Author Martin Jacques talks about his new book

China is going to rule the world. That should come as no surprise. What is interesting, however, as Martin Jacques' points out in his new book, When China Rules the World, is the West's total unpreparedness for this eventuality. This is an important book. Jacques, a respected political commentator and academic, has read widely, consulted widely, researched widely, including a stint at Beijing's Renmin University during 2005-2006. His is a big picture book which defies the orthodox Western mindset of looking at China's rise in strictly economic terms. Jacques argues that China cannot be regarded as a typical nation state but rather as a 'civilization state' and that as it rapidly reassumes its traditional position at the center of East Asia, its age-old sense of superiority will reassert itself. And the West, Jacques says, is blithely unprepared for it. We spoke with Martin Jacques ahead of his Glamour Bar talk in Shanghai on November 4.

You say it's inevitable that China will use its new-found economic strength for wider political and military ends. What has led you to that conclusion?
Well, as China becomes economically more powerful it will have much wider interests in the world, and you can see this gathering pace now compared with 10 years ago. It's got extensive interests in Africa and Latin America and, of course, in East Asia. And China will, like any power in that situation, be anxious to promote and defend those interests. I don’t think there's anything exceptional about that. These are, if you like, the consequences of being a major power in the world. You have to find ways in which to secure your interests. For example, China is acquiring extremely extensive raw material interests around the world which it needs to protect.

Are you saying China will use its military power aggressively in a colonizing sense like the other great powers have done?
That's a different question. I think we need to separate two things here. As any power rises it comes into a position where it is able to exercise much wider forms of influence around the world. China has hitherto not done that, but it's not done that because it's been A - poor and B - preoccupied with the problem of economic development. That has been the overwhelming preoccupation or focus of the Chinese government since 1978, and still remains so. But already China is acquiring wider interests. The second thing is that economic development creates the possibility of having wider forms of influence. If you don’t have economic power, if you're not underpinned by a prosperous and wealthy economy, you can't afford to have the Beijing Olympics or a film or television industry that can promote itself around the world. I essentially identify with the kind of argument that Paul Kennedy puts forward in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers which is that economic power is a precondition to the exercise of political and cultural power. And China will not be any different in this sense. That is really fundamental to the argument in my book. What I'm arguing is China's rise so far has been interpreted almost solely in economic terms. This is a narrow view of the rise of China. This is going to affect the exercise of power in a multitude of forms globally. And it's with a blindfold to not see what the wider ramifications are going to be. No, I don't think China is going to colonize. It's a very difficult question to answer the one you're asking me. Because we're so used to the Western form of domination of the last 200 years so to think in terms of another power with a very different culture and history and imagine what the forms of its hegemony, both hard power and soft power, will be is difficult. I would be surprised personally if China proves to be a colonizing power. Let me make that clear. The classic form of American domination has not been colonization. That was the European, and to some extent the Japanese form. But America has not by and large been like that. America has had what some people call an informal empire which has rested on its huge economic and political and cultural domination reinforced by its military power in terms of the world being ringed by American military bases and so on. I think the more interesting question would be, to what extent would I imagine China being a militarily aggressive power? I would think not. Not, at least, in the Western tradition. Because the western tradition has for a long time, at least 200 years, been a very aggressive tradition. And it emanates from Europe which has been a very aggressive and expansionist continent and to some extent that obviously influenced American behavior because America was a European transplant. I don't think China will be the same, primarily because China has always been essentially a continental power and its expansion has been within what it regards as its natural territory, which is roughly its borders now. And even when China did exercise power and projected its power in a regional context with the tributary states system and so on, it didn't conquer or annex those territories. On the contrary, the attitude of the imperial period was that the center of the universe, the land under heaven, was the middle kingdom. And it was superior to countries outside the middle kingdom and therefore it didn't try to annex them. And so there's been a very different tradition. If I were looking at historical resonance I would look at the tributary states system as a way of trying to understand how China might behave in East Asia projecting forward several decades. I think the past is always important in trying to understand a country's behavior in the future.

Much of the book seems to dispel a lot of myths the West has about China. Do you not feel that the West's perception of China lags behind what the reality is?
The problem with the West is that it's well behind the curve of China's development and what it means. It finds it very difficult to understand China and to understand where China is at. Why is this the case? I think that the rise of China is a completely novel problem for the West. It really hasn't had to contend with something like the rise of China. You could say it did in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, there are elements of that. You could say the same with the rise of Japan in the '70s and '80s. But China is on such a different scale and is very distinct in its own way. We're looking at something completely new as far as the West is concerned. And so how to understand the rise of China is a very big problem for the West. You know, I live in Britain and I'm struck by how the British mindset about China easily gets distracted by human rights, lack of democracy. I'm not saying those things don't matter. But they are not the beginning and the end of the agenda on China. The first question you must understand with the rise of China is the big picture, not the details. Not what you've got in your country that they haven't got and therefore should have. And therefore you mark them down for not having what you regard to be certain baseline characteristics. You can't do that with China because China is in a different place. It's come from poorer economic circumstances and has come from a completely different historical and cultural context. So you can't understand a developing country like China by projecting yourself onto China and then marking it down for not being like you. That is the mindset. That is a very powerful mindset in the West. So that's the first crucial problem. And it's wrong and it just prevents you getting the big picture because you’re not looking at China, you’re looking at yourself and looking at China through your own prism. And that will not do. The second point I'm going to make is that there's a very serious intellectual problem with very powerful political implications in the West regarding China. Basically, the West has understood the world in terms of its own development. The conceptual apparatus with which the West tries to understand the world is overwhelming derived from understanding Western development and Western history. You do actually have to understand China in its own specificity, in its own historical context, so you have to develop a different set of concepts which is what I've tried to do in the book with the concept of the civilization state, for instance. Of course it's alien to a Western way of thinking because actually it's not part of Western development. But it's fundamental, it seems to me, to trying to understand what China is like. The West has the wrong kind of conceptual equipment to try and understand the rise of China.

