Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China
The world is changing with really remarkable speed.If you look at the chart at the top here, you’ll see that in 2025 these 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.We should bear in mind here these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crises.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP (Banque Nationale de Paris) PARIBAS for when China will have a larger economy than the United States.Goldman Sachs projected 2027.The post-crisis projection is 2010.That’s just a decade way.
China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects.First of all, it\'s a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10% a year.And within a decade it will have the largest economy in the world.Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country.
Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world which I think is China will become, will be not from the West, and from very very different civilizational roots.
Now I know it’s a widespread aumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also Westernize.This is an illusion.It’s an aumption that modernity is a product simply of competition markets and technology.It is not; it is also shaped equally by history and culture.China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.It will remain in very fundamental respects very different.Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment by-and-large is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas.We can’t.Now I want to offer you 3 building blocks for trying to understand what China is like just as a beginning.
The first is this, that China is not really a nation state.Okay, it\'s called itself a nation state for the last hundred years.But everyone who knows anything about China knows it’s a lot older than this.This was what China looked with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C.at the end of warring state period—the birth of modern China.And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China.Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2000 years ago, and you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.
Now what is extraordinary about this is what gives China it’s sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation state period which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization state.I’m thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like “guanxi”, Confucian values and so on.These are all things that come from the period of the civilization state.
In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization state, rather than as a nation state.And there’s one other thing to add to this, and that is this.Of course we know China’s big, huge demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people.What we often aren’t really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized.You can’t run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case.It’s never been the case.
So this is China, a civilization state, rather than a nation state.And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications.I\'ll give you two quick ones.
The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization.You know, 2000 years ago, Europe breakdown, the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, it divided, and its 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.
The second is, maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong.Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was, one country, two systems.And I’ll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them.Window dreing.When China gets its hands on Hong Knong, that won’t be the case.13 years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997.We were wrong.Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we though, naturally enough in nation state ways.
Think of German unification, 1990.What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West.One nation, one system—that is the nation state mentality.But you can’t run a country like China, a civilization state on the basis of one civilization, one system.It doesn\'t work.So actually 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.Let me offer you another building block to try to understand China, maybe it’s not such a comfortable one.The Chinese have a very very different conception of race to most other countries.Do you know of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90% of them think they belong to the same race, the Han.Now this is completely different from the other world’s 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.So the question is, why? Well, the reason I think eentially is again back to the civilization state.Very very…you know, at least 2000 years, a history of conquest, absorption, aimilation and so on, led to the proce by which over time this notion of the Han emerged, of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.
Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together.The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together.The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural differences.They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not.Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state.Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West.Now we in the West are overwhelmingly seem to think—in these days at least—that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy.The problem of this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese that is true with any Western state.And the reason for this is because—well, there’re two reasons I think.And it’s obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don’t have a democracy.
And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special.It enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization state.This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.
And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state’s power is continuously challenged—I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on.For 1000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged.It’s had no serious rivals.So you can see, the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history.
The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state.Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don’t see the state like that at all.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.This the Chinese view of the state, very very different to us.It’s embedded in society in a different kind of way to what the case in the West.
And I would suggest you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we’ve had to think about in the past.You know that China believes in the state and market, I mean, 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.” And, apart from the Mao period, that remained more-or-le the case ever since.But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state.The state is everywhere in China.I mean, its leading firms, many of them are still publicly owned.Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on the state patronage.Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state.And the state, of course, its authority flows into lot of other areas as we are familiar with, with something like the one-child policy.Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft.I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one.But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the 5th century B.C.and was finally completed in the 7th century A.D.It went for 1114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai.So there’s a long history of extraordinary state infrastructure projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expreions of state competence within China.So there we have 3 building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China—the civilization state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society.
And yet we still insist, by-and-large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts.If you want to know why we unerringly to get China wrong, our predictions about what’s going to happen to China are incorrect, this is the reason.Unfortunately I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality.There’s kind of arrogant.It’s arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure.
And secondly, it’s ignorant.We refuse to really addre the iue of difference.You know, there’s a very interesting paage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian.And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures.But it’s not.In many ways, it’s the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it’s not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations.Because at the end of the day, it could, if neceary by force, get its own way.Whereas those cultures, virtually the rest of the world in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-à-vis the West, have been thereby forced to understand the West, because the West’s presence in those societies.And, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.I mean take the question of East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc.a third of the world’s population lives there, now the largest economic region in the world.And I’ll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asian.
Now this point is very germane, I’m afraid, to the present.Because what’s happening? Back to that chart at the beginning the Goldman Sachs chart.What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world.I mean we’ve seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7 or the G8.And there are 2 consequences of this, first, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world.There was a dramatic illustration of this actually, a year ago, Copenhagen, climate change conference, Europe was not at the final negotiating table.When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago, and that is what is going to happen in the future.And the second implication is that the world will inevitably as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it’ll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with or conversant with.And at last, I’m afraid, take Europe, America is slightly different, but Europeans by and large I have to say are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing.Some people, I’ve got an English friend in China, he said “the continent is sleepwalking into oblivion.” Well maybe that’s true, maybe that’s an exaggeration.But there’s another problem which goes along with this that Europe is increasing out of touch with the world and that is a sort of a lo of a sense of the future.I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in its confidence.Take the 19th century for example, but this, alas, is no longer true.If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China—there’s old Confucius.This is a railway station the like of which you’ve never seen before.It doesn’t even look like a railway station.This is the new Guangzhou railway station for the high-speed trains.China already has more of the bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.Or take this: now this is an idea, but it’s an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing.Here you have a megbus, on the upper deck carries about 2000 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。
Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States.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。
Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it.But I want to argue above all, a big picture positive for this world.You know, for 200 years, the world was eentially governed by a fragment of the human population.That’s what Europe and North America represented.The arrival of countries like China and India—between them 38% of the world’s population, and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years.Civilizations and cultures which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world.As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation.And we will have to learn about these civilizations.This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and acro the Indian Ocean to East Africa.The little boat in front of it, was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus croed the Atlantic.Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by Zhu Zhou in 1368.I think they’re playing golf.Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.Welcome to the future.Thank you!
