REVIEW ESSAY: A New World Order Made in the Image and Likeness of China

REVIEW ESSAY

A New World Order Made in the Image and Likeness of China

M. D. Litonjua*

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

by Martin Jacques. New York: Penguin Press, 2009, 550 pages.

Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific, by Robert D. Kaplan.

New York: Random House, 2014, 225 pages.

The Devouring Dragon: How China’s Rise Threatens Our National World, by Craig Simons.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013, 289 pages.

The rise of China, it has been assumed, will replicate the rise of

the West; it will follow the trajectory that the West had initiated to

become a modern nation. First, the rise of China will be primarily

economic: it will grow in economic strength and, because of its size,

will become the biggest economy in the world; it will create a large

middle class; it will raise the standard of living of its people; it

will create the most expansive consumer class in the world; it will

lower its poverty rate. Second, it will become a modern nation, much

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like other Western nations; its social and political culture will be

not much different from those of the West: an emphasis on individual,

human, and citizenship rights, a system of governance that is based on

law, equality and democracy. Thus, third, China will eventually occupy

its proper place in the community of sovereign nations, a community

that adheres to a liberal world order, created and maintained by the

West since World War II and especially led by the United States. John

Ikenberry is a foremost proponent of these views. 1 Francis Fukuyama

categorically declared “the end of history” as a clash of ideologies

because capitalism and democracy have definitely triumphed. 2

Not so fast, argues Martin Jacques, co-founder of the UK think

tank Demos, who writes a regular column for The Guardian and has been a

visiting senior fellow and professor at various institutions and

universities. I admit that I considered his book as just one more in

the flood of books on China, until I belatedly opened its first pages

and found the names of Eric Hobsbawm, Niall Ferguson, and Arne Westad,

historians from whom I have learned much, in his acknowledgements. If

Jacques is half correct in his analysis and predictions, his book is

revisionist and radically different from other books on China and will

be the most consequential among the prognostications on China’s future.

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Before all else, the rise of China calls into question the rise of

the West itself. Not industrialization as the take-off for economic

growth. Not the fact that the industrial revolution started in England.

Not the fact that “once Britain embarked on its Industrial Revolution,

investment in capital- and energy-intensive processes rapidly raised

productivity levels and created a virtuous circle of technology,

innovation and growth that was able to draw on an ever-growing body of

science in which Britain enjoyed a significant lead over China.” Nor

the fact that Britain, because of its economic prowess, became a world

empire, to be followed by the United States with its economic,

military, and imperial outreach. Nor the fact that “Europe was the

birthplace of modernity. . . . Modernity and Europe became inseparable,

seemingly fused, the one inconceivable without the other: they appeared

synonymous.”

What the rise of China calls into question are, first, the

characteristics of the West that it derives from its cultural legacy of

Greek democracy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian religion which are

posited as preconditions for take-off, industrialization, and economic

dominance. The West is made, therefore, the defining model of a modern

society, the template against which every subsequent transformation

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should conform to and be measured by, which is simply Eurocentric and

ethnocentric.

Second, the hindsight thinking that because of the dazzling

success and extraordinary domination of Europe from the beginning of

the 19th century, the roots of that success must date back longer than

they actually did, that they were the product of a very long historical

process that took place over several centuries. The decisive period of

change was the 19th century. Before that, in the late 18th century, Adam

Smith pointed out, China enjoyed a more developed and sophisticated

market than Europe because of its absence of feudalism. Paul Bairoch

has calculated figures for per capita income that put China ahead of

Western Europe in 1800, with Asia as a whole behind Western Europe but

in advance of Europe. The most advanced regions of China, notably the

Yangzi Delta, were more or less on par with the most prosperous parts

of northwest Europe, in particular Britain, at the end of the 18th

century.

Third, while modernity is made possible by industrialization and

economic take-off, and while Europe was the birthplace of modernity so

that modernity has been indelibly linked with Europe and the West, the

rise of China and other non-Western nations to economic prominence

means that they are also spawning their own distinctive ideas, values,

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institutions, and ideologies, shaped by their own histories and

cultures, prising apart in the process the relationship between the

West and modernity. Japan, for example, is modern but hardly Western.

We are witnessing a world with multiple, competing, and contested

modernities, in which the particularism and exceptionalism of the

Western experience are becoming more apparent. In fact, the West

itself, in debates about post-modernity, has expressed qualms about its

own modernity.