What do you think will hinder China rise to global power?
There are all sorts of problems. Presiding over the extremely rapid transformation of such a huge country…

Which it has done, though, successfully for 30 years…
Yeah, of course. It's been an extraordinary achievement and I wouldn't want to detract in any way from that. But it's still got loads of problems. Looking forward into the future we shouldn't get hijacked into thinking that China's already there. There are lots of questions to be resolved. The underlying problem of China is always holding the thing together, providing cohesion, because it's such a huge country, huge population, great diversity, great unevenness. So it's always, from Chinese history this is always a very fraught problem. And it expresses itself in all sorts of different ways. Looking forward, the biggest question is, through this hugely rapid transformation can the tensions and conflicts be managed successfully? And I don't think one can assume on the basis of the last 30 years that they necessarily will be even though the experience of the last 30 years is extremely encouraging.

Surely the inevitability of China's rise will depend on a set of favorable circumstances, just as it has done with the rise of the rest of the world's great powers? It's not as if America set out to be a global power, but it did capitalize on a set of favorable circumstances to become one…
Of course. The nature of the process is fundamentally unpredictable, because you cannot possibly foresee the sequence of events which will shape that process. So that is clearly true. I would just make an observation or two. First of all, I think that China will, as far as possible, seek to delay its rises as a global power. In other words, the focus will remain in a classical Deng Xiaoping sense. That is, the overwhelming priority will be economic growth and as far as possible China should not be distracted by anything else which might in any way prejudice achieving that successfully. The second point is that China is in a position to play for time. I think China can look forward to pretty healthy growth for some time to come. And while that is true the balance of power between China and any other country you care to mention is shifting constantly in China's favor. Take the relationship with the United States. China's economic rise is reconfiguring the power relationship between the two countries. China can afford to be patient. It's in the Chinese mentality. It's part of the DNA of the civilization to be patient, to play for time. Because time has a different meaning in Chinese terms compared to American terms. So I think China can afford to play a very long game. I think that China will be reluctant to be a global power because it’s still a very poor country, it's still deeply preoccupied with the problems of development. The second reason is historical. China had a very bad time in the early to mid 19th century – the century of humiliation and so on – and so that has taught it to be cautious. It's been humiliated and humbled and its still feels that.

Are you saying it still has a chip on its shoulder?
I think it still resents what happened and wants to make good the damage that was done, to recover from that situation. I personally don't think China has a chip. People talk about victim-hood and I think China has a certain victim mentality but I wouldn't want to major on that. It's an element in China's emotional makeup, but I would not want to overstress it.

What similarities, if any, does China's rise have with the rise of the Western powers?
China does have something in common with the West. And that is, unlike Japan, it regards itself to be a universal model. The West wants to project its model onto everyone else. Now, historically, China has not. They regard themselves to be the center of the world. I mean, that's what the whole notion of the middle kingdom is about… China as the great civilization beyond compare. This manifests as a very powerful sense of cultural and racial superiority which has somehow managed to survive. This attitude is still there and recovering. But it's very resilient. So China's universalism has not been a desire to project itself onto others. How that will work itself out in the future I don't know. This is my area of greatest concern… how China's sense of cultural and racial hubris will influence its behavior in the future. It's a difficult question. The Chinese have a very hierarchical sense of themselves and the world, and this is deeply rooted historically and how this will express itself I don't know.

How will China's hegemony play out in the cultural arena?
Well, this flows from what I've just been talking about. The Chinese have long regarded themselves as having the most sophisticated culture in the world. Now, I think this is a critical point. The defining sense of Chinese civilization is this sense of a very rich and historically very old and sophisticated culture. Of course, people are preoccupied with how China failed to meet the Western challenge which is why China fell into this so called century of humiliation. It was unable, unlike Japan, to reconstruct itself. But to get obsessed with that and to allow that to distract from the longer running characteristics and sense of what China is, which is a country with a deeply laid culture and profound sense of what it is. The Chinese are very clear about their identity. The Americans are constantly remaking themselves. The Chinese are not.

Is not the other difference that, whereas the US has been keen to aggressively export its culture, China historically has not?
Yes, that is true. The Han Chinese have hitherto not tried to project their culture onto others. Although internally, of course, they have.

Finally, what are the key differences between China and that other great civilization state, India?
The key difference with India is, first of all, that India is a far more recent creation. Only with the British Raj did it begin to acquire anything vaguely like its present borders. The regional identity is much stronger. India is a multiracial country, it regards itself as a multiracial country. It is the home to many different languages which are not communicable either by the spoken or written word. So regional identities are much more important in India than they are China. People in India often think of themselves as Punjabi or Gujarati or Tamil rather than being Indian. China is the opposite of that unless you're one of the minorities.

// Read The New York Times review here

Comments (1)

Show/hide comments

Show/hide comment form