United States as the preeminent superpower, but also dominate the world stage in economic, social and cultural fields, and change the Western world's concept of what it means to be the preeminent global power. For me, what was even scarier than the title was the impression I got as I read the chapters and his well-reasoned and masterfully articulated points, and the stubborn, indisputable facts that can not be simply brushed away as pure fantasy. And what is truly enigmatic is that America seems to be steadily and willfully marching in the direction of a steep precipice not too far away.
I find it quite fascinating that what he predicted and wrote last year is happening right now, that the United States will find itself on the eve of a psychological, emotional and existential crisis as it enters a protracted period of economic, political and military trauma. With unemployment hovering around 14% in several states, and a large number of Americans subsisting on food stamps only and zero income, and now that President Obama has decided to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, even as civilian deaths caused by drone attacks and night raids have increased dramatically, causing a great deal of trauma, and ever growing anger and resentment and even hatred of America, the author is certainly right regarding "a protracted period of economic, political and military trauma" .
Written in lucid prose, this book is quite reader friendly: "The meltdown of some of Wall Street's largest financial institutions in September 2008 underlined the shift in economic power from the West, with some of the fallen giants seeking support from sovereign wealth funds and the US government stepping in to save the mortgage titans Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae partly in order to reassure countries like China, which had invested huge sums of money in them: if they had withdrawn these, it would almost certainly have precipitated a collapse in the value of the dollar. The financial crisis has graphically illustrated the disparity between an East Asia cash-rich from decades of surpluses and a United States cash-poor following many years of deficits."
I do not agree with all that the author has written, of course. He states: "At least for the next century, the new world will not be Chinese in the way that the previous one was Western." But at the rate our nation is marching in the wrong direction propelled by misguided notions, and the belief that we can solve many of the world's simmering problems using our military might, I am afraid that the loss of USA's preeminence on the world stage will occur sooner even than the author predicted.
Not all readers would be persuaded by this book, however. This book is worth reading if one reads it with an open mind. I found the book truly fascinating and thought provoking.
Good book December 2, 2009
Meng Qi
20 out of 29 found this review helpful
Disclaimer: I was born and raised in mainland China. Currently I am going to college in the USA.
Finally there is a book that is not ignorant about China or just outright China-bashing....the author knows his stuff really well. There are few factual errors. All arguments are supported by plenty of data.
The author did a good job debunking a myth in the West that the Chinese people are dying for democracy. In fact very few Chinese like democracy. Even most Chinese who study in the US do not like democracy or the Western way of living.
However he was somewhat too idealistic about the virtue of the Chinese state. I do not support democracy, but I admit that the Chinese bureaucracy has a lot of corruption and inefficiency, and needs serious reforms.
This book helps understand the potential future ... January 17, 2010
Jack Kennedy Jr. (Wise, Virginia, USA)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
When China Rules The World caught my eye after hearing an audio interview of Martin Jacques on National Public Radio. While I do not proclaim to be a China expert, I have read several books about China the past year both prior to and following my first trek across the country in the summer of 2009. I enjoyed reading this book enormously as it provided cultural insights not afforded in more niche-oriented works.
While the book's premise is about how China is growing at rapid pace and will overtake several markets in the 21st Century based upon the country's development, balance of trade, and investments, I found there was a lack of consideration of future "Wild Card" scenarios in American energy technology developments that could change the whole paradigm.
Nonetheless, I found the book educational and a worthwhile read. I have recommended it to several friends who trekked about the People's Republic of China in the summer of 2009. I also recommend it to anyone who thinks about the future and the possible roles it will play in the 21st Century. It is well researched and written.
China's incredible economic advance is proof that U.S. Plutocrats are screwing up our country December 20, 2009
Herbert L Calhoun (Falls Church, VA USA)
13 out of 21 found this review helpful
In this 600-page tome, Martin Jacques, a seasoned British reporter, places 2000 years of Chinese history into context, by essentially taking note of China's phenomenal growth and showing, with Chinese history as its backdrop, how different the Chinese model of "constructive social and economic development" is from our own -- that is to say, how different it is from the basically Western imperialist expansionist model of "the Western version of economic progress."