The experience of the West cannot be universalized as historical

law. The explanation for the economic breakthrough achieved by Britain

was due to two short-term contingent and conjunctural, highly specific

and particular factors, as Kenneth Pomeranz had elucidated. 3 First,

England discovered large quantities of coal which eased the growing

shortage of wood, fueled the Industrial Revolution, and enabled England

to break the crucial constraint of land which had become increasingly

exhausted through overuse. Second, much more importantly, the

colonization of the New World, namely the Caribbean and North America,

provided huge tracts of land, a massive and very cheap source of labor

in the form of slaves, and an abundant flow of food and raw materials.

Manchester would not have been possible without the land to raise sheep

and to grow cotton and the cheap and plentiful supplies of cotton,

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sugar, and timber from British slave plantations. “The role played by

colonization, in this context,” notes Jacques, “is a reminder that

European industrialization was far from an endogenous process.” Jacques

sums up by quoting Christopher Bayly’s conclusion: “If, in terms of

economic growth, what distinguished Europe from China before 1800 was

only its intensive use of coal and the existence of a vast American

hinterland to Europe, then a lot of cultural baggage about inherent

European political superiorities looks ready to be jettisoned.” 4

Martin Jacques contends that Europe and the West are a poor

template for understanding the rise of China in particular and of Japan

and East Asia in general. In fact, the modernity which has been a

Western monopoly, has been decidedly broken and is ineluctably being

transformed into diverse and plural non-Western forms. Of course, the

airports, the shopping malls, the high-rise buildings, and busy urban

centers of the non-Western world, which constitute the hardware of

modernity, are all too familiar to any Western traveler. But dig deeper

into their cultural software and you will find combinations of pre-

modern and modern ways of thinking, of mixtures of past and future,

alternative and convincing concepts, theories, and frameworks. This

Jacques interestingly explores with regard to language, the body, food,

and politics. This leads Jacques also to declare that the Age of the

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West, which marked the 19th and 20th centuries, is coming to an end. The

West is no longer the exclusive home of modernity, which threatens

Western countries with an existential crisis of the first order. The

bearer of this change will be China.

Martin Jacques starts the second part of his book, the Age of

China, with China’s economic transformation, “surely the most

extraordinary in human history, notwithstanding the sheer novelty of

Britain’s as the first.” We all know that beginning with the four

modernizations of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the economy of China has grown

to be the second biggest in the world and is expected to overtake that

of the United before the middle of the century. The most significant

fact for me is that the number of people living in poverty in China

fell from 250 million in 1978 to 80 million in 1993 and 29.7 million in

2001, thus accounting for three-quarters of global poverty reduction

during this period. It has been the greatest poverty-reduction program

ever seen.

But the continuing economic success of China is not guaranteed.

Jacques catalogues the most severe economic challenges China faces. Is

China’s economic growth sustainable? A serious and sustained drop below

8 percent carries the threat of serious social unrest. The priority

given to breakneck economic growth has moved China from being a highly

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egalitarian society to becoming one of the most unequal in the world.

The inequality is threefold: between coastal and interior provinces,

between urban and rural areas, and between those in the formal economy

and those dependent on informal economic activities. The sense of

insecurity of many Chinese is compounded by China’s lack of a decent

social safety net and the threadbare character of key public goods.

China’s growth has been extremely resource-intensive, rapidly

exhausting what limited resources it has. As a result, China has become

dependent on the rest of the world for huge quantities of raw

materials, with levels of demand that are unsustainable in terms of the

world’s available resources. Another more ominous result is the huge

ecological deficit that China has accumulated in just a few decades,

especially its use of coal which fired up its hypergrowth: water

shortages, lack of drinking water, and polluted groundwater, rampant

deforestation, vanished rivers if they have not become industrial

sewers, polluted cities, acid rain affecting a third of Chinese

territory, deserts covering a quarter of the country, 58 percent of

land classified as arid or semi-arid. The picture of people with masks

against a backdrop of a hazy, smoke-filled sky sums up the

environmental destruction that China has wrought upon itself with its

breakneck economic growth. China has overtaken in 2007 the U.S. as the

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biggest emitter of CO2, although not in per capita terms. “If the