David Steindl Rast Want to be Happy be Grateful
There is something you know about me, something very personal, and there is something I know about every one of you and that\'s very central to your concerns.There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with, and that is that all of us want to be happy.In this, we are all together.How we imagine our happine, that differs from one another, but it\'s already a lot that we have all in common, that we want to be happy.
Now my topic is gratefulne.How is the connection between happine and gratefulne? Many people would say, well, that\'s very easy.When you are happy, you are grateful.But think again.Is it really the happy people that are grateful? We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy, because they want something else or they want more of the same.And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy.They radiate happine.You are surprised.Why? Because they are grateful.So it is not happine that makes us grateful.It\'s gratefulne that makes us happy.If you think it\'s happine that makes you grateful, think again.It\'s gratefulne that makes you happy.
Now, we can ask, what really do we mean by gratefulne? And how does it work? I appeal to your own experience.We all know from experience how it goes.We experience something that\'s valuable to us.Something is given to us that\'s valuable to us.And it\'s really given.These two things have to come together.It has to be something valuable, and it\'s a real gift.You haven\'t bought it.You haven\'t earned it.You haven\'t traded it in.You haven\'t worked for it.It\'s just given to you.And when these two things come together, something that\'s really valuable to me and I realize it\'s freely given, then gratefulne spontaneously rises in my heart, happine spontaneously rises in my heart.That\'s how gratefulne happens.
Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while.We cannot only have grateful experiences.We can be people who live gratefully.Grateful living, that is the thing.And how can we live gratefully? By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say.It\'s a gift.You haven\'t earned it.You haven\'t brought it about in any way.You have no way of auring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that\'s the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains.If we didn\'t have this present moment, we wouldn\'t have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything, and this moment is a gift.It\'s a given moment, as we say.
Now, we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity.What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn\'t have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn\'t be grateful for it.Opportunity is the gift within every gift, and we have this saying, opportunity knocks only once.Well, think again.Every moment is a new gift, over and over again, and if you mi the opportunity of this moment, another moment is given to us, and another moment.We can avail ourselves of this opportunity, or we can mi it, and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity, it is the key to happine.Behold the master key to our happine in our own hands.Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift.
Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not.We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppreion, for exploitation.On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the lo of a friend, for unfaithfulne, for bereavement.But I didn\'t say we can be grateful for everything.I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us.It isn\'t as bad as it might seem.Actually, when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is opportunity to enjoy, and we only mi it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity.
But once in a while, something very difficult is given to us, and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it\'s a challenge to rise to that opportunity, and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful.Learning patience, for instance.We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon.That takes patience.That\'s difficult.It may be to stand up for your opinion, to stand up for your conviction.That\'s an opportunity that is given to us.To learn, to suffer, to stand up, all these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire.They make something out of life.And those who fail get another opportunity.We always get another opportunity.That\'s the wonderful richne of life.
So how can we find a method that will harne this? How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful.How can we do it? It\'s a very simple method.It\'s so simple that it\'s actually what we were told as children when we learned to cro the street.Stop.Look.Go.That\'s all.But how often do we stop? We rush through life.We don\'t stop.We mi the opportunity because we don\'t stop.We have to stop.We have to get quiet.And we have to build stop signs into our lives.
When I was in Africa some years ago and then came back, I noticed water.In Africa where I was, I didn\'t have drinkable water.Every time I turned on the faucet, I was overwhelmed.Every time I clicked on the light, I was so grateful.It made me so happy.But after a while, this wears off.So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet, and every time I turned it on, water.So leave it up to your own imagination.You can find whatever works best for you, but you need stop signs in your life.And when you stop, then the next thing is to look.You look.You open your eyes.You open your ears.You open your nose.You open all your senses for this wonderful richne that is given to us.There is no end to it, and that is what life is all about, to enjoy, to enjoy what is given to us.
And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy.And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third.Stop, look, and then go, and really do something.And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment.Mostly it\'s the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it\'s something more difficult.
But whatever it is, if we take this opportunity, we go with it, we are creative, those are the creative people, and that little stop, look, go, is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world.Because we need, we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousne, and you will be surprised if you -- I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word \"gratefulne\" and \"gratitude\" comes up.Everywhere you find it, a grateful airline, a restaurant gratefulne, a cafe gratefulne, a wine that is gratefulne.Yes, I have even come acro a toilet paper that the brand is called Thank You.(Laughter) There is a wave of gratefulne because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world.It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you\'re grateful, you\'re not fearful, and if you\'re not fearful, you\'re not violent.If you\'re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share.If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.And it doesn\'t make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing.The future of the world will be a network, not a pyramid, not a pyramid turned upside down.The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution, and it\'s so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution, because a normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones did before.What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world.
A grateful world is a world of joyful people.Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people, the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we\'ll have a joyful world.We have a network for grateful living, and it has mushroomed.We couldn\'t understand why it mushroomed.We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something.And there have been 15 million candles lit in one decade.People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place.And that is what I hope for us, and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same, stop, look, go.
