Book Review: When China Rules The World by Martin Jacques

Jacques writes at length a provocative, frightening and partially persuasive analysis that the 8 main differences that will define China as a major global power will be:

1. China is a "civilization-state" not a nation state, which seems to mean (Jacques is not the most coherent writer in the world) it feels it transcends any nation and era and draws on its past history for ideals and inspiration rather than conforming to western views of modernity and civilization. In other words, it will do its own thing.
2. China will see its relationship to East Asia and other parts of the world as a "tributary-state" relationship. In other words, when it becomes powerful, it will see other nations are inferior and in need of submission to its demands.
3. China will see the Han Chinese as a superior race, not just culturally but also biologically.
   
4. China is a continent as well as a country. Point not clear. Something about how the continent includes many different nations and regions and becoming truly democratic will not be likely to happen. One region will dominate the rest, just like in the EU system where strong economies dominate the weaker.
5. China will continue to have politics in the form of "imperial dynasties" that do not share power. One group will hold the mandate from heaven, whether imperial, communist, or other until it is overthrown and replaced by another. In other words, China is unlikely to become a western style democracy.
6. China's current rapid speed of development will continue, but unlike Japan, Taiwan and Korea which as smaller nations could attain relative equality within the modernized country, China will continue to face disparity of development among regions.
7. China has had a Communist Party based system since 1949. It has successfully overseen China's re-emergence as a global economic power and therefore has a strong level of legitimacy.
8. China will continue to be a mix of "developed" and "developing"--allowing it to relate and be involved in interactions with both types of countries, developed and developing, colonizer and colonized, the winners of the 19th/20th centuries and the losers.

Reading through the book gave me the impression that Martin Jacques accumulated a wealth of information about the current situation of China, economic, political and cultural, and did his best to make sense of it to write predictions and cautions for western observers of China. However, the task may have been fundamentally impossible on such a large scale and the books leaves the reader a bit confused and unsatisfied with the depth of the final analysis.

The facts he gives are well-documented and valuable. However, when it comes to drawing conclusions about where China is going to go in the future, most of his paragraphs become bogged down in rather unsatisfactory repeats of the historical or current situation. Yes, we know China had an imperial tributary system that dominated that region of the world for centuries, and we know that it has a soaring socialist market economy that is going to become by far the largest in the world. So where is China going to go from here? Jacques is able to tell us that China will dictate its own terms of modernization and global interaction, and is able to tell us what we might need to consider in predicting what that modernization path will entail--the 8 things above.

OK, we'll leave it at that and see where things go. The most valuable point Jacques makes is that we should not assume we know where China is going and we should be ready for deviations from the western model of the liberal capitalist democratic multicultural state.