world’s biggest polluter doesn’t radically reduce the amount of coal it

burns,” Jeff Goodell writes, “nothing anyone does to stabilize the

climate will matter.” Yet he also shows how difficult it is to move

China to take any meaningful action as the nations of the world prepare

to gather in Paris in December 2015 to try to hammer out a global

climate agreement. 5 This is equally true of the United States. 6

But, Jacques insists, much more is needed to understand China’s

rise and its implications. “China, by the standards of every other

country, is a most peculiar animal. Apart from size, it possesses two

other exceptional, even unique, characteristics. China is not just a

nation-state; it is also a civilization and a continent.” China as

civilization refers to “its history, dynasties, Confucius, the ways of

thinking, their relationships and customs, the guanxi (the network of

personal connections), the family, filial piety, ancestral worship, the

values, and distinctive philosophy.” This self-awareness and continuity

of being a civilization remains the primary point of reference for the

Chinese people amidst all the huge and revolutionary disruptions and

discontinuities they have undergone. “There are no other people in the

world,” Jacques writes, “who are so connected to their past and for

whom the past – not so much the recent past but the long-ago past – is

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so relevant and meaningful.” The most influential writer who shaped

China with his arguments and moral precepts is Confucius. Two of the

most obvious continuities in Chinese civilization, those that concern

the state and education, can be traced back to Confucius. The state is

the embodiment and guardian of Chinese civilization, whose most

important task is maintaining its unity. Education is vested with the

authority and reverence of Chinese civilization, with teachers the

transmitters and bearers of wisdom.

“The fact that [China] is a continent in size and diversity,”

Jacques affirms, “is critical to understanding how the country

functions in practice.” Instead of seeing China through the prism of a

conventional nation-state, it is better to think of it as a continental

system containing many semi-autonomous provinces with distinctive

political, economic, and social systems. The provinces are akin to

nation-states that enjoy great autonomy. The fundamental importance of

the relationship between Beijing and the provinces revolves around the

question of centralization and decentralization which constitutes the

fundamental fault line of Chinese politics. One of the key reforms of

Deng Xiaoping was to grant more freedom to provincial and local

governments as a means of encouraging greater economic initiative. But

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this major shift in power soon became a concern for the central

government, and it was largely reversed.

Although politics is the most impoverished area of debate in

China, its most fundamental feature is the overriding emphasis on the

country’s unity, whose reverse is the pathological fear of division and

instability. It is here that Martin Jacques introduces his discussion

of democracy, communist rule, and state capitalism. “Whatever

democratic political system evolves in China,” Jacques opines, “will

bear the heavy imprint of its Confucian past. . . . It would be wrong,

moreover, to regard Confucianism as entirely inimical to democratic

ideas. . . . The mandate of Heaven, in recognizing the right of the

people to rebel if the emperor failed them, was certainly a more

democratic idea than its European counterpart, the divine right of

kings.” Democracy in China, therefore, might emphasize more the

importance of accountability with regard to the conduct of officials

than the issue of elections. During the reform era, there has been a

steady process of depoliticization, which in effect resulted in a new

kind of compact: the task of the Communist Party is to govern, while

the people are left free to make money. Thus, the Party has been

transformed from a revolutionary organization into a ruling

administrative party. But the state has consistently been seen as the

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apogee of society, enjoying sovereignty over all else. The

developmental state in East Asia and China has been instrumental in

their economic success. So it will not be a surprise that the

capitalism with Chinese characteristics will not be the neoliberal kind

of market economy, but will have the state as an integral functioning

partner. And if this century will increasingly belong to China and

India, in conjunction with the United States, it will be the Age of the

Megastate, looking very different from the Westphalian system that we

have been accustomed to.

China’s civilization-state serves as a constant reminder that

China is the Middle Kingdom, occupying as the center of the world a

different position from all other states. Every society in some way

thinks of itself as racially superior to all others, sees the world in

terms of its own history, values, and mindset, and seeks to shape the

world according to its experiences and perceptions. Race and ethnicity

always enter into a country’s sense of origins and destiny. For China,

this means two things. China was once populated by a multitude of

races, but today projects itself a homogeneous nation, sharing a common

origin and a natural affinity as Han Chinese. And while the racial

superiority of the United States and Israel, for example, arises from

the belief that they are God’s chosen people, the racial chauvinism of

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China rests on the conviction of “an innate, almost visceral Han sense

of superiority.” China’s utterly Sinocentric view of its place in the

global order brings with it a belief in its universalism, the relevance

and application of its culture to all peoples and societies, and its

inherent superiority to all others. What does this Middle Kingdom

mentality imply for China as a great power? “White racism has had a far

greater and more profound – and deleterious – effect on the modern

world than any other,” Jacques points out. Do we expect that China as a

global superpower will be less informed by yellow racism and sense of

superiority?

