[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] When China Rules the World

[Bill Totten]

by John Gray

New Statesman (June 18 2009)


It is clear that the rise of China marks the end of western global
hegemony, but just what the coming Chinese ascendency will look like is
another matter.

On his first visit to China as US treasury secretary, at the start of this
month, Timothy Geithner attempted to reassure an audience at Peking
University that there is no need to worry about the enormous holdings
China has built up in US government bonds. "Chinese assets are very safe",
he declared. Geithner's statement produced loud laughter from the largely
student audience.

Unlike most western commentators, who still give the Obama administration
the benefit of the doubt, China's emerging elite know there is no prospect
that the United States will pay back its debts at anything like their
current value. The only way the US can repay its vast borrowings is by
debasing the dollar - a process in which China will inevitably be
short-changed. Significantly, the students' response was not anger, but
derision - a clear sign of how the US is now perceived. Resentment at US
power is being replaced by contempt, as the impotence and self-deception
of the American political class in the face of the country's problems
become increasingly evident.

In a characteristically incisive formulation, Martin Jacques writes that
the "rise of China and the decline of the United States are central to the
present global depression". Although China remains a fast-emerging, rather
than a developed, economy and even though it is nowhere near acquiring
America's worldwide military reach, the crisis has speeded up a shift in
the balance of power between the two countries that has been taking place
for decades. The importance of China's advance goes far beyond the
incontrovertible fact of America's relative decline, however. If Jacques
is right, the rise of China will bring the end of the western world as we
have known it over the past several hundred years.

Western commentators on China fall into two main camps. The first, which
we may called the China sceptics, rejects out of hand the notion that
China can ever become the world's dominant power. The second - which is
increasingly vocal and influential, especially in the US - sees the rise
of China as a major threat to the existing, western-dominated global
system. Though the two views are not finally compatible, they can quite
often be found in the same person. The awkward fact with which both of
them struggle is that China's industrialisation - the largest in history -
has been achieved indigenously. China's success is widely praised by
western governments, but it has been based on a rejection of western
advice.

Like climate-change sceptics, China sceptics tend simply to ignore
evidence that does not fit their world-view. Even if they accept that
China's success over the past thirty years has been achieved by following
a distinctive path, they can only insist that China will be compelled to
westernise at some point in the future - overlooking how it is western
neoliberalism, and not Chinese capitalism, that has collapsed. Or else,
they must admit that China can go on developing, and even overtake the
west, while remaining as different from the west as it has ever been. This
last is a terrifying scenario, as it implies that if a country
westernises, that does not ensure its economic success - if anything, it
may be an impediment. In other words, China may be so successful because
it is so different from the west. At this point, the first view of China
morphs into the second and we start to hear hysterical warnings of the
threat posed by China's inexorable rise. Inside every China sceptic is a
prophet of the New Yellow Peril waiting to be let out.

The common conviction of nearly all these commentators is that no country
can modernise without following a western path. The message of When China
Rules the World (2009) - by far the best book on China to have been
published in many years, and one of the most important inquiries into the
nature of modernisation - is that this assumption blinds us to the way the
world is being reshaped before our eyes. Jacques's comprehensive and
richly detailed analysis will be an indispensable resource for anyone who
wants to understand contemporary China; but its primary value is in
overturning the assumption - almost universal in the west, and held by
some in China - that, as a country develops, it is bound to evolve into
something like a western state. As Jacques points out, China "may seem
like a nation state, but its geological formation is that of a
civilisation state". When China was weak it had little alternative but to
accept western terms of reference. As it grows richer and stronger, China
is more and more affirming the inherent value, if not the actual
superiority, of its ancient civilisation. Far from turning its back on its
history, the country is returning to the past in order to forge a new
version of modernity.

"The emergence of China as a global power", Jacques writes, "in effect
relativises everything". The author is not endorsing any kind of
fashionable postmodernism here. He is clear that there are universal human
values. His argument is rather that there are many ways of recognising
universal values in a modern society. All the same, the version of
modernity which appears to be emerging in China does come with some rather
dark spots. The deep sense of China as a unitary civilisation, together
with a pervasive belief in Han superiority, leaves little tolerance for
the claims of other cultural groups.

Some way may be found, the author suggests, whereby the Tibetans can
coexist with the Chinese state. But, as he admits, the dominant sense of
Chinese identity is essentially racial, and most Chinese look down on
Tibetans with loathing. In line with this, and also for strategic reasons,
"China has encouraged large-scale Han migration in an effort to alter the
ethnic balance of the population and thereby weaken the position of the
Tibetans who for the most part live in the rural areas and in segregated
urban ghettos". It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in building the
Chinese civilisation state, Beijing is systematically destroying a unique
civilisation.

A resurgent China will be problematical in a number of ways. It remains
very unclear how China's rulers view the international system. Will they
try to reshape it in their own image, and if so what will the world then
look like? Jacques argues that something like the tributary system that
existed in the past can be re-created, but that system applied mainly to
China's nearer and smaller neighbours. It is impossible to envisage such
an unequal relationship being acceptable to India or Russia or, for that
matter, Japan. Again, can China extend its control of world markets while
retaining its grip on its own economy? Control of capital flows has been
one of China's strengths in the current crisis. Will it be ready to
compromise this advantage in order to supplant the failing dollar as the
world's reserve currency?

There are no clear answers, if only because China's ruling elite have
almost certainly not begun to answer these questions themselves. What is
undeniable is that China's ascendancy is bringing with it an international
environment potentially more volatile than any in the recent past. So far,
says Jacques, "The changes wrought by China's rise have done little to
disturb the calm of global waters, yet their speed and enormity suggest
that we have entered an era of profound instability; by way of contrast,
the Cold War was characterised by relative predictability combined with
exceptional stability".

The witless, end-of-history triumphalism that shaped western attitudes in
the post-Cold War era is nowhere more misplaced than in regard to China.
History is on the move again - and it is not the delusional, teleological,
self-congratulating history dreamt up by liberal rationalists, which
somehow always ends with themselves as the winners. The rise of China is
the real thing, a world-changing event that marks the end of western
hegemony.

_____

John Gray's latest book is Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (Allen Lane,
2009)

http://www.newstatesman.com/2009/06/western-world-china-state


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