twice the size of the American economy –
and larger than the US and European
economy combined. Welcome to a very
different future.
And China’s impact will not simply be
economic. Just as China will transform the
world economically it will have a similar
impact politically and culturally. But this
will take longer. There was a time lag
between Britain’s Industrial Revolution
and its later huge political and military
power – as expressed for example in its
burgeoning empire – in the second half of
the nineteenth century. Likewise America
possessed the world’s largest economy by
around 1900 but it was not until after
1945 that it became the dominant global
power and began to shape the world and
its values in a way that we are familiar
with today. We can expect the same time
delay with China. It probably won’t be
obvious until the second half of this
century that the world is becoming
increasingly Chinese rather than Western.
At present there is a widespread
assumption that as China modernises it
will become a replica of the West. But
modernity is not just a product of markets,
competition and technology: it is equally
a function of history and culture. And
China’s history and culture are profoundly
different from those of the West. China
has never been like the West and never
will be. True, it has been learning much
from the West, and this process will
continue, but it will, nonetheless, remain
very distinctive.
Indeed, one of the great difficulties
that the West will face is trying to
understand China. Hitherto, it has largely
tried to make sense of China in Western
terms using concepts derived from
Western experience. This in large
measure explains why Western
predictions about China, not least about
its economic performance, have been so
frequently wrong. We will find in the
future, however, that we have no choice
other than to understand China in its own
terms. This will be a huge challenge to the
West that is likely to occupy us for most
of this century.
Let us take a couple of examples.
Although China has called itself a nation-
state for over a century, in reality it is
primarily a civilization-state. China, of
course, is not a century old but more like
two thousand years old. So the experience
of being a nation-state is very recent and
extremely brief. The Chinese sense of
whom they are and what China is, comes
not from the last century but
overwhelmingly from the previous two
millennia when China was a civilization-
state. A pictographic language, Confucian
values, a very distinctive notion of the
state and the family, Chinese food and
medicine, ancestral worship and suchlike
date back many centuries and often
millennia. The outlook of Westerners is
largely shaped by a sense of national
identity; the Chinese, in contrast, are
fundamentally moulded by their notion of
civilization. The implications of this
difference are multifarious and profound.
Or take the question of governance. It is
overwhelmingly assumed in the West that
the legitimacy of government is a function
of Western-style democracy. On this basis,
the Chinese state is clearly bereft of
legitimacy. Yet there is much evidence to
suggest that the Chinese state in fact
enjoys considerable legitimacy in the eyes
of the Chinese. Clearly the reason is not
Western-style democracy; so what is the
explanation? The Chinese see the state as
the embodiment of their civilization and
its key task as preserving the unity of that
civilization. Unlike in the West,
furthermore, where the government is
seen in utilitarian and instrumentalist
terms – ‘what will it do for me?’ – in China,
as in many other East Asian societies,
especially those derived from
Confucianism, the state is seen in familial
terms, as, in effect, the parent
(traditionally, the father). This is totally
different from Western ways of thinking.
Finally, the Chinese lay great importance
on the competence of the state and its
officials, and on meritocratic selection.
This is a very old tradition that go es back
more than two millennia. There is no
question that the Chinese state is by and
large far more competent than its Western
counterparts, especially given it is still a
developing country.
Just these two examples illustrate the
profound difference between Western and
Chinese traditions. In this light it is not
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