China’s regard of itself as being at the summit of the global

hierarchy of race is already evident in its own backyard as East and

South East Asia are being reconfigured by China’s rise. The past is

prefiguring the present and the future. Until the latter decades of the

19th century, China enjoyed regional dominance in Asia, which dominance

took the form of a tributary system. Korea, part of Japan, Vietnam, and

Myanmar paid tributes to China, while a large number of South East

Asian states either paid tribute or acknowledged Chinese suzerainty.

From the second half of the 19th century, the European-conceived

Westphalian system, with its colonial subsystem, steadily replaced the

tributary system as the organizing principle of interstate relations in

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the region. Today, everywhere in East and South East Asia, China has

become the locomotive of growth by serving as a market for regional

states and a provider of investment and technology. Even Australia with

its huge deposits of raw materials, especially iron ore, has not

escaped the attention of China’s voracious appetite. But China’s

economic power does not translate into an interdependence of equality

with its neighbors; it is a tributary relationship of dominance and

dependence. It also means the effective exclusion of the United States

from economic diplomacy in the region.

China has also begun to flex its military muscle. Robert Kaplan,

who has written volumes on foreign affairs and political conflicts all

over the world, and who was named by Foreign Policy as one of the world’s

Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2011 and 2012, contends that China has made

the South China Sea Asia’s Cauldron, effectively putting an end to a stable

Pacific. The South China Sea is the location of the Spratly and Paracel

Islands, a collection of uninhabited rocks, under which is believed to

be precious mineral deposits. The Spratly are to the north of East

Malaysia and Brunei and to the west of the Philippines, and the

Paracels are to the east of Vietnam, over which China claims

sovereignty, but which is contested by the aforementioned countries.

There is also the dispute between Japan and China over the

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Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, and over Taiwan. All of

these countries, except Japan and Taiwan, do not have the military

capability to thwart China’s claims, and China has, until now, not

shown any intentions of using military force. And even if and when it

does, it is doubtful that the United States will militarily engage

China over these islands. In the meantime, tension abounds and

skirmishes ensue as China slowly squeezes the resolve of the concerned

countries into submission.

Kaplan points out that the South China Sea connects the maritime

world of the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent to that of Northeast

Asia. It is as central to Asia as the Mediterranean is to Europe. It is

arguably the most critical geographical juncture of the non-Western

world. If the dominance of Great Britain in the 19th century demanded

the control of the Mediterranean Sea, and if the ascendancy of the

United States in the 20th century necessitated the control of the Great

Caribbean, stretching from Florida to Venezuela, together with the Gulf

of Mexico, and uniting North and South America into a single coherent

geopolitical system, the rise of China is leading it to dominate the

maritime passage of the South China Sea. It will be remembered that the

Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was primarily about the political consolidation

of the American home continent, within whose geopolitical sphere of

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interest fell the Great Caribbean. Eliminating Europe from the New

World was the foreign policy cornerstone that was the Monroe Doctrine,

so the question is: Will China have as a goal of grand, long-term

strategy the elimination of America from Asia? “That is why,” Kaplan

foresees, “the South China Sea will be among the most salient political

and moral registers of any future U.S. defense retrenchment. Here is

where everyone is arming to the teeth, even as China’s military is

pulling further and further ahead of every other in the region.”

