http://www.martinjacques.com/articles/articles-geopolitics-globalisation/the-myopic-western-view-of-chinas-economic-rise/
China’s governance system has been remarkably successful for more than three decades. It has presided over the greatest economic transformation in modern history.
The state is highly competent, able to think strategically, while at the same time pragmatic and experimental. It has presided over rapidly rising living standards and enjoys a great deal of popular support.
The legitimacy of the Chinese state lies deep in the country’s history. Along with the family, the state is one of the two most important institutions. For at least two millennia the state has been seen as the guardian and embodiment of Chinese civilisation. This is the key source of its legitimacy.
Some of the other characteristics of the state – the emphasis on meritocracy, state competence and an essentially familial concept of the relationship between the state and the people – are deeply rooted.
The Communist party’s achievement in recent decades has, not least, been its reinvention of the state and the restoration, in a modern context, of its main historical characteristics – its pivotal status, competence, meritocracy, legitimacy and efficacy.
It is inconceivable that the Chinese state could have masterminded such a huge economic transformation if it too had not been the subject of profound reform. This process will continue, probably even more dramatically.
The Chinese governing system as fragile and tenuous, we need to understand what has been, by the standard of the past three decades, an extraordinarily successful institution, one that the world will increasingly come to recognise it must learn from.
American democracy has become increasingly dysfunctional, short-term, polarised and subject to capture by vested interests, in particular the 1 per cent.
There are strong historical reasons for believing that western democracies may face a difficult and uncertain future. Their past success has been based on two underlying conditions: firstly, the fact that the west has for at least two centuries dominated the world, bringing huge economic advantages and bestowing on their political elites great status and prestige; and secondly, their populations have for a long time enjoyed rising living standards. Neither can be relied upon in the future.
in 2025, Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy.
the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020.
This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture.
the civilization-state, customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values.
The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together.
Country like China, a civilization-state. The response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.
The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han?
This is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.
The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family.
The state is everywhere in China. it's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state.
Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said,"The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe."
the Great Wall , the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China.
East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world.
East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia.
G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world.
China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.
a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour.
China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.
The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on give Birth of a New Global Order.
China’s governance system has been remarkably successful for more than three decades. It has presided over the greatest economic transformation in modern history.
The state is highly competent, able to think strategically, while at the same time pragmatic and experimental. It has presided over rapidly rising living standards and enjoys a great deal of popular support.
The legitimacy of the Chinese state lies deep in the country’s history. Along with the family, the state is one of the two most important institutions. For at least two millennia the state has been seen as the guardian and embodiment of Chinese civilisation. This is the key source of its legitimacy.
Some of the other characteristics of the state – the emphasis on meritocracy, state competence and an essentially familial concept of the relationship between the state and the people – are deeply rooted.
The Communist party’s achievement in recent decades has, not least, been its reinvention of the state and the restoration, in a modern context, of its main historical characteristics – its pivotal status, competence, meritocracy, legitimacy and efficacy.
It is inconceivable that the Chinese state could have masterminded such a huge economic transformation if it too had not been the subject of profound reform. This process will continue, probably even more dramatically.
The Chinese governing system as fragile and tenuous, we need to understand what has been, by the standard of the past three decades, an extraordinarily successful institution, one that the world will increasingly come to recognise it must learn from.
American democracy has become increasingly dysfunctional, short-term, polarised and subject to capture by vested interests, in particular the 1 per cent.
There are strong historical reasons for believing that western democracies may face a difficult and uncertain future. Their past success has been based on two underlying conditions: firstly, the fact that the west has for at least two centuries dominated the world, bringing huge economic advantages and bestowing on their political elites great status and prestige; and secondly, their populations have for a long time enjoyed rising living standards. Neither can be relied upon in the future.
The west is in decline, Europe rampantly so. Some estimates suggest that by 2030 China could account for a third of global output and be twice the size of the US economy. American power would then be a pale shadow of what it is today. This is bound to affect how the American people regard their political elite and political system. Furthermore, with strong evidence that living standards have been static for many people in the US and western Europe, the outlook is uncertain.
Rising powers tend to enjoy strengthening domestic support, while declining ones incur their citizens’ discontent. We should not discount the possibility that the problems of governance will become more acute in the west than China.
http://youtu.be/3G1EyvRZmOs
Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China
http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_rise_of_china/transcript?language=en
in 2025, Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy.
the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020.
This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture.
the civilization-state, customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values.
The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together.
Country like China, a civilization-state. The response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.
The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han?
This is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.
The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family.
The state is everywhere in China. it's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state.
Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said,"The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe."
the Great Wall , the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China.
East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world.
East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia.
G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world.
China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.
a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour.
China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.
The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on give Birth of a New Global Order.
