The world is being remade but the West is only very slowly waking up to this new reality. In 2027 Goldman Sachs estimates that the size of the Chinese economy will overtake America’s and by 2050 will be twice as big.
But we still think of the rise of the developing countries and the relative decline of the developed nations in almost exclusively economic terms. China’s rise is seen as having momentous economic implications but being of little political and cultural consequence. This is a profound mistake.
In the past – Britain and the US being obvious cases in point – the economic rise of a country has always been the prelude to the exercise of much wider political and cultural influence. So why should China be different?
[i]So why should China be different?[/i]
Well, demographics is one big reason. China’s demos begin to fall apart in about 2020 and it will move quite rapidly to being the sort of very old society Japan now is. India OTOH has really good demos out through 2050, as does the USA.
In many ways China is four countries, not one: a northeastern Rust Belt, the east central heartland, the southeastern economic dynamo, and the massive areas of central & western China. It is already posing significant problems for Beijing to hold these different areas together.
I’m not saying they’ll be insignificant, but I remember lots of people saying the same things about Japan 30 years ago, when there demos were much like China’s today.
What is exciting (and decidedly possible) is that by 2050 China will be the largest [i]Christian[/i] country in the world, and that our faith will be practised in freedom there. A point for prayer in any case.
Apologies for ad hominem reference, but Martin Jacques used to be editor of the monthly Marxism Today which is now defunct and I could not help but wonder whether his generally left-wing orientation might have influenced the article. (Despite its title BTW the journal was fairly free-ranging in its coverage.) He may of course be right and to some extent certainly is right. But to me the key question is this: can China make the leap from a cheap skills-based economy to a knowledge-based economy? The key to the latter is the free exchange of information and ideas, which is hardly the case there now.
One way in which China may become the 500 pound political gorilla, at least for a short period, is that it has money to throw around. The current situation in Fiji is an example of the potential new world(or at least Asian/Pacific and perhaps /African) order.
Currently China is mostly interested in China – one China with one culture under one party. When some group gets in power that wants to express Chinese greatness in the rest of the world things will get interesting.
Another example of Chinese influence would be the swift resolution of the Tamil Tiger rebellion which has plagued Sri Lanka for 30 years. With ample Chinese arms the Sri Lankan army brought the end game to a close. BTW, we have been plagued here in the UK with a Tamil demonstration that repeatedly blocked traffic here in London especially in the parliament area. It is now ended. I might have felt more sympathy had the same people protested against the Tamil Tigers’ repeated use of suicide bombers which killed many hundrends, perhaps thousands of people, including a prime minister of Sri Lanka.