China’s global power is being driven by its voracious need for raw

materials of which it does not have enough. “In 2001,” Martin Jacques

takes note, “China officially launched its ‘Going Global’ strategy,

which was primarily intended to foster a closer relationship with

commodity-producing countries and thereby secure the raw materials the

country urgently required for its economic growth. The effects of this

policy have been dramatic. . . . [I]n fact China’s changing

relationship with the developing world is of rather greater import in

China’s emergence as a nascent global power.” The most dramatic example

is Africa. Chinese imports from, and Chinese investments in, sub-

Saharan Africa have dramatically risen, and this without regard to the

African country’s dictatorial rule and human rights record. China’s

impact on Africa has so far been positive, increasing the latter’s

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strategic importance in the world economy. “There is little evidence

that China’s record in Africa is any worse – and in fact is almost

certainly far better – than the West’s own miserable catalogue of

support for corrupt dictatorial regimes on the continent, not to

mention its colonial legacy.” According to Stefan Halper, this has led

to the growing discussion and resonance in the developing world of what

is called the “Beijing Consensus,” as opposed to the neoliberal

“Washington Consensus,” which emphasizes strong government, state-led

investments, and controlled markets for economic growth and

development.7

The Devouring Dragon that is China’s economy, however, has not had

equally beneficial effects on the global environment. Craig Simons,

former Peace Corps China Volunteer, Knight Science Journalism Fellow,

and reporter on the environment for various publications, categorically

states that China’s rise threatens our natural world, assaulting it at

an alarming rate. “The problems that are obvious across China –

millions of pollution-related deaths, plunging water tables, the

eradication of wildlife – are beginning to stretch far beyond its

borders to reshape the physical planet: the air we breathe, the health

of the oceans and the last remaining tracts of untouched forests, the

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diversity of plants and animals, the climates that shape where and how

we live – the very metabolism of our rapidly crowding planet.”

Simons also points out, as if people still needed to know, that

scientific study after scientific study show that “humanity is using

natural resources unsustainably – in ways that deplete them faster than

they can be replenished or their wastes safely dealt. Since the

beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for example, we have cleared

more than one quarter of the world’s original forests and an even

larger fraction of its wetlands and plains; set off the world’s sixth

great era of extinctions – with losses occurring at a rate scientists

consider between one hundred and one thousand times greater than before

humans dominated the Earth; pumped enough carbon dioxide and other

greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to heat the planet by more than 1

degree Fahrenheit; depleted the oceans to the point that the UN Food

and Agricultural Organization classifies more than one-quarter of fish

species as ‘overexploited’ or ‘depleted’; and released billions of

toxic and hazardous materials into the air and water.”

Simons, however, is honest to admit that “the Western world is

largely responsible. The impact of today’s wealthy states was to some

extent a direct result of colonization and resource exploitation – the

slaughter of species for profit and sport. But it also grew from a

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ratcheting up of the planet’s economic metabolism: as people in London,

Paris, and New York demanded tropical products, for example, land was

cleared, roads were built, animals were hunted, and communities were

pulled into the modern world, initiating additional sets of cascading

change. Writing about the United States, Richard Tucker, a historian at

the University of Michigan, argues that demands for imported products

have constituted a dimension of American power that while ‘almost

totally ignored . . . has surpassed all others in its grasp of Nature’s

global resources and thus in its worldwide ecological impact.’”

To put things into proper perspective, Simons also compares the

ecological footprint of an average Chinese citizen with the typical

American:

The average American is responsible for 13,647 kilowatt-hours of

electricity each year – enough to run 136,470 one-hundred-watt

lightbulbs simultaneously for an hour. He (or she) uses 933

gallons of crude oil and 2,156 cubic meters of natural gas. He is

responsible for roughly 18 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions

and eats 238 pounds of meat. He almost certainly owns a car. Every

day, he throws away four and a half pounds of trash.

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The average Chinese citizen, by comparison, looks as green as

a Vermont wind farm. She (or he) uses just 18 percent of the

American’s electricity demand, one-tenth of his oil demand, and

less than 5 percent of his natural gas demand. She is responsible

for less than one-third of the American’s carbon dioxide emissions

and – even though Chinese demand has more than doubled in recent

years – eats half as much meat as her American counterpart. China

surpassed the United States as the world’s largest auto market in

2010, but odds are high that she does not own a car. (In 2008,

only one in twenty-eight Chinese owned a motor vehicle.)

But today as Western countries have passed the reins of economic

growth to the developing world, among developing nations, “China by

dint of its rapidly growing needs, its ancient belief in natural cures,

and its nascent environmental awareness, stands above all others in the

damage it is causing to biodiversity. . . . [G]rowing Chinese desires

have pushed resource exploitation into the Earth’s last untouched

places.”