The first, and perhaps most important difference, is that the Chinese people do not internalize their government as a threat to them, its own citizens, or to their individual rights. They see it as being an extension of those rights and a protector of them - and more importantly -- as an extension of what is good about society as a whole. This is a difficult concept for a self-absorbed, hegemonic self-reflective neocon run culture such as our own to get its hands around. We have come to rely on the fact that everything we do, or think, immediately becomes "the universal." This book tells us otherwise, that it ain't necessarily so: far from, it in fact.
To the self-absorbed US and Western mind, the Chinese way is a radical new conception of how governments relate to their peoples. And in important ways, it is the beginning of the eclipsing of the old Ayn Rand idea that "the best government is a dead government." In this now anachronistic view, we can see with eyes wide open where the Ayn Rand, Vienna and University of Chicago schools, and the Ronald Reagan and GW Bush's version of "voodoo economics" has gotten us. Their idea, that the best government is effectively a dead one -- that is one that allows the maximum amount of deregulation and also the maximum amount of top-down corruption--is also the best, is utter nonsense. Even a Communist model of our own version of capitalist growth is now kicking our incestuous plutocrat's butts.
Now that we see that this is the case, maybe its time to "double-down" and take a page from the Chinese capitalist playbook and re-invent ourselves? Otherwise, we must deal with the reality that infinite faith in our own idea of endless economic expansion has met its match in Communist China's novel model of economic expansion. In other words, the Chinese have "peeked at our economic hold card" and found the above gurus of our economic theories to be "wanting." And they have used this fact to beat us at our own game. They have used what we once considered "the much feared Communist government" as the vanguard of the greatest and fastest economic expansion in world history, learning capitalism with a vengeance, and becoming, in a short sixty years, better at it than we are. How could we have allowed this to happen? Has it been because our greedy plutocratic ruling class has decided that their own greed is more important than the economic health and well being of the country itself is?
Who would have thunk it? That our old Communist nemesis would be growing at the phenomenal clip of 10% per year for as long as the eye can see; would have bailed out a flailing U.S. economy (that was itself the cause of a severe international recession); be the only source of U.S. economic survival; and would be holding us by the economic balls with almost $3 trillion of our debt (and still counting); and yet are beating us at our own game? We remain in denial by telling ourselves that they are merely adopting "our model of capitalism," but this book says otherwise, that it ain't so. It says that there are fundamental differences that we need to take into account, or else our version will soon be relegated to the dustpan of history.
Something has gone terribly wrong here and our fine democratic institutions are not even trying to get to the bottom of it. In the Communist countries, they shoot the leaders responsible for the kind of mistakes that would cause the kind of economic tailspin that our leaders have allowed. In the U.S. we make endless excuses for them, then promote them; give them Nobel Peace Prizes, and then place them above the law, even when they are caught red-handed. No wonder the Chinese are beating us at our own game?
Second, while it is reassuring that the author predicts that China will eschew the militarist expansion model (because expansionism is just not a part of China's historical DNA), it does raise, at least in the book's subtext, a question of how and why our so called "militaristic democratic model" has gone so wrong, so quickly and so badly?
While in just under 60 years China is poised to take over our role as the leading capitalism power, we hear Joe Lieberman on the Senate floor exhorting us to fear China as a growing military threat: Would not the time to have done that been before we went into hock to them for the $3 trillion? What seems clear here is that despite what Lieberman says, and our own continued infinite economic bravado (and what Wal-mart's move to Bejing proves) is that the reality is that the U.S. is increasingly becoming an economic ward of China: perhaps China's own new 51st state. How long can a country "in hock" remain a preeminent military power? (A couple of decades? Another generation? Your guess is as good as mine?)
While China grows at 8% per year even as it pulls out of a recession that our own morally-challenged economic gang of five created, our so-called democratic system is faltering under such a cloud of greed and corruption and its own purposefully constructed ideological gridlock by our ruling class, that we have tucked our tails between our legs and put our heads in the sand and hope to keep both their forever. Our morally challenged plutocrats seem incapable of seeing the handwriting on the wall and will take the American economy, its military, and all its institutions down with it.
If they had either a patriotic brain or bone in their bodies, China's rise as the preeminent economic power in just 60 years would be an economic wake up call. But our ruling class remains tone deaf and asleep at the switch. They cannot see beyond gorging themselves off of the next profits from more "credit-default swaps." Five Stars
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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