Understanding the rise of China | Martin Jacques

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About Martin Jackques

Jacques’ interest in East Asia began in 1993 during a holiday there, and thereafter 'found every reason or excuse he could' to visit the region and write newspaper and magazine articles about it. In 2009 he published When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, which in its UK edition was sub-titled The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. With China’s GDP projected to overtake that of the US by 2027, he argued that far from China becoming like the West it would remain highly distinctive. He suggested, indeed, that there was not one modernity but many modernities, and that we had now entered the era of competing modernities. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the West, he asserted that China’s economic transformation would continue long into the future and similarly its political system, which, he argued, enjoyed deep roots and growing legitimacy. He believed that one of the reasons why most Westerners got China wrong was that they tried to understand it through a Western prism: it had to be understood in Chinese rather than Western terms. So, for example, China could not be regarded as a conventional nation-state but was primarily a civilization-state. 

Westernisation, he suggested, had peaked and that China’s rise would lead to a growing process of sinicisation in the world and the end of a Western-dominated international order.
From the outset, Jacques's book attracted a great deal of attention in the UK and the US and around the world, most notably in East Asia and especially China. Many reviews were favourable but some were critical. Perry Anderson described it as representing 'a belated meeting of Yesterday's Marxism with Asian Values'. David Pilling, on the other hand, thought it 'a useful corrective to those who assume that emerging superpowers, principal among them China, will recreate themselves in America's image', while Joseph Kahn praised the book's 'exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China'. Although the initial Chinese reaction was cautious, and not infrequently critical, by 2017 there was widespread acceptance of Jacques’s views and he came to be regarded as something of a prophet. The journalist Andrew Moody described Jacques as 'the man of the moment in China'.

When China Rules the World has been translated into Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Bahasa Malaysia, Burmese, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Turkish and Mongolian. A revised edition was published in 2012 and has been translated into Japanese and Bahasa Malaysia. A third edition, with a new introductory chapter, was published by China Citic in 2016. By November 2017 the book had, in all editions, sold more than 400,000 copies.


Jacques's talk at TEDSalon in London in 2010, on 'Understanding the Rise of China', had received more than 2.5 million views by March 2018.

Source:
Wikipedia.com