A most tragic aspect of the ecological catastrophe we are facing

is the rate at which plants, animals, and fishes are going extinct.

Whereas earlier episodes were caused by massive natural disruptions of

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the earth’s ecological processes, like collisions with asteroids and

volcanic eruptions, the current episode of mass extinction is one in

which one species, the human species, has pushed the others over the

cliff to oblivion. A large share of responsibility for the

multiplication of endangered species, of their extinction or near-

extinction lies with the increasing prosperity of a growing number of

people in China, who can afford their every whim and fancy, like home

décor and ornaments of ivory. There is also the impact of traditional

Chinese medicine, which continues to utilize various animal and plant

parts to allegedly cure any and every ailment, the most infamous of

which are tiger bone and rhino horn. Then there is the world’s most

open-minded culinary appetite, where almost everything that moves is

considered edible, where exotic meats are enjoyed, often of poached and

smuggled wildlife. In China, it is said, people eat everything on four

legs except tables, everything that flies except planes and everything

in the water except boats. China’s culinary taste is rooted in its

belief in traditional medicines: because every animal part has

medicinal benefits, they eat everything.

Simons notes that “it took Europe a couple of centuries to destroy

its environment. It took the U.S. about a century to get from a

frontier mentality to where we are now. China is doing this whole

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process at breakneck speed. It’s doing it in just a few decades.” It

will be a sad day when the most lasting legacy of China’s epic tale

ends with the destruction of the natural world.

The future shape of a new world order being driven by China’s

emergence as a global power remains as yet unclear. Martin Jacques lays

down eight characteristics of Chinese modernity that will impact the

processes of its transformation. One, China is not a nation-state in

the traditional sense, but a civilization-state. Most of what China is

today – its social relations and customs, its ways of being, its sense

of superiority, its belief in the state, its commitment to unity – are

products of its long history as a civilization. Two, China increasingly

conceives its relationship with East Asia in terms of a tributary

state. Could the same kind of hierarchical system be repeated

elsewhere? Could there even be a global tributary system? Three,

because of the distinctively Chinese attitude towards race and

ethnicity, it will mean that as China interacts with the rest of the

world, it will remain aloof, ensconced in a hierarchical view of

humanity, its sense of superiority resting on a combination of cultural

and racial hubris. Four, China operates, and will continue to operate,

on a quite different continent-sized canvas from other nation-states.

For one thing, the democratic systems that we associate with the West

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have never taken root on such a vast scale as China, with the single

exception of India. The fact that China’s true Western counterpart, the

European Union, is similarly without democracy serves to reinforce the

point. Five, the Chinese state is venerated, above society, possessed

of great prestige, regarded as an embodiment of what China is, and the

guarantor of the country’s stability and unity. The legitimacy of the

Chinese state does not depend on electoral mandate, but on that of

Heaven. Six, Chinese modernity, like other East Asian modernities, is

distinguished by the speed of the country’s transformation. It

combines, in a way quite different from the Western experience of

modernity, the past and the future at once and the same time in the

present. Seven, since 1949 China has been ruled by a Communist regime.

Negative Western attitudes toward China continue to be highly

influenced by the fact that it is ruled by a Communist Party. But the

Chinese Communist Party has created and re-created the modern Chinese

state: it reunited China after a century of disunity; it defeated

Japanese colonialism; it played a critical role in the rise of China;

it now manages China as a global power. Whatever the longer term may

hold, the Chinese Communist Party must be viewed in a more pluralistic

manner than was previously the case. It is certainly different from its

Soviet counterpart. Eight, China for some time to come combines the

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characteristics of a developed and developing country. It will continue

to display the interests and characteristics of both. But China is the

first great power that comes from the “wrong” side of the divide

between First and Third Worlds.

But if and when China becomes a major global power, what will a

globally hegemonic China look like? What would a Pax Sinica mean? Martin

Jacques catalogs 14 characteristics of America’s global hegemony and

speculates how these characteristics would change “when China rules the

world.” It is a very interesting exercise, at the end of which, Jacques

does not speculate that “the most traumatic consequences will be felt

by the West because it is the West that will find its historic position

being usurped by China. . . . If Europe will suffer, that is nothing to

the material and existential crisis that will be faced by the United

States. It is almost completely unprepared for a life where it is not

globally dominant. . . . The United States remain[s] largely blind to

what the future might hold, still basking in the glory of its past and

present, and preferring to believe that it would continue in the

future. . . . The turning point in the United States may well prove to

have been the financial meltdown in September 2008, with the near

collapse of the financial system and the demise of neo-liberalism.”

