PULLING FOR THE LAST MARXIST OUPOST:

When China Rules by Martin Jacques: review: Adrian Michaels examines When China Rules the World: the Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World by Martin Jacques, an account of the emerging superpower (Adrian Michaels, 11 Jul 2009, Daily Telegraph)

How will the newly restored China look, and how will other countries interact with it? Will the West be undermined fatally, or will the astonishingly successful Western models for the economy, state and society be adopted by China? No one knows the answers to these questions, so that makes it an alluring subject for writers. We have had, among the most lauded of recent books, The Writing on the Wall by Will Hutton, the Left-leaning journalist and economist, and China Shakes the World by James Kynge, a former Beijing correspondent of the Financial Times.

Those titles were scary enough. Now comes Martin Jacques with When China Rules the World: the Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. Jacques is the former editor of Marxism Today, co-founder of the think tank Demos, Guardian columnist and visiting academic at numerous institutions.

Jacques’s thesis stands as a rejoinder to US triumphalism at the collapse of Communism in Europe. It is an implicit attack on Hutton’s views that Enlightenment values and institutions – competition, elected government, balance of powers, promotion of inquiry, openness, an independent judiciary and press – are a requirement for China to continue its current success. Where Hutton sees huge contradictions in China and troubles ahead, Jacques says “Western hegemony… will come to an end” and sees China continuing to prosper. Moreover, Jacques imagines that many other countries in China’s orbit will be pulled into China’s way of doing things, turning away from the methods advocated by a dying West.

Jacques agrees with Hutton that something has to give. He understands that China cannot grow at its current rate without consuming all the world’s resources.

Grow? They have a fertility rate under 1.8. They're declining.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2009 8:11 AM