Will China Rule the World?

Have the past two centuries of a Western defined and dominated world order — the norms, rules and ways of thinking about the world — the very concept of modernity — been a historical anomaly? After all, until the early 1800s, really until the onset of the industrial age, China and India accounted for some 50% of the world economy. The list of Chinese inventions over its nearly 5000 year history is a long one, from gunpowder and the printing press to oceanic navigation decades before the West.

A standing half-joking line sometimes tossed around by Asia hands is that “China had a couple of bad centuries, but now they’re back.” That notion is really the theme of a widely discussed recent book by Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World. It’s more than your typical “rise of China” book citing the usual suspects: economic prowess matched by diplomatic skill and military build-up. While Jacques’ well-researched, readable, multi-dimensional and provocative book forecasting a future Sino-centric world can be accused of seeing things too much through a Chinese prism, much of it is not easily dismissed.