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Jacques issues a cautionary warning: “The biggest danger facing

the world is that the United States will at some point adopt an

aggressive stance that treats China as the enemy and seeks to isolate

it. A relatively benign example of this was the proposal of the

Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain for a ‘league of

democracies’, designed to exclude China and Russia (which he also

wanted to expel from the G8) and thereby create a new global division.

The longer-term fear must be that the U.S. engages China in military

competition and an arms race in something akin to a rerun of the Cold

War.”

Jacques’ peroration is worth quoting:

The emergence of China as a global power in effect relativizes

everything. The West is habituated to the idea that the world is

its world, the international community its community, the

international institutions its institutions, the world currency –

namely the dollar – its currency, and the world’s language – namely

English – its language. The assumption has been that the adjective

‘Western’ naturally and implicitly belongs in front of each

important noun. The West will progressively discover, to its acute

discomfort, that the world is no longer Western. Furthermore it

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will increasingly find itself in the same position as the rest of

the world during the West’s long era of supremacy, namely being

obliged to learn from and live on the terms of the West. For the

first time, a declining West will be required to engage with other

cultures and countries and learn from their strengths. The United

States is entering a protracted period of economic, political and

military trauma. It finds itself on the eve of a psychological,

emotional and existential crisis. Its medium-term reaction is

unlikely to be pretty: the world must hope it is not too ugly.

In the meantime, President Xi Jinping has consolidated power and

established himself as the paramount leader of China, has articulated a

simple and powerful vision of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation

under the mantra “Chinese Dream,” and has proposed to reform, if not

revolutionize, political and economic relations with the rest of the

world that will propel China to the top of the world order. 8 The West,

on the other hand, is confronted with an entrenched political

paralysis. The European Union cannot get its act together to solve its

enormous problems, and is in danger of dismemberment and dissolution. 9

In the broken American system, Republicans and Democrats, the former

more than the latter, assiduously pursue brute partisanship that

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renders impossible consensus on the common good. They are American

Neros fiddling while American Rome burns.10 Napoleon is supposed to

have said: “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she

wakes she will move the world.” China has awakened, but the world

awaits in trepidation whether it will be for good or ill of all of

humanity and the planet.

NOTES

1. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of

the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2011), which I reviewed for the International Review of Modern Sociology.

His recent articles on this topic are: “The Rise of China and the

Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?” Foreign Affairs,

January/February 2008; and “The Illusion of Geopolitics: The

Enduring Power of the Liberal Order,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2014.

2. Francis Fukuyama first published his thesis as an article, “The

End of History?” in The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), which he

then expanded into a book, The End of History and the Last Man (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992).

3. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the

Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

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2000). I discussed Pomeranz’ study in my “The Evolution and

Development of Societies: The West and the Third World,” JTWS 32:1

(Spring 2015), in which I especially emphasized the causal role of

colonialism in the rise of the West and the plight of the Third

World.

4. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1870-1914: Global Connections and

Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 469.

5. Jeff Goodell, “China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet,”

Rolling Stone, September 15, 2014.

6. As I finish this review essay, there is late breaking news that

the U.S. and China have reached a climate accord, in which the

United States would emit 26 to 28 percent less carbon in 2025,

while China pledged to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, if not

sooner. Immediately, however, Republicans, who will control both

houses of Congress, denounced the accord and vowed to derail it

(Mark Landler, “U.S. and China Reach Climate Accord after Months

of Talk,” The New York Times, November 11, 2014).

7. Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will

Dominate the Twenty-first Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010); see my

review, JTWS 31:1 (Spring 2014).

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8. Elizabeth C. Economy, “China’s Imperial President: Xi Jinping

Tightens His Grip,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2014; Hannah

Beech, “The Power of One: Xi Jinping, China’s strongest leader in

years, aims to propel his nation to the top of the world order,”

Time, November 17, 2014.

9. “Is Europe Kaput?” Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2012.

10. “See America: Land of Decay and Dysfunction,” Foreign Affairs,

September/October, 2014.

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*M. D. Litonjua is emeritus professor of sociology of Mount St. Joseph

University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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