Martin Jacques

A China está de volta! Não convém negar esta realidade. Esse país imenso, rico de história, de cultura e de invenções, prepara-se para retomar o seu lugar na história e no mundo.
Os EUA, potência industrial que surgiu durante a II Guerra Mundial, estão a definhar em termos económicos, políticos e militares. Atrás dos EUA seguem o mesmo caminho de declínio todos os países ocidentais.
Estas são as duas tendências que se observam após a crise financeira de 2008. Atenção, tendências! O futuro ainda não está decidido. É que ambas as tendências têm um denominador comum: o neo-liberalismo americano e ocidental. Foi o neo-liberalismo que ao deslocalizar a indústria para a China, transferiu a médio prazo a riqueza, crescimento, emprego, etc. para aquele país, em troca de lucros imediatos para alguns empresários.
Se o Ocidente se reformar, acabar com o neo-liberalismo, mudar as regras do comércio internacional, salvar-se-á do descalabro e a China não crescerá tão depressa. Porém, para isso, seria necessário estratégia e visão de futuro e não a negação do desastre anunciado, tal como o autor observa no final da obra.
Seja como for, ainda muita coisa irá acontecer. O autor não considerou a Rússia, como se este jogo se jogasse a dois. Pelo menos a Rússia é uma peça importante neste jogo. A Índia também terá uma palavra a dizer, até porque é o principal aliado da Rússia.
Nada é ainda definitivo. Mas no Ocidente convém começar a pensar em reformas para evitar conflitos e, talvez, a III Guerra Mundial.… (altro)

A robust qualitative and quantitative account of China's rise to power in the closing decades of the 20th and beginning decades of the 21st centuries. When China Rules the World certainly makes its case with more than enough supporting data.

Much of the informative qualitative aspects are traced through a high-level view of Chinese history, revealing the longevity of the Chinese culture, little-known innovative aspects of the earliest Chinese rulers, inventors and explorers, as well as overviews of Chinese cultural behaviors, political philosophies, social sentiments and its notable lack of outward imperial expansion. Indeed, China refers to the latter half of the 19th through the 20th as its "century of humiliation" while, by the beginning of the 21st century it finds itself leading the economic world order admist the faltering Western institutions that have dominated it for the last century and a half.

Unsurprisingly, most of Jacques' argument stems from the quantitative analysis of Chinese economic performance, relative to the global economic order and, if the intuition wasn't already there for you, the rise of Chinese influence around the world is convincingly an incontrovertible reality. The argument is made through countless references (contained within roughly 100 pages of notes and bibliography) and a few anecdotes from Jacques himself (observed through his professor fellowships held at several Chinese universities through the early aughts and aught-teens).

While the last update was over 7 years ago, there's little that seems to have changed in the general trend that Jacques has illustrated throughout this book. The only shortcoming I had with it, and this may merit a separate text altogether, is the lack of detail on domestic political function, structure and organization. While there was a small subsection or two on domestic politics, very little of it made any mention to particulars and instead fell to the more qualitative anecdotes and inferences made by Jacques. Whether this was due to far less rigidity in domestic Chinese political protocol (as compared with its Western counterparts) or that it was simply not what Jacques was attempting to explain was not easily discerned within the text.

Regardless of this, Jacques has put together a comprehensive and quality argument for why China will rule the world. For anyone interested in foreign policy, global finance, economic power and even Chinese politics, Chinese culture and its history in terms of Western notions and concepts, I would recommend this book for reading, perusal, or reference.… (altro)

This is, as everyone says, an important and timely book. Of course it is. The more interesting point is that it's actually rather good, and admirably coherent. Unlike some other recent books on China, which seem to hinge on one idea and uses it as a crow-bar with which to attack all issues relating to China (Will Hutton is definitely guilty in this regard), or one approach to the world (as with Kissinger and yet another book nominally about Realpolitik but which often seems to be more a thinly veiled memoir and extended process in self-on-back-patting), Jacques has an entire arsenal of observations. Indeed, there are so many, that one has to reach beyond military metaphors and say he also has an orchestra of ideas. This is important, because he does not simply rely on economics (central though this is), rather illustrating the importance of philosophy, geography, politics, geopolitics, and history in understanding a nation.
Beyond this, Jacques calls on us of the west (be we colonizer or colonized) to understand just what it means to be western. In understanding China we begin to understand Ireland, Britain, France, America - only from the outside in. It is something of an exercise in ideology critique, then, since Jacques again and again isolates what we take to be givens (democracy as the root of political legitimacy, as one stand-out example), dusts off the cobwebs of accumulated assumptions and lazy thought, and hands back a rather different object to us. He recognizes the rhetorical nature of the title too, pointing out that military or political supremacy after the American or European model is not in the make-up of Chinese civilization, or at least not beyond what China considers to be its rightful territory (thus what is to outsiders the curiously -at times almost unintelligibly - fraught relationships with Tibet and Taiwan). Yes, certainly a timely and important book.… (altro)